WE ARE INDIANS, INDIANS AND NOTHING BUT INDIANS ... 1

The only way to integrate India is to emphasise our identity as Indians right from birth and not as belonging to specific religious communities. But that is a far cry as yet. However, a beginning will have to be made and let us here begin it. Let each member pledge that he/she is an Indian, an Indian and nothing but an Indian. Now, do not block this development by positing the even larger ideal of belonging to humanity at this stage. Let us first graduate to become Indians without any appendage of narrow nationalism and then we shall gradually evolve to becoming citizens of the world as well for who may thwart the march of human evolution? The Indian ethos is deep enough to accommodate the whole world in it and we need not much worry about our nationalistic identity degenerating into the roguish nationalism of erstwhile Europe that brought in its wake two world wars. Our belonging to the nation, our identification with it as our primary identity, our nationalism, our patriotism, our love for the motherland, all these will be manifest in the highest sense of human harmony, peace and enlightenment and shall be the cause of disturbance to none within or without the borders of India. We shall fear none and none will have cause to fear us. In the cultivation of national excellence, in the sacrifice for our motherland and in the service rendered her with our every breath let us usher in great glory for our country whose lustre shall illumine the path of all of humanity despite the turbulence of the times. Let us initiate this grand project of self-building for nation-building and let us not fall victim to a sense of cynicism that kills all affirmative action for the motherland. Let us help each other flower in our human endeavour, ever remembering that each one of us is not a mere isolated individual but is an aggregate being encompassing the whole of India. This is the only way forward for our nation, diverse as it is in cultural, linguistic and religious affiliations with seemingly no hope of integration except through this broad and deep identification of the individual in collective terms and the collection equally in self-terms, the self again defined in enlightened nationalistic terms which in turn is to be understood in the broadest humanistic terms. Only then may we prosper when we accept all that is ours as ours, rejecting none, casting away nothing that is integral to our history, be they good, bad or ugly, accepting them as ours with a view to studying them, revelling in their glory and learning lessons from them where they are inglorious. Each and every Indian is my sister, my brother, my heart and my soul, my self, my everything. This is real nationalism to begin with, for the end lies in integration with the whole of phenomena and the transcendence thereof which remains our eventual goal, our divine destiny, our philosophical endpoint of attainment. May the Mother bless us in our endeavour and may the motherland be blessed with countless children, valorous and heroic, who shall live lives imbued solely with the perfected spirit of patriotism! Vande Mataram! Jai Hind! Inquilab Zindabad!

WHEN SOLDIERS BLEED AND POLITICIANS HEED NOT ... 1

The nation needs a cleansing of intent, the perceptive pursuit of military strength and an uncompromising stance of an unbending political will that will not cower even before the mightiest powers of the world when it comes to national interest regarding sovereignty and territorial defence. The world admires the manifestation of will, so said Swami Vivekananda, and it is in this regard that we need to send out signals to the world that India will no more bear and forbear any amount of perfidy perpetrated against her by the powers that be to keep her from attainment of maturity as a nation.

The past injustices of history have debilitated her seriously as partitioned she stands, ever in conflict with her erstwhile province, her newborn noxious neighbour in Pakistan that spares no means to destabilise her territorial integrity by inducing insurrection in Kashmir which has, courtesy the connivance of Pakistan, nay, its active infiltration to promote perfidy, transformed from heaven on earth to a hellish war-zone where the soldiers of the Indian Army are martyred by the day to humour the paralysing policies of a dispensation that somehow will not heed the exigencies of the times in the light of half-baked understanding of truth and non-violence as decreed by its paterfamilias, and, so, suffers from endless misery as befalls the one that has surrendered to the forces of evil in the name of befriending the enemy with the grand aspiration of attempting the transformation of his hideous heart with the healing touch of superficial love. Thus has India suffered and so shall keep suffering till her martial roots are relocated in her rectified imagination and corrective course of action adopted that will swing her free of age-old inertia of untruths, half-truths and darkest lies masquerading as high priest of philosophy where seek refuge the rogues of the day in noxious narration of a heritage high, in a facade forged by fabricated falsehood that seeks the demise of all that is good.

But such a state cannot endure and India must rise a mighty power, in economic and in military terms, with spirituality, the bedrock of national life, guiding the course of each, for the world to survive and live on beyond the doom that ever looms large, hanging on the horizon like the hangman's noose or the guillotine's blade that will precipitous fall, severing the head of imperial pride.

What ought to be then India's role in the ensuing struggle for emancipation that must see its fruition everywhere? Why? it must be the pursuit of strength, not a facade, foul and foolish, that dares not see the enemy eye to eye, for fear rules the heart of the coward, but it shall be the hero's valour, victorious in war and generous in adjustment thereafter when peace prevails, never losing sight of the broader outlines of history or the unfolding course of social evolution, while pursuing prospective profits of the day which precipitate a perfidy in time that eclipses civilisation. No, our role as a nation, luminous and free, shall be of the keeper of the conscience of the world, the director of international understanding and the upholder of all that is virtuous and spiritually sound in individual and in collective life.

