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!