This series is on Thirukkural, a masterpiece of Tamil classical literature written by the ancient poet-philosopher Thiruvalluvar on the virtues, ethics and art of living. I will be delving into different kurals, not continuously but as a sandwich between other posts and as random picks from the Thirukurral book.
Kural No: 391
This Kural, taken from the Chapter: Education reads as “Karka kasadara karpavai, kattrapin nirka adharkku thaka”
It says that whatever we learn, we should learn it thoroughly. After we have learned, we should learn to apply what we have learned and live our life in accordance with what we have learned or rather follow the learned aspects in our life without fail. It’s like saying that our conduct should be worthy of our learning.
There are many different messages that we could sense in these lines. Learning anything thoroughly needs time, patience and dedication or commitment. In today’s world, there are lots of things we can learn and lots of ways to learn them too. Our learning can be towards developing a skill or that of moral values on how to conduct ourselves in this world. While learning a skill these days is like diving into an ocean, we can take different portions of the skill and learn it thoroughly as per the need of the job where we need to apply it. But living a life according to what we have is pointing towards the moral aspects that we get to learn through our educational stint. We should strive to learn each of these aspects thoroughly and conduct ourselves in such a way that is worthy of our learning. Being diligent in our job or being true to ourselves and others in what we do are some examples of such learning.
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