For this aspiration to fulfil, we need the harmonious growth of our nation along the lines laid down by the sages and the seers of Truth we honour as Rishis, and that will include the strengthening of our armed forces as well and the development of the political will to exercise it when necessary, ever with restraint but not that of the breed of a non-committal passive acquiescence to perfidy perpetrated which with pious pleas and prayerful petitions we may scarce redress. Our military might shall be in defence of our fair national interest and, in its superlative strength, shall be the great upholder of peace on earth with our civilian leadership, rooted in our highest heritage and steeped in our perennial wisdom, guiding the course of our national outflow amidst the mighty current of international life.

But this weakness, this dreadful disease of hiding under the cover of false philosophy, of fearing to face up to the Truth within and to the brute without and dealing the death-blow to root out evil and in victory smile, O this terrible tyranny of the failing spirit must go forever if we, in sooth, mean our mantras right. May we be true to our motherland and rise, hereon, heroes of the soil! Vande Mataram!

BOSE --- AN INDIAN SAMURAI by MAJ GEN GAGANDEEP BAKSHI

At last it seems an unapologetic account of the true history of India's armed struggle for independence will be out in the public domain for people to read and learn from. Maj Gen Gagandeep Bakshi is doing yeoman's service to the cause of historical research in this phase of the lost years of India's freedom struggle, attempting to dispel doubts and the deliberate darkness effected by successive Congress governments at the Centre and, in so doing, enlivening fresh research in the subject of Netaji and his INA's contribution to the liberation of India and the subsequent mysterious disappearance of the hero post 18 August, 1945. A lot of the mist may clear, a lot of it may still persist, but the endeavour of our Maj Gen Gagandeep Bakshi is commendable as is his peerless patriotism which shines through the ardour of his discussions on the subject, be they verbal or in print. I eagerly await the release of this seminal work on Netaji and the Indian National Army and exhort all my countrymen here and abroad, especially in East Asia, to give the book a rousing welcome by purchasing it and reading it. A last word and that is to you, Maj Gen Gagandeep Bakshiji. Salutations to you for your undiluted love for the nation in these times of the general erosion of patriotic values! May Sri Ramakrishna bless you with a long, healthy and happy life in his service which, in your case, is eminently the service of the nation! May Netaji shower his blessings on you and take you into his leading! May the sceptical youth of the day learn lessons of valorous love for the motherland from a septuagenarian like you! May your research into the hero's life and times illumine our way as we grope through the darkness of our national life today unto the springtime of a brighter morrow! Vande Mataram! Jai Hind!

LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY

We must not take our freedom for granted, else we may lose it again one day. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, so goes the saying.

Real equality is a far cry and until it has borne its truest fruit, liberty can scarce be. Democracy will remain a distant dream till people are freed from the fetters that bind, power bred in privilege putrid, pernicious pestering of the festering corpse that fallen man through folly has been for ages now and, God alone knows, will remain so for how long more.

Long has been the suppression of man and longer still the suppression of woman. Now the time comes when free men shall arise everywhere to declare the independence that is inherently theirs but which has remained in the pages of declaration documents of the rights of man, while power and privilege, changing garb, have ruled on to perpetuate the slavery of man with an escape through death alone to a promised Paradise the one illusory objective that makes the drudgery that life is, bearable.

And, through it all,
Through the slits yon high
Keeps streaming in
The light at dawn.
The twilit being,
Awaking to its call, Rushes forth
To meet the guest
In meadows green,
In fields far-flung,
Across the ends
Of the distant earth,
Seeking life,
A new rebirth.
The soul awakes
And awakes man
With the light of love
Richer than
All earthly pelf
Which shadows the self.
And, so begins
A golden age
Of light and love
And learning free
For men to live
And breathe in peace,
Fearless, free,
As free can be,
Like fragrant breeze,
Through a forest in bloom,
Caressing blossoms
With utter ease.
In spring shall spring
The bud to life
And see no more
A change of tide.
Fair freedom's free,
Thou ever be
In peace and bliss
And in love abide.

THE OM --- WHAT IT IS AND WHAT IT IS NOT

Photo : Swami Shantananda, disciple of Holy Mother Sri Sarada Devi, in perpetual perception of the Om.
But the real Om is the unvibrated 'sound'. Hence, this thesis falls flat if taken literally. The purport must be understood in terms sublimely subtle for the Om lies at the interface of the manifest and the unmanifest as the dicotyledonous seed of the twain. Swami Shantananda, one of the earlier disciples of the Holy Mother, used to 'hear' the Om uninterruptedly from the year 1916 when it began all of a sudden. He used to urge the junior monks like Swami Bhaskarananda to try and 'hear' the Om when they would go on austerity tours through the Himalayas. Shantanandaji was perpetually in the 'Om mode', if I may be allowed the literary license to label it so, and this, in other words, meant that the venerable sage was habitually in the transition state between the phenomenal and the absolute, perhaps, passing into multiple samadhi (spiritual ecstasy where diverse thoughts are quelled in the silence of integrated flow or no flow at all in the realm of the Vast Void) a day, effortlessly and with a spiritual spontaneity mastered out of earlier rigour when the first footsteps were measured out metrically and meaningfully, the fruition coming in its wake as the fulfilment of this labour of love.

