https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4b13EbR5nc
It is a shame that Mahatma Gandhi's name is mentioned in this lecture by Swami Ranganathananda but not Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose's name as being inspired by Vivekananda, although, Netaji openly affirmed that he considered Swamiji his spiritual mentor and preceptor and that he would have been at the feet of the prophet-patriot by way of becoming his disciple had he been alive when Netaji trod this earth. He held Ramakrishna-Vivekananda as his life's ideal.
However, it is the speaker's discretion as to who he would like to highlight in a speech, suiting the occasion as well, and often, the mentioning of names follows the subconscious drives of a person as per his or her mental predisposition and orientation thereof, which spontaneously and without malicious intent flows out in the midst of an extemporaneous oration.
Not only did Swamiji inspire Gandhiji and Netaji but he did so a whole army of extreme revolutionaries like Aurobindo Ghosh, Bagha Jatin, Surya Sen, Hemchandra Ghosh and others who drove the wits out of the British and made them flee Calcutta to seek safe haven in New Delhi which became necessarily the new capital city of the British Raj. Besides these valorous souls who gave back the British their own terror tonic and rose up in armed insurrection against them, great Gandhians like Chakravarty Rajagopalachari, to cite but a sole illustrious instance, and a host of others who formed the body politic of the national movement, were inspired by Swamiji as well. In fact the entire youth brigade of India in those days came under the influence of the prophet and got galvanised into revolutionary action, violent and non-violent, to eventually evict the British from India.
This tendency, therefore, in public fora to downplay the seminal contribution of Netaji, the leonine hero of India's freedom struggle, by omission and commission, comes from a mass misapprehension of history and a superficial understanding of human character, motivations and commitment to a cause. Also, organisational compulsions often prompt people to overemphasise or underplay certain facts, which is a sad travesty of truth that knows no compromise with partial renditions or deliberate silence on contentious issues. Swamiji must have alluded to this when he forewarned about these propensities in the running of an organisation in the following words : "Organisation breeds new evils." No wonder the people of this country do not sufficiently awake to the blazing words of Swamiji when those that carry his name all the while do not sufficiently articulate the truth as it is and not as it is conveniently tailored to be. Jai Hind!
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