What is to be respected? || Acharya Prashant, with BITS Hyderabad (2022)
Questioner (Q): I'm a first-year student in electrical engineering at BITS Hyderabad. My question was, we often hear the notion that we should respect elders but when it comes to the elders, for example, in my family, every family has some sort of problems and I get to know some things about them. After that, I don't feel like I should respect them because those actions weren't right. So, if I don't respect them, society hates me and I get scolded for that. But if I do respect them, I feel bad. So, shouldn't we respect behaviour instead of just respecting elders and is the notion that ‘We should always respect elders’ correct?
Acharya Prashant (AP): What do you mean by ‘respect’? First thing.
Q: Like, talking politely, talking properly.
AP: No, talking politely and talking properly is something you should anyway unconditionally do, right? Even if you are talking to a crime convict, you do not want to be particularly impolite, do you? So politeness and propriety are not things that are, first of all, dependent upon something else. And secondly, these are not very intimately connected to respect. What is respect?
Q: Respect is having a genuine appreciation inside me of the person I feel…
AP: Valuing that person highly?
