Passion, too, comes from surroundings, but passion becomes dangerous because it presents itself as if it is something internal. Not only does it present itself as something internal, it decorates itself as something of the heart.
The fellow will say, “My heart beats for cricket.” You must ask him: Why doesn’t your heart beat for ice hockey? Just because you have had no conditioning favorable to ice hockey. You have not been conditioned towards ice hockey, you are conditioned towards cricket: there was cricket on the TV, there was cricket in the journals, in the radio, in the park in front of your house; your elder brother put a cricket bat in your hand when you were just three-years-old. You are seeing all these things, and all these things are having an influence on you. The result is, you didn’t even get to know when you absorbed and internalized these things, and you have started saying, “Well, my heart beats for cricket.” Were you born in Brazil or Russia, would your heart still beat for cricket?
Passion is as much an external thing as, let’s say, peer pressure.
