From Ignorance to Innocence - Osho - Oshorajneesh.com

CHAPTER 21. PERSONALITY: THE CARBON COP-OUT
”There is a student in the class who lives by the house of the prostitute. You visit that prostitute
almost every day. Do you want me to call out the name of the boy, and ask him to stand up and say
that he sees you every day in the prostitute’s house? There is a boy here whose father sells wine
and all kinds of drugs. He can stand up for me and tell you what kind of things you go on purchasing
from his father. And still you want me to call you sir?”
Now certainly it looks like mischief, but not to me. He was very angry and annoyed. He took me to
the principal, and the principal said, ”It is better you settle it yourself”
But he said, ”No. This boy is going to spoil the whole class. He was saying to the class,’From
tomorrow nobody calls him sir.”’
I said to the principal, ”These are the reasons; now you tell me whether we have to call this man sir.
As far as I am concerned, even calling him mister is too much. If he does not agree to mister, then I
am going to find something worse.”
The principal took him aside and said, ”You had better settle for mister. It is not a bad word, it is
perfectly respectable. There is no harm, because what he is saying... and he has proofs. And what
he is saying is that he is an eyewitness that you pushed your wife. He is dangerous, he can go to
the police and you may be in trouble. And he is not afraid of your violence or anything which your
neighborhood is afraid of.
That man settled for mister. The whole class... and then I started spreading it into his other classes,
”You have to call this man mister.” Finally he resigned. Seeing that the whole school knew about
everything that I had been telling, he resigned; not only resigned, he left the city and moved to
another town.
It can be thought of as mischief, but I don’t think it is mischief. I had valid reasons and still I will stand
by what I did; it was perfectly right. In fact this man should have been thrown out of the school long
before, thrown out of the city long before. And it was a good non-violent strategy that I applied.
He left on his own. I was the only person on the station to say goodbye to him. And I can still
remember the way he looked at me as if he wanted to kill me, then and there. But the train moved,
and I went on waving to him; I went on running up to the end of the platform. And I said, ”Don’t be
worried. I will be coming to visit sometime, wherever you are.”
This world, from a child’s standpoint, looks very different. You will have to understand it from a child’s
standpoint because his standpoint is non-political, fearless, innocent. He sees things as they are.
And if every child is allowed to behave according to his understanding, you will see that every child
proves to be mischievous. It is your attitude that interprets it as a mischievous act because you are
not thinking from an innocent vision.
It continued in the university. One of my vice-chancellors was Doctor Karpatri, a very famous
historian. He was a professor of history at Oxford, and then he became vice-chancellor at Saugar
university; an old man, a world – famous authority on history. And the first address that he gave to
the whole university was on the birthday of Buddha.
From Ignorance to Innocence 295 Osho