How to deal with a blasphemous colleague?

From: Birendra

I have a colleague who slanders Lord Krishna and Hinduism also. She smokes, drinks wine, eats meat even though she is a Hindu. I cannot tolerate her presence in my office, but she is more powerful than me. What should I do? How can I continue working with her?

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Thank you very much. Question by Pirendra. I have a colleague who slanders Lord Krishna and Hinduism also.
She smokes, drinks wine, eats meat even though she is a Hindu. I cannot tolerate her presence in my office, but she is more powerful than me. What should I do? How can I continue working with her? As devotee seekers, we need to avoid the association of the envious.
We need to keep a distance from them. You can refer to the answer about aggressive atheists through the general principle of why we should avoid association and how we should deal with their arguments. But the basic principle here with respect to the practical situation that you have asked about is that if we cannot avoid the association, then we need to avoid that subject.
Even if that person is more influential than us, the office is a working place. And if we have to work with that person, then we can either inform that person or that person’s superior that the office had best be used as a place for discussions on work and other discussions about personal beliefs or personal disbeliefs had best not be allowed to intrude on one’s work time and distract one from contributing to the company or to the job, whatever be the immediate context. So, while working within a secular or non-devotional environment, we have to be very careful about our association.
Those who are injurious to our faith, we need to keep only a minimal official working relationship with them. Those who are you will find even in our workplace, there may be some other people who will be pious even if they are not devotional. If they are devotional, that’s excellent and you can try to share Krishna Consciousness with them and that will help us to protect our consciousness and enhance our consciousness to some extent also by sharing Krishna Consciousness with others.
But if we cannot find any devotional people in those rare situations where this happens, then we can try to stay within the circle of people who are relatively pious and we can discuss if at all we have to talk something beyond the work. We can discuss some topics which are related with professional or family or other social interests, but which don’t intrude in and harm our faith. If there are some specific arguments which those people ask and if we feel that answering those arguments might be helpful if those people are submissive and might change if they get the answers, then maybe we can contact some senior devotees, get some articles, get some books and send to those people or get those people to meet some senior devotees who can answer their questions.
But in general, if those people are too cocksure, cocksure means arrogantly confident about their, about the rightness of their own views, then it is best that we keep our relationship with them purely at the practical, working, necessary level and have some more social, cordial relationship with those who are more conducive or appreciative