There is, thus, a huge misconception about the inconceivable Om that defies description, being beyond the terrain of verbal turbulence we term this phenomenal world. It is the unutterable essence of all utterances, beyond speech and sound, ever eluding expression, yet, engendering it. The Om has to be ever approached, never quite attained in the material sense, and may be merged into when all sense of the phenomenal has been resolved to its roots, the ego obliterated in the moment of resolution and the lower self sublimated till its residuum but remains in the Self sublime, existent, blissful, super-conscious. Shantanandaji was a phenomenon in this regard, being blessed by the Holy Mother into subtle sensitivity of the Seed Word whence spring countless universes without beginning and without end. However, what he perceived may not be easy to apprehend in our common sense of audible perception, and herein lies the difficulty of realisation of what sages and saints say and the perversion of their utterances in common understanding. It is, thus, enjoined that strict spiritual observances, firmly founded in continent living, be maintained on a disciplined basis for a protracted period of time, so that, in the fullness of fruition, it may induce the state of the perception of the Om just prior to the zeroing into one's own infinitude. Hence, we must be wary of these easy pronouncements on abstruse matters and not so gullible as to delude ourselves into false understanding and foolish practice thereon.

THE EVIL THAT WAS THE RAJ ... 5

The British used Indians to suppress Indians, and, fools that they were, men of little character, fuelled only by necessity, greed and a servility to the white master, they betrayed their motherland into subjection to a rapacious, roguish regime that denuded her of health, wealth and happiness. A handful of Englishmen --- hardly men, for in trickery and in treachery, in deceit and in duplicity, in betrayal and in a vile barbarism that reeked of their racist arrogance, they hardly bore any semblance of humanity towards the conquered people to be offered in right earnest the epithet of 'man' with all that is glorious that goes by that name --- , by dint of superior organisation, a disciplined command system, unity of will and the inglorious capitulation by local kings and feudal lords for petty self-preservation, controlled masses of Indians who outnumbered them by a ratio of 10,000 : 1 for almost the entire period of their 190 year rule in India.

The British disarmed the Indians after the Revolt of 1857 which, indeed, was the First War of Indian Independence, but the process of building up a slow and steady infrastructural network of political control in India had been initiated by them right from the very beginning of their occupancy in this land of mysticism and mantra where more civilised people lived than they had ever encountered in their northern continent.

BANKIM --- A VOICE IN THE WILDERNESS?

When the freedom fighters were tortured in jail, their call was Vande Mataram. It was this passionate appeal that went up to the highest heavens of freedom from the hearts of the tormented children of the Mother and it was this call that was their constant companion in life, struggle and death. We owe it to Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay for discovering this mantra and I have no hesitation in calling him the Rishi of Indian nationalism. His 'Ananda Math' ignited the fire of nationalism in a million souls and paved the way for future revolutionary activity. Swami Vivekananda is said to have urged Bagha Jatin to study Bankim, especially, 'Ananda Math', when the latter had paid a visit to the seer to seek his blessings.

Bankimchandra proved the power of the written word and set alight the flame of revolution which became a mighty conflagration in due course, consuming an empire and its imperial pride with it. There should be none among us who has not read the novel that changed the course of our national history and set us up on the high road to freedom. Our salutations to the great revolutionary, Bankimchandra, who we, in our justified romanticism over the martyrs of the freedom struggle, unfortunately tend to forget and, so, do ourselves a grave injustice, for the causes being relegated to the waste bin of history, the effects are bound to follow suit. The fruits of freedom to be savoured, the seed that grew into the mighty tree of nationalism must not be lost sight of. This is important and I urge all to be conversant with the writings of the great novelist and nationalist par excellence, Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, by way of establishing the right connecting link to our revolutionary roots. Vande Mataram!

INQUILAB ZINDABAD! (LONG LIVE REVOLUTION!) ... 4

Photo : Chandrasekhar Azad lying in final restfulness on the bed which was the soil of his motherland after shooting himself through the temple at the end of an hour-long gun battle with a contingent of British Indian police. The British officers look on. Azad held on alone against a veritable assault battery for an entire hour before his ammunition got exhausted and, true to his earlier self-resolution that he would never be captured by the enemy alive, he reserved one last bullet for his self-martyrdom. Thus, the leader of Hindustan Socialist Republican Association became one in life and death with the soil of this nation and entered into the consciousness of all freedom-loving people of India. His inspirational life and its eventual immolation at the altar of freedom inspired a generation of future freedom fighters who battled to shake off the colonial yoke from the fallen form of the motherland.

"You do not have to arrange for interpreter for me as I know English. However, I choose to speak in my mother tongue and so may you arrange for an interpreter for the honourable judge that he may follow what I say. I so resolve to speak in my mother tongue because I feel that when one (the honourable judge) is being allowed the privilege of expressing himself in his mother tongue, so must the other (myself, Ram Muhammad Singh Azad, nee, Udham Singh) be allowed to speak in his mother tongue." ... Udham Singh's statement in the British court during his trial for the assassination of Michael O'Dwyer.

Do we deserve our freedom when we remain so very apathetic to the very discussion about the lives of the fighters for freedom? Our desire is only for the ordinary pleasures of life, sense gratification and the building up of the egocentric self. Where amidst such heavy duty will we get the time or opportunity to serve the nation's cause? Where in the name of all that stands for sustenance of the petty self is there any room for rumination on the larger cause of the patriotic self? None, my friend, none. Our lives are dedicated to the cause of self-survival, a la Darwinian evolutionary principle at work in every small mind that there be, killing out opposition and rooting out resistance in the vilest possible way that ensures the survival of the dominant being alone in a mighty affirmation of the animal that is yet to leave the precincts of the human heart.

