In a world driven by pride, where being right is often prioritized over being at peace, genuine reconciliation has become rare. We build walls around our ego, hoard unspoken resentments, and rationalize the subtle ways we hurt one another.

Then comes the ancient, profound wisdom of “Micchami Dukkadam.”

Originating from the Prakrit language and observed during the sacred Jain festival of Paryushana and Samvatsari, this simple phrase carries a universe of emotional depth:

“If my thoughts, words, or actions have hurt you, knowingly or unknowingly, I sincerely seek your forgiveness.”

Beyond a Ritual: A Radical Reset

Micchami Dukkadam is not a polite social formality, nor is it an exchange of empty courtesies. It is a conscious, courageous surrender.

True forgiveness requires dismantling the three greatest barriers to peace:

• No Ego: Acknowledging that our self-righteousness is not worth the cost of a strained relationship.
• No Justification: Stepping away from the urge to defend intentions, and simply honoring the impact of our actions.
• No Conditions: Seeking harmony without demanding anything in return.

When we utter these words, we acknowledge a fundamental truth: as human beings navigating complex lives, we often cause harm without realizing it. A careless word, a dismissive glance, a missed gesture of support, or an unspoken judgment can leave silent marks. Asking for forgiveness for the harm done unknowingly requires the deepest form of self-awareness.

The Gift of a Lighter Heart

Holding onto anger and grudges is heavy. It anchors the mind to the past and clouds the present.

Seeking forgiveness—and extending it freely—is an act of emotional detox. It grants both the speaker and the listener permission to put down the baggage, wipe the slate clean, and begin again. It turns strangers back into allies, mends fractured bonds, and restores clarity to the soul.

Perhaps this is one of the most beautiful, timeless gifts we can ever give one another: the grace of a fresh start.

May we carry the spirit of humility beyond rituals and into our daily lives.

Micchami Dukkadam. 🙏

Prejudice describes an attitude towards a person that is unjustified or simply incorrect, generally a hostile one, and held on no other basis than the social group that person belongs to.

Views of that sort may fasten onto a race or onto a gender. What the definition turns on is sequence: the group is judged first, and the individual is judged afterwards, by inheritance.

Where the word came from

As a concept it appeared early in the twentieth century, and it rose quickly to become the dominant term, both in social science and in ordinary speech, for hostility directed at people because of the group or category they fall into.

The argument inside the definition

Among social scientists the standard definition has been a negative attitude held by one group towards another.

A good many of them attach a condition to that. On their account the attitude must additionally be wrong, or unwarranted, before the word properly applies.

It is that wider version, rather than the narrow technical one, that has settled into everyday use. Which explains why the word lands as an accusation when we use it, rather than as a neutral description.

Careful thought is what a wedding outfit deserves. Looking your best is the requirement, so the materials and the designers you pick from should be the best available to you.

Start by taking it seriously

Accept first that this genuinely does deserve the attention. That acceptance is step one, and a surprising number of grooms never take it.

Let the theme narrow it down

The theme decides a great deal for you. An afternoon wedding, one held outdoors, one held at night: each of them cuts the field of options down.

The safe option, and its problem

Few choices are safer for the day than a well cut classic suit. Worn with any confidence at all, it reads as smart and elegant.

Its weakness is that every other man present is also in a suit, and this is your wedding. So put a twist in it with accessories nobody else will have.

Customise it

Personalising the outfit suits a groom particularly well. Cufflinks engraved with your name will do it, or anything else that carries a reference to the day itself.

Do not dress for a meeting

Leave the comfort zone, and resist anything that edges towards corporate. This is a wedding, and looking as though a presentation is imminent is not the effect you want.

Equally, remain recognisably yourself. Settle on a style that fits your own personality and wear what you can be comfortable in.

Tailor-made usually wins

Going to a tailor is generally the better route, because the suit or traditional outfit that results is built around your own taste and your own ideas, with a designer’s expertise added on top.

Do not rent it

A few hours of wear, admittedly. But those particular hours carry more weight than any others, and renting is a cheap option in every sense, given that the garment has almost certainly been worn by somebody else already.

Stretch a little beyond your usual spending. Weddings are infrequent things. If fortune is kind, you will only have the one.

When an infestation of head lice fails to clear promptly under the commercial preparations sold for the purpose, the word attached to it is super lice.

A disputed term

Voices within medicine had been predicting their arrival for years, arguing that it was only a question of when.

Other practitioners will not accept the category at all. In their reading, whatever resistance is being seen has more to do with the person than with the insect.

The theory behind the name

The reasoning behind the term runs like this. Strain by strain, over a long period, lice have developed an immunity to the active ingredients in the shampoos and similar products sold over the counter.

