He was the son of the demon king
Hiranyakashipu and was a great devotee of Shree Vishnu. His father wanted him
to worship him but the boy held on to his chosen deity. A terrible clash
ensued, of persecution on one side and silent suffering on the other, eventually
resulting in the Lord appearing in his terrible Nrisingha form, emanating from
a pillar of the royal court to slay the offending evil king. Prahlad is
considered to be the epitome of devotion in the Indian Puranic tradition.
May our hearts be filled with such resolute
loving devotion for God which nothing can thwart and may we be filled with the
fervour that calls on the divine in man which shall be our only object of
worship so long as even a dog suffers on earth, as Swami Vivekananda famously
uttered in agony at the plight of his countrymen under the octopus-hold of British
tyranny! May our motherland be exalted in our purified vision to be the
universal motherhood congealed and condensed into her beautiful form in
sprightly dance with arms outstretched, as if calling on her other children
scattered everywhere to come running into her loving embrace!
Where shall we draw our boundaries of
love, where the borders of our motherland? O, it stretches across the ends of
the earth and beyond to the remotest corners of space-time and deep within the
human heart to the innermost recesses where ‘sadaa janaanaang hridaye sannivishtaha’
resides the Lord and dispenses the fruits of action, Himself the doer of all
such in His triple phenomenal mode, sattva, rajas and tamas. This, then, is the
India I invoke you to love with your heart’s ardour, with a profusion of tears
rendered sublime in your soulful sufferance for the motherland’s cause, in the
sacrificial living for the welfare of the many, for the good of all, ‘bahujana
sukhayacha, bahujana hitayacha’. Jai Hind!
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