Vengeance is mine.

Revenge subverts the ethical basis of a competitive society. It is also a revolution in miniature; it assumes that the existing state of affairs is insupportable, and it actively seeks to transform it. Violence and headlines seem to be made for each other.
Early modern audiences enjoyed and celebrated revenge, associating it with the pursuit of social and economic justice, a leveling of scores. Shylocks, seek to avenge themselves on an unjust social order. In war or crusades the soldier, and unpaid religious zealot uses revenge to claim the equal rights of which society has deprived them, what they desire they call, is not retaliation, but the triumph of justice.

The morality of revenge is thus a deeply fraught and finely balanced ethico-political question. Revenge is reprehensible, to cite Complete Works of Shakespeare, which remarks that the playwright “allows Shylock to place himself in the wrong by his refusal to forgive his enemies”. The inference is that “anyone with ethics . . . will oppose revenge”. They enjoyed it because revenge satisfied an increasingly widespread fantasy of social equality be revenge. Paradoxically non violence does not make great news, mercy and forgiveness seem alien to many nations and people around the world.
Though the great Messiah Christ, asked his followers to turn the other cheek upon being slapped, and MK Gandhi remarked about revenge ‘an eye for an eye will make the world blind’. In certain parts of the world, adultery is punished by public flogging, and a thief’s hands are chopped off and then there is the death sentence.

Nevertheless, the original impulse behind this “law of talon’ or lex talonis was benign; it was meant to provide satisfaction to the offended party. But did this make retributive justice less cruel than the original crime? Not really. That is why the spiritual doctrine of forgiveness provides a revolutionary contrast to justice. Many factors including social contribute to crime and punishment. It does not matter what goes on in the mind, it really doesn’t. The only difference between the wise and the foolish is that the wise learn to cope with reality and transform while the foolish get swept away by emotions. It is better to leave behind the intoxicating fragrance of revenge and embrace the peace of mercy and compassion.-Vinay