A Call for KINDNESS

What does it mean to live with daya-kindness-as both duty and grace in today's conflicted world?

- BY Sumana Roy

HOW MIGHT IT FEEL to have a name like Daya? The Indian languages allow us that to be the bearer of a virtue, to respond to someone calling us by that name, as if they were invoking the virtue itself. It is also possible that a name derived from virtues might, from being repeated over and over again, polish something in their owners, in the way footsteps, over centuries, shine the stone steps of pilgrimage sites. It might be a burden as well, the responsibility of having to live up to that name, say, in the way a word like 'rain' has to, as if it were ingrained in the instruction manual of the word itself.

What, then, of a name like Dayanand? The 'da' in 'daya', our etymologists tell us, means 'gift' 'Anand' is, of course 'joy. Is the recipient of this gift-of daya, kindness also the recipient of joy? Or is it the giver of kindness, to whom joy comes from the act of being kind? I'm trying to understand why if the giver of daya finds such ananda in giving it-should being kind be hard? Why don't their English equivalents carry the joy, the expansive joy, that the act of being kind is supposed to bring the giver of kindness?