LIVE THE LIFE 3

Swami Vivekananda was born of rich parents but took pleasure in intellectual and cultural pursuits as he grew up. The acute poverty his family faced following the death of his father made him realize the virtue of frugal living. In later years he stressed upon this fact when he pronounced that the youth ought to be encouraged to live frugal lives. The stark poverty of the masses of India, his own harrowing experience of poverty in his familial life and the extreme poverty of his spiritual brotherhood must have been the immediate cause of his being prompted to make this statement. But at a deeper level he must have also felt the sheer necessity of frugal living as the means of restricting the wayward mind from dissipating its forces in diverse directions and so suffering from energy depletion whose final resolution would be the utter loss of mental vigour and ruination of character for extravagance surely would bring in its wake the mirage of multitudinous desires seeking fulfilment through the finite confines of this mortal frame. The consumer culture that is so rampant among the youth today, Swamiji had determined to arrest. And why the youth alone? Consumerism is eating into the vitals of the young and the old today and has reduced masses of the urban population into foppish imbeciles with film frivolity the dominant note in their cultural make-up and slavish pseudo-western orientation the height of their social independence. Fortunately, the masses as yet are uncorrupted owing to their extreme poverty. Nonetheless, this cultural invasion of the decadent West is ruining the very moral fibre of our urban masses, especially the youth and that is a matter of grave national concern. So, it is clear why Swamiji with prophetic vision had forewarned the youth from being foppish as a cardinal point in their development of character. He, in no uncertain terms, had literally launched into a tirade against the then prevalent ways of the affluent in self-indulgence, oblivious of the hapless condition of the masses when he said: So long as the millions live in hunger and ignorance, I hold every man a traitor who, having been educated at their expense, pays not the least heed to them! I call those men who strut about in their finery, having got all their money by grinding the poor, wretches, so long as they do not do anything for those two hundred millions who are no better than hungry savages!

I rest my case here, friends, for after a Vivekananda speaks, none else ought to. Jai Swamiji!