We should re-popularise the inspiring invocation of 'Vande Mataram' to greet each other. After all, this was the clarion call of the revolutionaries who reposed faith in the Divine Mother as incarnate in the motherland. There was another band of nationalists, though, who had rejected faith in the existence of God altogether in the absence of empirical evidence for the same, and they preferred to thunder 'Inquilab Zindabad! (Long live revolution!)' Bhagat Singh and the leftist revolutionaries belonged to this category.

The entire freedom movement had 'Vande Mataram' as the clarion call of the revolutionaries, be they armed resisters of British rule or passive resisters in khaddar and the charka with non-violence and truth as their arsenal. But the subsequent communalisation of national politics in the 1930s and 1940s led to the controversy surrounding the national mantra and, the Muslims rigidly refusing allegiance to the text of the song eulogising the Goddess Durga, it became relegated to the inferior status of the National Song relative to 'Jana Gana Mana', the National Anthem. This problem of communal disharmony over 'Vande Mataram' was resolved by none other than Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose who in Germany adopted the 'Jana Gana Mana' as the National Anthem for his Provisional Government of Free India and, thus, circumvented the otherwise intractable issue. Also, he had Abid Hassan Safrani, his adjutant, coin the greeting 'Jai Hind' for all Indians. In both these endeavours Netaji came out triumphant in fostering Hindu-Muslim unity but the fact remains that 'Jai Hind' is but a poor substitute for the far more emotionally appealing call of 'Vande Mataram' which is an invocation to the Divine Mother incarnate in the motherland as opposed to the much drier and unpoetic call of 'Jai Hind'. In Bankimchandra's mantra there is suffused spirituality whereas in the Muslim-appeasing secular mantra there is a certain lack of depth and a relative prosaicness devoid of the sublimity of the former call to adoration of the motherland which ran like the 'sutratma' (the connecting thread of the Self) through the entire freedom movement. Thus did I say that we should once more adopt in real earnest the national mantra 'Vande Mataram' by way of a return to our revolutionary roots for freedom without imposing in any way its use on any that may have theological or ideological issues with it.

DIVERSE APPRECIATION AND COMMENTS

I have so much to write in appreciation of your writing, @Kanchan Ghosh, but am biding by time till you rejoin the group in terms of express articulation.
Fabulous, @Wordsmith Rana! You are doing a great job in refocusing reader-attention towards constructive nation-building. Hope to see this perceptive post reaching the wider sphere of public appreciation through your copious sharing in relevant groups and pages. However, I feel that, with your prodigious talent in writing, you may be persuaded into writing short biographical sketches about the freedom fighters of India and, so, disseminate the knowledge of their lives and achievements among the common reader who may not be equipped with the data always on these seminal patriotic personalities who ushered in the freedom that we aspired for several centuries even as we groaned under the tyranny of foreign occupation ever since the defeat of the last Hindu king of Delhi, Prithviraj Chauhan, in the Second Battle of Tarain, 1192, at the hands of the invading Mohammedan emperor, Muhammad Ghori.

INQUILAB ZINDABAD! (LONG LIVE REVOLUTION!) ... 3

True it is, and it is a travesty of historical justice to these patriots that their role in the freedom struggle is much neglected of mention in history books. So are generations of students being deprived of fact, perspective and direction when dealing with their immediate historical past, and this is a serious delinking between successive phases of our historical movement whose pernicious influence we are witnessing in every sphere of our national life. A nation that is kept in the dark about its true history does not in fruition rise to its fullest stature, for the perfidies of the past, that obstruct the vision, do not allow the free flow of national life, blocking access to avenues that lead to diverse discourses on development and, in effect, stagnating the mass of miscarried mantras in the minds of a million indoctrinates

The British were occupying our country and we were pleading for and, later, making hesitant demands for the introduction of certain reforms in the administration to improve the lot of the Indians but we were not fighting for complete independence which ought to have been the objective from the very beginning, such, it seems, were the imperatives of the times. Notable exceptions to this were Aurobindo Ghosh who was, perhaps, the first to voice the demand for Purna Swaraj (total independence) and, decades later, Subhas Chandra Bose and Bhagat Singh who followed suit. Prayers, pleas and petitions of the Moderates within the Congress was followed for a short while by Aurobindo's radical programme demanding Purna Swaraj, but that failed when the leader fled to Pondicherry to pursue his spiritual quest. Then came the demand for Home Rule and Dominion Status but not total independence yet. It passes one's imagination to think how immoderate has been our moderation throughout the course of this cringing before the British, despite pretensions galore of passive revolutionary intent, that we could not muster manhood enough before 1930 to make total independence the declared goal of the Congress.

