What do each of the following quotations mean to you? (а) "Condemn none: if you can stretch out a helping hand, do so. If not, fold your hands, bless your brothers, and let them go their own way." - Swami Vivekanand (b) "The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others." - Mahatma Gandhi (с) "A system of morality which is based on relative emotional values is a mere illusion, a thoroughly vulgar conception which has nothing sound in it and nothing true." - Socrates.

(a) Vivekananda: a helping hand, not a curse

• The line forbids the cheap pleasure of condemnation — the tweet, the caste slur, the officer’s sneer at a petitioner who failed a form.
• Practical meaning: if you have power, money, skill or a file, use them as a hand. If you do not, do not add a sermon. Bless and step aside.
• It is not moral indifference. Letting someone “go their own way” is for the adult who is not harming another. It is not a licence to ignore a child in labour or a woman being beaten next door.
• For a civil servant: complete the lawful case; do not humiliate the person you cannot yet help; do not perform rage on a file to look strict.
• For a citizen: volunteer, donate, teach — and if you cannot, refuse the hobby of hating the poor for their poverty.
• Present context: disaster relief that photographs the giver and shames the receiver fails Vivekananda. Quiet competence, and a refusal to curse the other community, passes.
• Limit: “condemn none” does not mean “prosecute none.” A rioter, a rapist, a corrupt nexus is condemned by law. The quote targets contempt of persons, not the end of justice.

(b) Gandhi: lose yourself in the service of others

• Gandhi is inverting the career self. Identity is not found in a title, a bank balance or a pure ancestry. It is found when those are put down for a concrete service.
• Losing yourself is not erasing rights. It is ego-reduction: the ashram broom, the nursing of a plague patient, the constructive programme, the willingness to be nobody in a march so that a mill-worker becomes somebody.
• For public service: the IAS rank is a tool. The self that needs to be found is the one that can sit in a flood camp without asking who is watching.
• Present context: a pandemic volunteer, a teacher in a basti, an engineer who stays with a cracked pier rather than a ribbon — these are self-knowledge as duty.
• Danger of the quote if misread: a woman told to lose herself only in unpaid care, or a subordinate told to erase dissent, is not Gandhi. Service is chosen toward the weaker other, not extracted as caste or gender fate.
• The best way is “best,” not “only”: contemplation and skill still matter. Gandhi’s point is that a self that never serves remains a theory.

(c) Socrates: against merely relative emotional morality

• Socrates is attacking a morality that is only “how I feel tonight,” or “how my crowd feels,” as if right and wrong were a fashion.
• Relative emotional values: I am kind when I like you, cruel when I am tired; my group’s tears are sacred, the other group’s are fake.
• That system is called illusion and vulgar because it cannot be taught, cannot be argued, and cannot protect a stranger. It is the ethics of the mob and of the mood.
• Meaning for today: viral outrage is not a moral philosophy. A lynching justified by “hurt sentiment” is the vulgar conception in the street.
• Public ethics needs reasons that survive a change of mood: dignity of persons, truth-telling, promise-keeping, and law that is the same after lunch.
• It is not a claim that emotion is useless. Compassion and indignation are data. They are not the statute.
• For the civil servant: do not let an angry minister’s emotion, or your own humiliation after a scolding, become the principle of a demolition or a transfer. Write the reason that a court could read.
• Socratic limit: some values are debated (how much tax, how much speech). The quote forbids reducing even that debate to a feeling. It demands argument, not a vibe.
• RIGHT stance: moral realism of a practical kind — some acts are wrong though a majority cheers, and some duties remain though you do not feel like them.