Like Ravana of the Ramayana, the heroes and heroines of in movies today have a fatal flaw. The Ramayana is an ancient Vedic saga of action, romance, wisdom, and adventure.



This saga has inspired a quarter of the world's population for the millennium that depicts a past when beings of celestial might, who were both divine and demoniac, interacted on our terrestrial realm. It is also a saga of the struggle between good and the evil, in which God descends and teaches virtue, righteousness, and spirituality by His sterling personal example.

Despite the Ramayana's historical antiquity, its basic storyline is similar to that of a typical movie. It features a hero, a heroine, and a villain lusting for the heroine, and it tells of an exciting confrontation between the hero and the villain, culminating in the death of the villain and the reunion of the hero and the heroine. There is one vital difference between the Ramayana and a modern movie, which is that in a movie, the hero, the heroine, and the villain are all actually villains.

Many people think of a villain as someone who enjoys by exploiting and harming others. Although this is not wrong, this conception of evil is incomplete and naive, as it ignores a fundamental reality. The fundamental reality being our supremely responsible and loving father. Many of us never got the spiritual education needed to understand that it is the Supreme who selflessly provides us our daily food. It is true that we have to work hard to earn our living, but our effort is secondary.

It is like the hard work of birds searching for grains, because without the grains being provided for them through nature, then their search, no matter how painstaking, would be fruitless. Similarly, without His designing the miraculous mechanism of photosynthesis, which transforms mud into mangoes, which is a feat far beyond the best scientist and the latest computer, then we would never have any food, no matter how much we labored. All our other necessities such as heat, light, air, water, and health, which are similarly fulfilled, primarily by divine arrangement, secondarily by human endeavor.

Unfortunately, our media, culture, and education preoccupy us with so many materialistic allurements that we have become blinded to the fact of our dependence on Him and our obligation to Him. Being afraid of God is the beginning of wisdom, just as a healthy fear of a loving father is necessary for a naughty and restless child to become disciplined and responsible. Our love of Him is the culmination of wisdom, just as gratitude and love for a benevolent father shows the maturity of a grown-up child.

Sadly, however, our society fosters neither love, nor fear of Him, instead it glamorizes godless, selfish materialism. Consequently, nowadays many people are extremely selfish in their relationship with Him. People today do not give even a few moments to the person who has given them their entire life for us. In a family, if a son does not care for his father, then who is his link with his brothers, because soon he will stop caring for them too. In fact, he may even become malevolent toward them, because they have become his competitors for an inheritance. Similarly, selfishness toward Him is the origin of all evil.