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Asiriyar K.Veeramani
1. I will marry outside my caste; I will marry a widow or a divorced person. I will never sell myself, varadhaksh(i)na (bridegroom money) which is akin to slavery and which makes one lose one’s self-respect.
2. God, Religion, Caste, Cinema, Liquor and Drugs are repugnant to me.
3. I will strive to make the environment clean and pure, to protect public property and to lead a disciplined life thus making myself a guardian of society.
4. I realise that healthy mind resides only in a healthy body. I would dedicate myself to the true service of humanity at large.
5. “Forget God, Think of Human” said Thanthai Periyar. I will always serve myself to the cause of humanism and shall do only what I say and say only what I can do and live with self-respect.
6. With hardwork and self reliance. I shall elevate myself to provide jobs to others instead of being frustrated seeking jobs in vain.
7. I will cultivate habits of simplicity, humility and frugality and smart behaviour towards others.
8. I will be a part of the group to save our people from the external cultural invasion and internal chain to our mind of our lives.
9. I will not consider youths as a time for pleasure-seeking but as an opportunity for service, especially social service.
10. Thanthai Periyar said that you should treat others in the same manner as you would like to be treated by others. I will follow these high ideals of Thanthai Periyar in my personal life. I will be a messenger to fashion a new world with these humanitarian ideals.
(These are ten tenets of Thanthai Periyar which the students promised to abide by at the Conference of Dravidian Students’ Resuscitation held at Thiruchirapalli)
[Excerpts from the book “Towards An United Front” published by B.Premanand].
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HUMANIST HYMN
Helen Bennett
We believe the Master Plan
For the betterment of man
Is designed by us alone,
For we reap what we have sown.
We don’t need a deity
To grant us immortality;
By our actions, we alone
Make our names forever known.
We are not here to rehearse
Our place in the universe;
From the moment of our birth
We belong to Planet Earth.
All the trees and mountains tall,
All the creatures great and small
Of this ever-twirling ball
Heeded evolution’s call.
All the wonders of our world
Into human hands are hurled;
Science is our tool to know
How to heal and how to grow.
Let’s design a better land
All together, and demand
Freedom and equality,
Inborn worth and dignity.
Every woman, every man
Has the power, and we can
Make a tattered world like this
Ring with rapture, sing with bliss.
Let us all join hands and stand
In a circle large and grand,
As together we devise
Our own earthly paradise.
(Excerpts from the book, “Humanism, What’s That?”
By Helen Bennett)
