Life is precious and must be preserved. We set so much value to things material but discount the value of human life all around other than our close ones. This is gross materialism and is a highly myopic view of life. Resources available on Earth are not meant for hoarding or for individual pleasure-seeking but are there for the upkeep of all. If human greed could be supplanted by human love then humanity would know that there is enough on this planet for everyone's need as Gandhiji was used to saying but not enough for everyone's greed. And so, humanity suffers as billions live below the poverty line and are denied basic human living conditions while a handful enjoy the fruit of their labour to lead lives of ease and luxury, oblivious of their duties to their hapless brethren. This is a most regrettable situation and deserves the greatest censure for human irresponsibility of this magnitude is unpardonable. All our vaunted civilization is no good when we can scarce manage the Earth's resources well enough to be able to bring about the greatest good to the greatest many. What if the wheel were to turn around and plunge us, the privileged ones, into dire straits of misery and squalor, poverty and neglect ? Would we then not feel the pain, the pangs, the suffering of it all ? But why wait, brother, till Nature hits back at us ? Is it not our bounden duty, our holiest cause, our fraternal love's imperative to cater to the well-being of our brethren ? Must they be allowed before our very eyes to go to physical and psychological ruin as they fail to avail of resources available to the socially empowered ? How can we see with our very eyes our fellow humans go blind ? How do we spend millions for the higher education of our children in the West while we are so niggardly in spending anything worth the while for the education of their less fortunate sisters and brothers ? Where are we headed this way after all, to the Promised Golden Age of Truth and Light ( the Satya Yuga ) or are we going down the Niagara Falls into the yawning chasm of a watery death where the torrent will nullify the inequities of life and render the sameness of death to all ? The elite and the aristocracy, the privileged and the prosperous, the establishment and the order resist change for the present state of things facilitates their exploitative mode of living. But the poor and the powerless want change and change they will bring about in their lives when they realize that they have the power to do so. Marxism aims to achieve this end by pointing to the people the value and the power of Labour and depends on the integrating act of the Leader and the Party, and, the Idea that like a physical force is to grip the masses for bringing about this revolutionary change. Vedanta aspires for the same end in a more humane and enduring way but less cataclysmic, more evolutionary than revolutionary but no less effective. India from time immemorial has chosen this divine way of social adjustment and not the bloody path of social revolution although our Mahabharat bears testimony to the great civil war ( the Kurukshetra War ) India was subjected to at the end of the Dwapar Yuga when a new Age of peace and enlightenment could be ushered by the Avatar of the Age, Sri Krishna, only through a bloodbath that wiped off the valorous of the land enmasse. Evolution is ever revolutionary although its workings are slow, subtle and often imperceptive. Revolution, on the other hand, is the rough tool of mass evolution where, classically, widespread destruction takes place sweeping away the existing order of things in a fell swoop of revolutionary violence, discriminate and indiscriminate, shuddering at nothing, stopping nor for widow's tears nor orphan's cry, just coursing through like a river in spate deluging banks with the blood of the ages that have been spilled from the bodies of these the veritable slaves of the exploitative masters of the millenia gone by. It is the Tandava ( Dance Destructive ) of Nataraja ( Shiva, the King of Cosmic Dance ). Evolution and revolution are then the dual phase of a single drift of terrestrial life towards the Divine through what pain, oh, through what pain !
Such then is the predicament facing us. Shall we allow things to further degenerate into inevitable chaos whence a return to order and peace will not be possible for when the masses rise their combined might not even gods can combat or shall we accept responsibility for the present state of decadence, the feudal-capital exploitation of the masses, and immerse ourselves zealously into this stupendous task of setting the world to order and a higher balance of forces where all may live lives of dignity with their basic human needs taken care of and opportunities afforded to explore the horizons of life and beyond ? This latter option is for us to adopt, O devotees of the one and only GOD that is alive, MAN, and this is the RAMAKRISHNA-VIVEKANANDA WAY.
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