Partition was a disaster and the direct consequence of British perfidious politics of 'Divide and Rule' which they introduced to keep revolutionaries at bay ever since the bitter lessons they learnt during the great Indian Revolt of 1857. Hindus and Muslims had fought side by side to almost end British rule in India. The Crown quaked in fear and, assuming direct control of governance in their brightest colony, set about sowing the seeds of disunity among the Indians using Machiavellian methods. Since the end of the 18th century the English East India Company, which was the commercial face of the British Crown in India, had set about to studying the socio-spiritual culture of India. European Indologists were appointed to work in alliance with Indian Brahman pundits to work at the Vedas. Likewise, other scholars were given the charge to study Middle-Eastern Islamic culture. A momentous discovery arrived at from these studies was that the Hindus were a very resilient race so far as their religious culture was concerned and that intolerant monotheistic non-idolatrous Islamic culture was theoretically as well as much in practice in direct collision with the universally tolerant culture of the Hindus which was polytheistic and, in Islamic terms, blasphemously idolatrous too. It baffled the British to fathom how such contrasting cultures could syncretically co-exist when their theological roots were so antithetical to each other. From confusion came clarity and the British understood that this unity was there purely because the Muslims had for centuries been the rulers in India and would, therefore, necessarily break if the Hindus ever came to be dominant in the native national scene. The mild Hindu had patiently borne the injustice and intolerance of Islamic rule in India but, when the roles were reversed, the militant Mussalman would not tolerate the dominance of the erstwhile subject Hindu. Thus, could be created the fissure in Indian society to sufficiently weaken it for continued colonial rule of the Crown.

The Partition claimed the Mahatma as its final victim.

Sardar saved the nation from Balkanisation. The fraternal bonds had broken and fragmentation of the motherland beyond the rupture of Partition was imminent. Hyderabad, Junagadh, Kashmir, Saurashtra, were all at stake. Nehru's indecision at vital moments and capitulation to situational pressure proved disastrous for the nation and it was Patel's iron will, resoluteness and inflexibility in matters of national integration coupled with his insight into the political complexities of the times, which baffled his leader, that led to the emerging solidarity of the geographical residuum that yet lay beyond the clutches of the perfidious Jinnah, the worst villain in Indian history, and made India the nation that she is today. Sardar's political acumen outmatched Jinnah's and it is a tragedy that Panditiji did not sufficiently subscribe to good advice given him by the lion-soul whose decisiveness of action in the teeth of opposition, often by the hesitant Prime Minister himself, saved many a day when India's fate could have been sealed for good. When matters came to a head and Patel contemplated resignation from office, the Mahatma's demise prevented such an ordeal for the nation and this, in death, perhaps, was Bapu's final benediction on our benighted nation.

Yes, @Satyendra Singhji, I will start on this project as urged by you. I also feel that Ambedkar is being increasingly politicised in the wake of the Dalits forming such a high percentage of the electorate which is clouding vision about the seminal mover of the Constitution behind the cover of electoral gains and so denying us perspective on his actual contribution to the freedom movement. In fact, his sharp distinction with Gandhiji regarding the Dalit issue is so contentious that one loses sight of his actual contribution towards the independence of India, whatever be it in quantum, relative to the stalwarts of the freedom movement. Thus, a historical analysis of his role in achieving independence of the entire nation from the British is shadowed by his obvious and vociferous concern for his untouchable brethren whose integration with the Hindus, which Gandhiji espoused, he was at sharp variance with and relented but grudgingly in the ensuing political adjustment in the teeth of what he termed 'the Mahatma's blackmailing tactics of fast unto death' to sign the Poona Pact. Ambedkar was an open opponent of Gandhiji and has left behind a severe indictment of the Mahatma in his supposed double-dealing with the Dalits while professing false fraternal love for them. The Dalit leader, courtesy British patronage, carried the mandate of about 35% of the then population of India, at least on paper, for it cannot be vouched that he actually could move so many against the Mahatma, for if he could, he would have played a parallel role of equal importance as the Mahatma in the politics of freedom on stage then. But it never happened and that is ample proof that representation on paper of a people is one and real representation of the same as Gandhiji did was another. However, these are reflex ruminations which are not in answer to the question raised by you and I will get back to discussion of the contentious issue of Ambedkar's real contribution to the freedom movement after doing relevant research regarding the same. Thank you, Satyendra Singhji, for yet again focusing our attention on a highly neglected aspect of our immediate historical past which, considering the calamity of the cancerous growth of corruption in public life, needs a fresh treatment and a deft delivery thereof before the nation at large, for illusions, if any, are to be dispelled about personalities, however great by achievement or by appellation, for truth to prevail in the larger interests of the nation and for the setting right of the historical narrative.

A CHILDHOOD SPENT IN SACHIN ADULATION

You were sitting on my lap in my study with the front page of the newspaper (The Telegraph) spread out atop the table when you leaned over and with your little index finger pointing close to a photograph of Sachin Tendulkar at the top of the page, clearly and slowly said, "SA--CHIN," with a distinct gap between articulation of the two syllables, separately. It was, indeed, the first proper name you had uttered till then. You were just under two years and a half and, it quite seems, at least several months into subliminal Sachin adulation, for the incident took place, I guess, sometime around August, 1995, and by then you were pretty avid a watcher of Sachin's blistering batsmanship, sitting on your grandfather's lap or beside his chair on the floor. This is as accurate a description as it can be, for I was the sole witness, other than you, of course, to this episode and I vividly remember it all. Even as I write, I can see it all happening, as fresh as it ever was.

INQUILAB ZINDABAD! (LONG LIVE REVOLUTION!) ... 2

The first criterion for service to the nation is love for the nation, self-effacing real humility, not a show of it, to actuate this impulse of service. Only then will courage come and sacrifice in its wake. It is character that builds in the being a lion's courage and it is self-immolation, daily, hourly, for the common weal that builds character, for karma is at the root of it all, being the source of the austerity that inspires revolutionary action, be it peaceful, silent activity of self-awakening or the rough rude jolt of a collective momentous movement that turns society about on its heels and ushers in a new order.

