1.3 Billion tons of food wasted every year globally

[vgane]

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Colossal loss!! In Gurgaon Sun City gated colony, they have a refrigerator in the Main Gate where residents keep their left overs...The poor come and take that...That is a good initiative!! Let us not waste food in parties, marriages and other celebrations!!

http://blogs.worldbank.org/publicsphere/campaign-art-food-waste?CID=POV_TT_Poverty_EN_EXT

 

[Brahmanyan]

Very good initiative by Gurgaon Sun city people. In Bangalore many such
charitable initiatives under volunteers are doing wonderful service. Many of them are silently doing service to the poor and needy.
Compassion is a natural tendency in human birth. People should encourage such initiatives.

Brahmanyan
Bangalore.

 

[prasad1]

Compassion is a natural tendency in human birth.

Is it? I am not arguing your point, I think compassion is a learned behavior.

Humans are selfish. It’s so easy to say. The same goes for so many assertions that follow. Greed is good. Altruism is an illusion. Cooperation is for suckers. Competition is natural, war inevitable. The bad in human nature is stronger than the good.
These kinds of claims reflect age-old assumptions about emotion. For millennia, we have regarded the emotions as the fount of irrationality, baseness, and sin. The idea of the seven deadly sins takes our destructive passions for granted. Plato compared the human soul to a chariot: the intellect is the driver and the emotions are the horses. Life is a continual struggle to keep the emotions under control.


Human communities are only as healthy as our conceptions of human nature. It has long been assumed that selfishness, greed, and competitiveness lie at the core of human behavior, the products of our evolution. It takes little imagination to see how these assumptions have guided most realms of human affairs, from policy making to media portrayals of social life.


https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/the_compassionate_instinct

 

[prasad1]

Yet, just as most of us are born with the innate ability to learn to walk, so most of us are born with the innate ability to learn compassion.
And those of us who aren’t? What can be done for them?

Psychiatrists who work with and study psychopaths aren’t in agreement about how much violent behaviour is genetic and how much is learned. It seems some children could be born with less natural empathy than others. However, it is clear that even with a poor genetic start in life, a child is not destined to be a psychopathic murderer. Brian Masters has written biographies of some of Britain’s most notorious murderers, such as Dennis Nilsen. He thinks the society we live in affects how we behave, and points to how in Nazi Germany mass murder was encouraged. He points out that people don’t murder just because their parents treated them badly, but says, “if you’re badly treated as a child, if you grow up in a violent society, if you’ve got a psychological disorder – then you don’t stand a chance.”

Most psychologists agree with this view, including Philip Zimbardo, who conducted the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment.
For most of us, compassion might be natural, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be nurtured in those who lack it. A study in Australia has found that even boys who display abnormal lack of emotion and coldness can learn to change. These boys have difficulty recognising fear in other people (so would not realise that what they are doing is hurtful) but when taught to focus on the person’s eyes, they learn to recognise the signs. This study is still in early days, so the longterm effect of this isn’t yet fully known.

But it is such a great start and such a compassionate way to treat people who lack innate compassion. Just as we do whatever we can to make life easier for a child who cannot walk, so we also need to do whatever we can to nurture empathy and compassion in a child who is low in these qualities. Seeing those children as bad, evil or inferior should be just as unacceptable as it would be if the child couldn’t walk. Let’s not debate whether compassion in natural or nurtured but just help it to grow wherever we can.

http://yvonnespence.com/all/is-compassion-natural-or-nurtured-a-1000speak-post/

 

[Brahmanyan]

But it is such a great start and such a compassionate way to treat people who lack innate compassion. Just as we do whatever we can to make life easier for a child who cannot walk, so we also need to do whatever we can to nurture empathy and compassion in a child who is low in these qualities. Seeing those children as bad, evil or inferior should be just as unacceptable as it would be if the child couldn’t walk. Let’s not debate whether compassion in natural or nurtured but just help it to grow wherever we can.

http://yvonnespence.com/all/is-compassion-natural-or-nurtured-a-1000speak-post/

Agreed. I do not want to go in for more discussions on this subject than my belief that compassion is inborn trait.
Brahmanyan
Bangalore.