20 June 2014 - QA 13

Dear Gurudev, there is so much conflict in the world even right now. How can there ever be world peace?

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar: Sometimes you feel like that.
Even I felt, we have done so much work in Iraq; from 2003 we have been in Iraq. We have made efforts to bring communities together. We have brought smiles to the faces of thousands of Iraqi women. After the war we brought hope and light into the lives of thousands of people. There are about 10,000 people whose lives have been touched, whose lives were changed, and they became agents of change in the rest of the society.
Now, suddenly you turn and see, you feel all our work has gone down the drain. All that work has gone waste. This thought does come to our mind. But never the less, we have done something.
If we thought on the lines, that anyway it is not going to work, why should we do? Then even those few years of peace that these 10,000 people have enjoyed would have not been there.
We have done our level best and I feel we should keep doing. We should not lose heart. We should keep doing.

There has never been a time in history where there was no violence at all in the whole world. There has been intermittent time of peace, prosperity in many parts of the world.
I think there is no reason for us to stop doing what we have been doing. We should continue doing that though the situation is very grave, though the circumstances are not so encouraging. But nothing can put us down or stray us from our mission.