WHY THE YOUTH HAVE LOST THEIR LINKS WITH THE FREEDOM STRUGGLE AND WASTE THEIR LIVES IN VAIN FRIVOLITIES ... 2

When one compares the youth of today in free India with the youth of yesterday in India-in-bondage, one must with shame admit that today's youth are an emasculated lot with their heart in sense enjoyments and souls lost to the charm of the almighty dollar while those a century ago were revolutionaries inspired by the highest ideals of renunciation and patriotism. When one reads about the heroic episodes of the freedom movement and comes to realise that these were enacted by lads of fourteen upwards who fired on the British and laughed off the tragedy of the death sentence pronounced on them by the government, on them being later apprehended, one feels miserable to behold the plight of the modern-day youth full of frivolities that fill up their inconsequential lives with neither aim nor objective nor ideal to inspire them unto a higher living, unto a nobler existence. Such is the decadence that has afflicted the youth that they have neither the spirit to work for the common weal nor the character or strength of will to unselfishly labour for life to alleviate the misery of their countrymen who are daily sinking in the mire of ignorance and poverty. The callous apathetic attitude of today's youth inherited from their debilitating environment full of delightful dreams and noxious nightmares leaves them with no higher aspiration than so-called self-actualisation in the form of furtherance of career at the cost of a billion sisters and brothers who are daily ground to death to provide the elite few the luxuries of a heaven on earth while the rest burn in the hell-fire of their starving bellies.

Teachers play a huge role in the precipitation of this terrible decadence and so do parents. Ceaselessly goading children along lines of selfish personal fulfilment to the exclusion of the welfare of the many, plays into the hands of materialism with its twin vices of avarice and lust. The result is but obvious, a steady decline in national culture and a sharp erosion of character in the youth, elements which are the prime requisites for the rise of a nation, for the renascence of an ancient civilisation such as India. There is in the air an air of ultra-levity which is the sure sign of loss of character, and a pandering to the vanities of all that is Western in origin and orientation in the name of modernity and the sanctioned freedom of the liberal democratic way of life. Rootless citizens vast millions have become, transplants of an indigenous culture into foreign soil, self-oblivious fools who have become nomads devoid of destination, derelicts disjointed from their homeland.

It is hardly a healthy sign that millions of Indians in the flower of their youth have become the descendants of 'Macaulay's children' and are such a hybrid of Oriental and Occidental culture that their pernicious influence is eating into the vitals of society and rendering it hollow and dry. What a far cry it is from those early days when a nation, groaning under the heels of the British, rallied round the clarion call of the 'Prophet Patriot', Swami Vivekananda, and hurled itself headlong into the hell-fire of British tyranny to secure freedom in the fullness of time! The tale of those turbulent days, when 'Vande Mataram' sounded and resounded through the towns and the villages to rouse the nation to revolution, has remained untold, for the Government of India since independence has allied itself with half-truths and full lies to bury the real heroes of the freedom struggle beneath the sands of time while propagating most effectively and with decadent results the Gandhian saga of passive resistance which eventually sold the nation to the mercenaries who traded with the life of forty crore Indians and partitioned the motherland, amputating both her arms. In a truncated landmass Nehru did the rest of selling the sovereignty of India over parts to Pakistan and China and so sealed the future fate of rising India.

This then is the legacy inherited by the modern youth of India and small wonder it is that they are unable to hold onto anything substantial in post-independent India which can make them feel ennobled enough to lead a higher life, a life of sacrifice and service for the motherland, full of patriotic zeal and higher idealism, at once self-fulfilling and concurrently conducing to national welfare. However, all is not lost for youth is such a seminal phase in an individual's life that the fire of idealism may ignite any moment and transformation of personality effected that instant. To such a moment of self-discovery I send my good wishes with the flaming words of Swami Vivekananda who was himself youth-incarnate : 'Awake, awake great ones! The world is burning with misery. Can you sleep?'

Jai Hind! Azad Hind zindabad! Amar shaheed zindabad!