The tears of the mothers and the widows of the martyrs must be felt for each day if we have any pretensions to patriotism. Mere talking or lecturing or even writing elaborate texts will not be sufficient to move towards the Mother who intangible lies to the pretender, ever eluding his advancing grasp, while she caresses her heroic child who has given himself up to fall prostrate at her hallowed feet.

Jatin Das dies in jail. His 63-day fast is ended. Now he will require no feed any more. The Crown has cowered and the martyr has been vindicated in his death. This was no emotional blackmail done to exact a demand from one's own countrymen but an uncertain adventure in the domain of the unknown against a ruthless enemy that knows no humanity towards the Indian.

Traitors that sold their mother for gold, betrayers that for commerce lived, they are buried today beneath the curse of an entire nation, while the heroes, deathless shine, more lustrous than the brightest stars, beacons for generations to come, to guide them through the troubled waters of national life, through the tempestuous times that lie ahead for a world fraught with ignorance and sin.

There was no corruption in these martyrs, no compromise in nationalism, no pretension, no perversion, no shaking hands with the enemy that molested the motherland and reduced her to death's door. These were the bright ones that were born with the blessings of the Mother, born with the mission to free her of her bondage to barbarians that looted her and savaged her children. Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev Thapar, Shivaram Rajguru --- the triumvirate of India's young eagles who set up before an entire nation what it was that revolution meant, not cringing before the enemy, begging for mercy, nor making a sham of all sense of masculinity in the shape of debilitating inconstant politics of passive resistance, an excellent irritant to the Raj, for sure, but never quite adequate a means to drive them away from their occupancy of foreign territory usurped by them through deceit, duplicity and induction of divisiveness in the ranks of the enemy. When on the 23rd evening of the month of March, 1931, they died, hanged on the scaffold where they scoffed off the earthly garb, an entire nation was stunned into silence. The dewdrops vaporised at dawn but left behind their legacy of future fruition which saw the resurrection of revolutionary activity across the country, the Chittagong Armoury Raid, the Battle of Jalalabad and finally, the Second War of Indian Independence, the INA assault on British India which led to freedom. And, in fulfilment of Bhagat Singh's dream of a non-exploitative world where men would live free and fearless, in dignity and peace, the worst exploitative machinery in human history was brought to its knees by the Indian National Army that dealt it the decisive deathblow to drive it to its doom. The British were kicked out of India and the Empire collapsed with it.

Mother, your valorous sons and daughters, who lived and died to free you, have been forgotten by the mass of West-oriented pseudo-rationalist, pseudo-liberal, heartless Macaulay's children, and one weeps to see how an entire nation has trodden the path of sheer perfidy, forgetting its debt to the martyrs. Shame on you, O my countrymen, who sit on your freedom and do nothing to glorify the fighters for the same. Yours is a freedom won in vain, for a nation that is forgetful of its heroes, in due course of time, falls into the same pitfall whence, through the flowing sacrifice of its martyrs, it had arisen. Therefore, my sisters, my brothers, take cognisance of your own historical past and, shunning this life immersed in frivolous forgetfulness, arise in glorious remembrance of them who may, even this day, lend you the virility that you manifestly lack.

End of Part 2 ... to be continued

INQUILAB ZINDABAD! (LONG LIVE REVOLUTION!) ... 1

Lala Lajpat Rai, beaten to death. History will seek revenge.

