Guru vs Guide

In ancient Indian traditions, gurukuls are one of the bases of life.. Life was divided into 4 stages, i.e. Brahmacharya, Grihastha, Vanaprastha and Sannyas.. At the beginning of life, a child went to ashrams as a school and stay there for their entire childhood, and teenage years to learn and study.. It mostly started at the age of 5 years and went until the age of 25 years.. In this time, the children had to work really hard, for their own living and they are taught many moral and technical lessons.. The gurus provide everything they needed in daily life and help them in deciding their life paths.. Children learn Vedas and other scriptures, science, history, philosophy, warfare and other skill-based subjects..

From that day Indians had huge importance to the gurus, as they are the people who were most knowledgeable and selfless to serve the nation and the kids of the nation and the society.. But in the middle ages, the gurukul system went abolished and in the British era, it was replaced by the school system of Englishmen.. But gurus were still held in high regard.. Gurus left the normal domestic life and went for some secluded place to get self-realised and when in problems people went to them to get answers and know the possible solution..

It was okay until it was the path of spirituality and faith, but nowadays, we find many kinds of gurus.. People in many fields who know something about the field, they claim of having huge knowledge and teach other people the things they know.. These people in the west are called gurus.. Like investment guru, productivity guru, self-help guru, minimalism gurus.. there was nothing wrong in naming them gurus if we want that.. But do we really need gurus in our life for every aspect of it??

In schools, we always try to find a specific teacher who is our favourite and we want to share everything about us with them and want us to guide us in every path.. Like this in every stage of life, we want someone to guide us.. Mostly these feelings come from our fear of deciding stuff by ourselves.. When we are not sure what to do we want someone to decide that for us.. We use gurus for that..

We also have a type of people called guides in our life, who can teach us, the roadmap of our life and the path we want to take, but the journey we have to do is by ourselves and make decisions by ourselves.. But what is the difference between gurus and guides?? Gurus are the people who claim to know everything and people tend to take their saying as the final decision of fate.. Where guides are the ones who suggest to us many things based on their own experience, and the choice always depends on us..

I always think guides are better than gurus.. As in our life, we shouldn’t use other people to make decisions for us.. And we don’t even know if they are telling the truth or not.. At the end of the day we can take many suggestions, but we should make our decisions yourself, not blindly decide what others say.;. Guides are also better they tell us what they learnt from actual practical experiences.. Guides are more prone to accept failures also and be transparent to us.. also as a human, we are more like to understand a person who is at a close distance from us, based on thoughts, knowledge and experience and age.. They can understand us better and view the situation based on our perspectives.. gurus tend to be a little older than us, and they must take time to learn everything about the topis, which can be backdated knowledge which may not work in our situation..

In the end, we can take advice from anyone we like or we believe but we should always make decisions by ourselves, otherwise, we may regret it in the future…