Life is so precious. A little bit of organized mass with what intricacies of such meanderings called nerves that carry the thought currents! Even a tiny insect can feel, can sense the pulsations of life. Plants can feel pleasure and pain as Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose had epochally demonstrated by means of his remarkable instruments, the crescograph and the morograph. Aeons of evolution have brought terrestrial life to this level of refinement and to murder it in an instant of barbarous madness, what folly, what a travesty of universal justice! To gaze at life in rapt wonderment ought to be the highest religion and thence to penetrate its myriad mysteries, not to destroy life in fanatical urges masquerading as religious impulse. The sheer magnificence of the universe and its sweeping majesty ought to humble us in pious prostration and invoke in us feelings of reverence for everything that exists in this phenomenal scheme of things. So it was in days of yore when the Arya Rishis realized the immanence of the Divine in Nature and worshipped divinity thus in all its myriad manifestations. They did not build temples all over for they felt the palpable presence of the Divine in the universe all around. European thinkers misinterpreted this as Nature-worship for the hymns of the Vedas apparently so often refer to the elements of Nature as being the objects of adoration for the Aryas. What the European scholars missed out was that the Arya Rishis were deep in their spiritual perceptions and venerated the Power immanent in Nature and not Nature as such and even when they worshipped the elements of Nature apparently, they did so in the full realization of the fact of the oneness of all existence, that is, they perceived Nature as the visible manifestation of the Divine. So, the question of them being Nature-worshippers in the low materialistic sense as ascribed to them is flawed and is a complete misrepresentation of fact owing to the 'superior' ignorance of European thinkers casually dabbling in Indian affairs without the necessary knowledge or even the will to know the real state of things as they were in ancient India.
Anyhow, life was held in great esteem in ancient India for life was seen as the flow of the Divine in the trinity of space-time-causality (desh-kaal-nimitta). The dissemination of the ideas of non-violence (ahimsa) and compassion (karuna) throughout the country had as its basis the concept of the oneness of all existence so unique to Vedantic thinking. However, civilization has its undulations and Indian civilization also underwent a catastrophic metamorphosis for nearly a millenium when it suffered the ravages of barbarous inroads into its domain and eventually capitulated to such politically losing much of its inherent grace. A constricted culture she became as foreign domination reduced her to a servile state devoid of self-glory and oblivious of her grand spiritual heritage rolling down the ages with the torrent of the Ganga. And what a price she has paid for her loss of political independence in 1192 to the barbarous tribes of Afghanistan and Central Asia till she regained freedom in 1947 amidst a carnage unprecedented in human history as Britain-orchestrated Partition of India 'sent a whole nation to despair' and tens of millions lost their lives in the transfer of populations across the newly created borders separating India and Pakistan! What ignorance of the Muslim rulers to convert Hindus to Islam forcibly to propagate their religion! Equally culpable have been European missionaries as they converted millions of Hindus to Christianity through craft, cunning and deceit. Finally, a word on the British. Even after suffering untold misery at the hands of the Germans during the Second World War did the British not learn the lessons of history and could they still in the name of their vaunted civilization stoop so low as to destroy India through Partition? Was it civilized to first conquer another's land, then plunder its wealth, systematically destroy its economic fabric for malicious Manchester ends and eventually to leave the land after having drained its resources for two centuries, depleted, debilitated and devastated through fratricidal feud in a masterful Machiavellian design of measuring out mercy to the Muslim Indian, a ploy which the Mahatma's magnanimity failed to foil? Was it not the worst modern-day barbarism to truncate Indian territory, to partition her along communal lines and so create permanent unrest in the sub-continent? I wonder how Vivekananda would have reacted to see his beloved Motherland so partitioned by British barbarism. He was the one Indian with crystal-clear vision and could see through evil British designs unlike the Mahatma whose political acumen failed him in regard to the occupying British leading to national disaster. The horrors of Partition haunt us even now and will do so for the foreseeable future and Great Britain must hold herself permanently accountable for it. A nation that has inflicted untold misery on its subject nations in the name of 'the Empire' must stand in the High Court of Eternity and plead guilty to the charge of thwarting human civilization and retarding human evolution throughout her erstwhile political domain and then bear out the punishment decreed by divine justice through the ages yet to come. This is not the curse of the suffering nations but the inevitable course of human history, the resolution of karmic forces, the inescapable destiny of the tyrant.
India and much of the world has received a rough deal at the hands of history. Now it is time to rebuild these nations and send a wave of hope and inspiration throughout these lands. Asia, Africa and Latin America have suffered endlessly. Time it is to revive them. So friends, with all our might let us dedicate ourselves to the task of nation-building so that a rejuvenated India stands at the 'vanguard of civilization with the flag of harmony and peace'. We need character to build our Motherland, spirituality to fertilize the world with the message of the Vedas and a vast compassion to serve all of humanity as our very own. Idle words will not do. We must LIVE THE LIFE.
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