Stated that way, nothing exotic remains in it. Insects of every sort acquire immunity to a product they are exposed to for long enough.

Celestial objects, the phenomena surrounding them and the question of where they came from: those together make up the subject called astronomy.

Few sciences are older. People have been practising it since prehistoric times.

What it rests on now

The modern version of the subject leans very heavily on established physics, the laws of motion set out by Newton and the general theory of relativity among them.

That dependence is recent. For most of its history astronomy was open to anybody, and reputations were built by seers and sages who put the stars to practical use.

The uses were practical indeed. Working out where you stood in the year. Steering a ship. Sailors crossing the Atlantic in the age of Columbus navigated by the same lights.

Where it goes next

Whatever comes next in astronomy will come from new ways of observing.

Interferometry is the one to watch, sometimes described as the hypertelescope, in which a network of telescopes is made to work cooperatively so that images resolve.

Pushed far enough, that technique could let us look straight at planets orbiting other stars, instead of inferring their presence from the gravitational signature they leave behind. The difference is between deducing a planet and seeing one.

The cheerfullest gathering can be reduced to a miserable one by negativity alone. And the trouble a negative thought causes is never worth whatever it was supposed to be warning you about.

Several approaches will break the pattern.

Not everything needs to be maximised

Younger people fall prey to this so easily for one reason: the molehill gets built into a mountain. And by the end, whatever happened has somehow been turned into evidence about our own faults.

Suppose a subject was failed. The world has not ended. Gather yourself and do better at the next attempt.

Picking over the problem to no purpose helps nobody. That habit is exactly what lets one small negative thought swell into a black hole large enough to swallow a person. Meet the thought early, while it is still small, and the swelling never happens.

Shutting yourself away does not work

We do it without deciding to. Nobody is spoken to. Trouble arrives, or the mood drops, and we say nothing at all.

But a head that never gets emptied out loses its grip on the problem itself, and thinking narrows down to a single track.

Speak to friends. Speak to family. Speak to whoever you trust enough to think out loud in front of.

List and cherish positive thoughts

If your conclusion is that nothing in your life is right, give it one minute of proper thought first.

Breathe in slowly and go back to the last occasion you smiled. Then find what caused it, no matter how brief the smile was or how trivial the thing that produced it.

Open your eyes, and write that cause down, along with anything else attached to that happy moment. Then do it again, and keep going until the page has no room left.

What you are holding is your positive list, and its function is to demonstrate that something good is always in there somewhere.

Positivity stems from genuine happiness

Real happiness is not issued by other people or by circumstances. It is generated internally.

Manufacture your own through singing, through dancing and through smiling. Only the negative make bad singers and bad dancers, so the saying goes. Singing releases a remarkable amount of stress. Lyrics can be forgotten and steps can be wrong, provided the time is enjoyed.

Singing and dancing are, in their way, feelings let out. Let feelings out and a smile appears on the face. And a smile a day is what keeps the negative thoughts at a distance.

Genuinely try to keep negativity away

Where does negativity come from? From negative people, and from negative situations.

There may be a friend who brings nothing but bad news, a relative whose pleasure is putting you down, a teacher who enjoys singling you out, a colleague who enjoys irritating you. Before you meet any of them, take a breath and decide in advance that what they bring is not getting into your head.

Where avoiding them is impossible, apply the effort deliberately and keep their negativity from arriving at all. In at the left ear, and straight out of the right.

Mindfulness does wonders too

Meditation helps, and so does a yoga class. Both move the focus off the problem and onto the pattern of your own breathing.

Yoga is treated by many as a relaxing form of exercise whose purpose is a brain at ease. Staying in the present matters enormously, and meditating is the most reliable route into it.

The instruction is to stop rehearsing what might happen, and to hold the attention on what is happening. Whatever it is, it is now.

Pretty pictures and silly animal stories is what people assume children’s books amount to. A good many of them are timeless instead, and they are inspiring, insightful and wise.

Sharing, the force of love, the business of becoming what you could be: none of these lessons were ever really aimed at children alone. They were aimed at the child that survives in everybody. Take the cue and see where the messages land in your own life.

We must take care of the planet

Nothing improves until somebody cares an enormous amount. Absolutely nothing.

Nearly all of us met that message early, in books and in cartoons about rescuing the world. It was among the first lessons we were given, and among the first we put down.

Love is powerful

How a thing was manufactured has no bearing on whether it is real. Realness is something done to you, by somebody who loves you over a long stretch of years.

Every story in which a toy or an animal longed to talk and dance the way people do rested on that. Somewhere a character loved without limit, and the unreal wanted to cross over because of it. That was the message underneath all of them.

Happiness has no value unless it is shared

Give away more, and what comes back is more delight, not less.

Certain books left something lovely here, which is that friendship and happiness both consist of handing your joy to other people rather than hoarding it.