Whether the extreme revolutionaries could have achieved their end of freedom through violent means or not, when the foe possessed such a mighty machinery of countering any such violent activity with ruthless efficiency, is not the pertinent question but what was significant in those turbulent times was that they exhibited rare manhood which ignited the freedom fervour of an entire nation.
The early revolutionaries were right in their diagnosis of the problem. It lay in the disarmament of the entire country post the Revolt of 1857. A disarmed country could not fight a modern army backed by a civil administration that was as efficient in exploitation as it was in keeping its octopus-hold on the subject nation, draining its resources with such surgical precision that the blood transfused from the Indian body to the British barbarian's emaciated the form of the colony till it lost all capacity to resist their perfidious control, or so it was intended to be. That it did not so happen must be attributed to those deathless heroes who laughingly gave up their lives at the scaffold or were tortured to death after they had fired at the Englishman to teach the Crown a lesson in Oriental valour and to remind them of the limits of their oppression that would be tolerated by the patient Indian.
The British treated us like animals, and for us to rationalise that the violent reaction of the revolutionaries, manifest in the form of assassination of the perpetrators of such inhuman treatment of our sons and daughters, was tantamount to the common crime of murder, shows to what degree we have sunk as a nation, being totally shorn of all virility, patriotism and self-dignity, thanks to the constant brainwashing received by us for the last seven decades that freedom was won by non-violence when there is not a shred of evidence to support the thesis that the British actually left their richest colony owing to the pressures of Gandhian truth-force (satyagraha) and non-violence (ahimsa). The contrary evidence of their leaving the country, being forced out of it by the impact of the INA assault and the Royal Indian Navy Revolt among others in its wake, holds ground perfectly and has even been corroborated by none other than Lord Clement Attlee in 1956 when he in a private moment admitted the truth to Justice P.B. Chakrabarty in the Raj Bhavan, Calcutta. Attlee admitted that it was Netaji and his INA's impact on the British Indian forces, subverting their allegiance to the Crown and turning them against their British Indian masters that had made perpetuation of the Raj untenable and that Gandhi's movement had minimal impact in influencing the British decision to leave.
The tears of the mothers and the wives of the revolutionaries, the daughters and the sisters of the valiant ones, shook the foundations of the Empire and burnt its edifice to ashes. Britain, you will yet have to learn the lesson of history, for karma will recoil on you, I say, and all that you have gained at the expense of others through plunder and loot and rapacious exploitation of the subjected masses, all of it will drain out of your hands as your festering grip fails to hold what never was yours. And the tears of the mothers and of the wives and the daughters will haunt your national life till retribution of history visits your cold island nation and, as Swamiji had prophesied, you are swept off your feet into the sea, which will be historic justice indeed, the balancing of your political sheet.
Where was British fair play, justice and civilisation when in someone else's country they stayed as occupying thugs and used their own men to keep them in subjection while looting the coffers of the nation dry? Where was their enlightenment when they heaped injury and insult on a conquered nation and even distorted that nation's historical narrative such that they as a nation sank into oblivion of their heritage and culture? Where was their humanity when they practised the most vicious racism on Indians, treating them like dogs and violating their very spirit, yet sending them to the war zones to combat the adversary in battle or in war as in the case of the two World Wars? How was England an enlightened nation when the lessons of the Enlightenment which centred on liberty, equality and fraternity they chose to conveniently ignore when it came to their dealing with the colonised countries among which India was the biggest cherry the Crown had for its ingestion? On the basis of which civilised principle did Britain barter humanity for their hellish treatment of Indians and how is it that countless Indians still do not have the fire in their belly to stand up to the facts of history and say, "We may forgive them one day in the distant future for their destruction of our motherland but we will never forget what they have done to us. We shall remember each and every act of British barbarism on us and seek inspiration from such to love our country evermore even as we labour to rebuild our motherland."? And how do Indians ever forget and forgive the amputation of their motherland which the British have done in perfidious alliance with the Muslim League and their villainous leader, Muhammad Ali Jinnah? How can they forget the horrors of Partition, the 35 million people starved to death by famines caused by British policy and a total apathy to the well being of Indians, the destruction of their industry to facilitate the growth and sustenance of inferior British industry and the mass molestation of a people that reduced them from being one of the two richest nations of the world to becoming one of the poorest within a hundred years of the British Raj during the nineteenth century? These are pertinent questions that need honest answering by Indians before they open their mouths in open criticism of the extreme revolutionaries, basing their arguments along debilitating lines backed up by an unfeeling, dry intellect sharpened to seditious proportions on the rock of historical heresy preached by Congressmen since their moderated antiquity.
Swamiji had spoken of thought vibrations that, emanating from a powerful meditative mind, can travel from the confines of caves to permeate the thought-pool of the world and bring about marvellous transformation in the minds of the people they are directed to. As Swamiji was a rishi (seer of transcendental truth), his words are bound to be true. In a like manner, I think that the collective will-force of the revolutionaries in and through their ordeal in seeking freedom, their terrible suffering and torture at the hands of the British police, their constant meditation on the ideal of freedom, all these must have had a largely positive impact on the eventual outcome of the freedom movement, both in terms of the sympathy they evoked from the common man for the cause and from the standpoint of spiritual vibration, the binding together of thought waves into a mighty current of revolutionary fervour aimed at freedom.
End of Part 1 ... to be continued

IN THE DEPTH OF THE MIDNIGHT HOUR

Once more silence reigns in the midnight hour when the world sleeps and the Lord keeps awake. Where the children of the senses sleep, the children of the Lord remain wide awake and where the children of the Lord sleep, the children of the senses remain wakeful. So says the Geeta and this is the strange opposite motion in life where the escalator moves both ways and carries souls up or down as their desired destination is. Who can break this midnight dream that envelopes the world, save the Avatar, and who can free the bound soul of the fetters that hold it, but the incarnate Divine? When a tsunami hits the sea, the shores shift too. The deluge that follows, damages as it builds on its ruins. Thus, the dual syndrome of death and life carries on pulling on the saga of terrestrial existence with it. This is beautifully encapsulated in the figure of Mother Kali whose two arms bestowing benediction are balanced by the other two destroying all that come in its pathway. The terrible form of the Divine is the cosmic harmony of creation and destruction in an unceasing flow, the form of Kali being the shaking synthesis of this dynamics of death.The rishis were not only supernal souls full of the realisations of the Self but were mighty artists as well who depicted the dynamics of the vast world they beheld in the form of synoptic figures that expressed it all. Thus, Nataraj, Durga, Krishna, Ganesh have emerged from the formless dark into luminous forms, conscious and concrete, adorning the corridors of space-time, interpenetrating it with their vibrations, rendering the Sanatana Dharma into a unique expression of not only the paradoxes that abound in life but also their very synthesis as well.

A DEWDROP AT DAWN

Wordsmith Rana is a budding writer of enormous promise and immense possibilities. His grasp of the English language is so profound and his literary sense so developed that with due encouragement and a sustained support for a while by readers, he will soon mature into a major literary figure who will be the flavour of our nation. An inspirational artist thrives on inspiration received and grows in stature in proportion to the acceptance he is blessed with among his readers. It is this writer's life's experience that he has witnessed the eclipse of many a budding poet, many a blossoming writer in the infancy of their dreams, when indifference from seasoned hands at the trade, if I may be allowed the licence to free expression as is the privilege of the poet, has put paid to the aspirations of high youth and rendered sterile what would have otherwise been the finest fruition of a fragrant dream. It is here that we must guard Wordsmith Rana from coming to calamity through our neglect of his prodigious powers for every dawn does not see the efflorescence of the edelweiss nor every eve see the fullness of the moon.

