Hiss

                                                    

My philosophy in life is to live and let live. I believed that people will allow me to live if I allowed them to live. This was true till I was surrounded by near and dear ones. But once I graduated from college and started working I realized that world around was not as good as your family. Even if you never harmed anyone there will be people around who will harm you, if you don’t know how to protect yourself and your own interests. If we can’t protect our own interests how can we protect interests of our family, society, company and nation? So after working for some years I realized that I was too soft in protecting my own self interest. I will share a story which helped me in standing up for my self.

Once upon a time there lived a black cobra. This snake was very evil and had habit of biting people, small children and cattle without any reason. Whole village lived in terror of this snake and nobody dared to go near the area of this snake. Terrorizing and killing innocent people gave the snake lots of joy and pride. One day a sage came to the village and people told him about the problem they faced from the snake. Saddened by the plight of the people the sage decided to convince the snake to stop his bad habit of killing innocent people. The sage met the snake and advised it not to bite people unnecessarly .He told him that his evil deeds will take him to hell. On hearing this snake decided to repent, lead a good life and stopped biting people.

After many days the sage came back to same village and was shocked to see the plight of the snake.The snake had grown very thin and was badly bruised and bleeding. Sage asked the snake what had happened to it. The snake replied, “Oh holy one based on your advice I stopped biting people.But due to this people are no longer afraid of me. The throw stones at me. Also as I have stopped biting ,I can no longer catch my prey. This has resulted  in me growing weaker and I am about to die”. On hearing this sage replied,"you are a fool, I asked you not to bite innocent people. But I never asked you to stop hissing and raising you fierce hood. The act of hissing and raising hood in itself would be so terrorizing that nobody would dare to come near to you or harm you. You can bit your prey when you  are hungry.
According to law of Karma it won’t be considered as a bad act as it is your nature to catch prey for food". After getting this advice the snake realized its mistake and again started hissing and raising its hood .
It lived happily for ever after that.