Face challenges head on

Over is not an option. Under is not an option. The way out is forward, through the middle.

Hard times have unpleasant sections and no path goes round them. You plough into them instead. Book after book puts its characters in serious trouble, has them face it with courage, and has them make peace for themselves and for their friends.

Learning is a lifelong journey

Why travel from one place to another? Chiefly to see everything lying between the two.

Arriving is not the valuable part, and neither is the satisfaction that follows a milestone. The value is in the travelling, and in whatever gets learned along the way. That learning is meant to continue for as long as the journey does, which is to say for life.

Make things up as you go

No moon to see by? Then draw one. Hungry? Draw a pie. Lost? Draw somebody who can point you the right way.

Grown up, we tend to forget the point being made. The best chances life offers are usually the ones a person invents.

Worrying and stressing over a future nobody can see, and over the unforeseen events and circumstances life delivers, is what the word uncertainty describes.

Why it frightens us

The fear traces back to inexperience. In certain areas of life you have simply not done enough yet.

Narrow experience produces a narrow view. So conclusions get jumped to, and assumptions get made, and sweeping statements get formed about the way life is or ought to be. The result is that the outcomes of acting in that direction start to look unpredictable and therefore unsafe.

What is actually happening

Understand first that life never stops shifting and changing.

Those shifts deliver outcomes of every kind. Some will suit you. Others you will find hard going. Neither is a malfunction.

Once that is accepted as simply how things are, the uncertainty being thrown at you becomes something you can start to take hold of.

What it takes to embrace it

Taking hold of it fully, though, asks you to develop a particular set of qualities. Courage. A sense of excitement. Appetite for adventure. Playfulness. Curiosity.

Those are what let a person walk into the unknown with confidence, and with a settled belief that whatever life hands over can be dealt with.

Dealers in used cars are everywhere, and so are the applications promising you the best price. Knowing what actually produces that price is therefore essential.

Pamper it

Anything that looks good moves quickly. Get the car appealing to the eye of whoever comes to see it and the rest of the sale tends to run smoothly.

Have it washed and polished until it tempts a buyer no less than a new one would.

Sell it yourself

Expert advice is worth having. Even so, the recommendation is that you take the seller’s part yourself rather than hand it over.

So many sites now exist to make that straightforward that all you really need is a set of details assembled before the car goes on the market.

Insurance papers, current and in order. Every official registration document. The trim or variant, given along with the year it was manufactured. The service history. The driving information, distance covered included. And the external details, meaning colour, make and whatever accessories are fitted.

Deciding the price

With the car ready and the paperwork gathered, work out what you expect for it and settle on a figure.

Calling on a few used car dealers first will give you a sense of where prices actually sit.

Leave room to negotiate. What you must not do is talk the car down for the benefit of a buyer. Where your figure and theirs can both be lived with, the sale will happen regardless.

Reading the buyer’s mind

Three things are being checked by every buyer before a decision gets made.

Ownership first. A single owner is the favourable position, since it means lighter documentation and less trouble in the sale, and buyers frequently look for it specifically.

Distance next. How hard the car has worked, measured in kilometres, is something a buyer wants to know accurately, so give the correct figure.

Age last. Every year added to a car makes the selling of it harder.

Few animals display social intelligence at the level elephants do, and alongside it they show individual reasoning and a long memory.

So where does their health and their contentment come from? Speech is not available to them, but a great deal about a well-rounded life gets communicated all the same. What follows are wellness pointers, tusk to tail, from the largest mammal walking the earth.

Be a social creature

Whatever their age, elephants lean on close friendships inside the herd.

Shyness is the thing to drop. When your own reserves are low, go and find other people.

Listen up

Ears that size were not issued for decoration. Take the counsel and the accumulated sense of the friends and teachers you love.

Set off alone and the cost is everything you might have heard from somebody who has already covered that ground.

Eat lots of plants

Three hundred pounds of food a day and upwards is the elephant diet, made up of roots, of leaves, of twigs and of fruit.

The quantity is worth scaling down. The principle is not. Greens in volume do humans as much good as they do pachyderms.

Drink plenty of water

Heat makes hydration urgent, which is why something near eleven gallons of water goes into a grown elephant across a day.

There is a second use for the watering hole. A trunk dipped in now and again is simply a way of staying cool and refreshed.

Take the rest you need

Rather than work through the heat, elephants nap in the middle of the day beneath trees and in the shade of rocks. Their nights are slept properly too.

Which settles an argument. However grown up a creature is, recharging time is still part of the requirement.

Take your time to grow

A young elephant stays bound to its immediate family for up to three years.

Healthy development, in other words, is not something that can be hurried or forced. Grow into your tusks at the speed they grow.