WHEN ALL ARE QUIET, I MUSE ON

All's quiet on the freedom front? If the soldiers sleep, who will defend? But the Lord never sleeps, so says the Geeta. Were He to do so, this universe and the countless others that follow in its wake, would all fall apart.

When night fell and the watchman called, "Jagte raho!" in the dead of the night, the boy Basanta would sit up in his bed, thrilled to his soul with the clarion call that would carry to his heart a message he could not then decipher but which made him restless seeking for something other, (hethaa noy, hethaa noy, aar konokhaney) not hither, not hither but thither, where he knew not. Basanta blossomed into springtime soon and followed the footsteps of Swami Vivekananda to become his youngest disciple, Swami Paramananda.

When the Master comes, he comes with his entourage. Has he come yet again? I wonder. How else may the maladies of the world be cured, how else may the inebriation of humanity be overcome and wakefulness to the urgency of the times restored?

The world is on the edge of a volcano, so said Swami Vivekananda exactly 15 years before the First World War. He had also said the the whole of Europe was like a vast military camp and unless the volatility of the political situation out there was defused by a deluge of spirituality, Europe would be up in flames. In a prophetic mood on another day the Swami had said, "The world will rise, but, oh! at what a cost! at what a cost! at what a cost!" Did the Swami foresee three cataclysmic world wars of which two have already happened and a third one is waiting in the wings, gathering potential energy before it erupts? If so, what will remain once the holocaust is over? Rocks, stones and dust? Will humanity survive the fire? Will life on earth cease completely except for microorganisms, perhaps, whence the karmic cycle will begin afresh? It is horrifying even to contemplate how humanity in folly is ushering in its destruction.

When the world goes wrong such that a higher adjustment, a deeper balancing becomes imperative, for the focal point of life has mightily shifted from its origin, then the Lord out of His infinite compassion manifests in human clay and remoulds humanity which is His manifold terrestrial form for earthly evolution, for divine sport. A wave of spirituality then floods the world, counteracting tamas with sattva, and the resolving rajas becomes creative in building up civilisation, not terminating it.

The real work of the Avatar and his apostles is at a depth and is not visible on the surface for men to see. I have used these words unconsciously and have unwittingly but duly paid my homage to the great sage, Sri Aurobindo, who had used the selfsame words when he was informed by a follower of his that some such author was writing a biography of his. Sri Aurobindo had mused, "My life has not been on the surface for men to see."

It is this depth-work, this plumbing the subliminal consciousness of humanity and re-tuning its frequencies, this re-channelising the thought currents of humankind and, so, restoring the lost links to the divine that is the purpose of the divine descent.

I am a humble devotee, perhaps with a tinge of rustic bearing in my ardent assumptions, in my hopes and aspirations about the possible advent of the Divine at a moment of crystallisation of terrestrial forces that seek a new adjustment which the inertia of the putrid past will not permit. In my myopic vision, you might argue, I cannot quite find out the fault lines that afflict society and, so, in a fit of irrational impulse, invoke the Divine to resolve issues human that are, perhaps, in your rational estimation, so very antithetical to the whole discussion. But the age-old conversation in India has been this, the interplay of the divine and the human in a world where demarcations cease and a seamless transition from one to the other pervades the whole of national life. In such a scenario to invoke the Divine to intercede in human affairs is but a natural course for one steeped in the spiritual tradition of his country. Who can in his senses deny the grand prophecy of Sri Krishna regarding the periodic decline of virtue, the rise of vice, the erosion of human values and the resurrection of the moribund society by the descent of the Divine?

Will there be a descent then of the Divine or has there already been one? If one is to go by Holy Mother Sri Sarada Devi's assertion, Sri Ramakrishna is due to appear after a hundred years, but after when? A hundred years from the date of his birth in 1836, from the date of his making this statement to whosoever he made it or from the date of his death in 1886? In all three cases the date of appearance is overdue. This view of the reincarnation of Sri Sri Thakur after 100 years is corroborated by Brahmachari Akshaychaitanya in his biography of the Master. Even Swami Vijnanananda is of the same view that Thakur will reincarnate after a century. But the ambiguity about the date persists as there is no clarity regarding the reference date of pronouncement from which date the computation must be made. There is again a second view. And this is aired by Swami Saradananda in his magnum opus on the Master, 'Sri Sri Ramakrishna Leelaprasanga' or in its translated version in English, 'Sri Ramakrishna and His Divine Play' where the author states that he has secondary evidence of Thakur having prophesied his return to earth in 200 years, but again the date of pronouncement being not known, the computation of the exact year of reincarnation is not possible. Even Swami Vivekananda may be said to have concurred on this when he affirmed before a group of intimate disciples in America one day privately that he would have to come back to the earthly plane in 200 years as part of the entourage of the Master who would then reincarnate. Thus, both these versions having prominent personalities pronouncing them, have gained equal currency and one cannot be sure as to the veracity of one or the other. Holy Mother, however, has given graphic details of the Master's whereabouts, his appearance and his manners and modes and his