Monday 31 July 2017

STATEMENT OFF THE SOUL ... 9

1. Death strikes at the door every moment and we are impervious to its demands. It is renunciation that takes cognisance of it and prepares to vanquish it. The rest of humanity sleeps in the senses and inevitably succumbs to the charms of life and its deathly counterpart.

2. The night shrouds the designs of the diabolical; the day reveals the shine of the Self, dispelling delusions, manifesting the light within.

3. When the nation is faced with threats dire, it is time to stand together in rank and in file to face the challenge. When peace reigns thereafter, it is meet that each of us devotes himself to self-development for the strengthening of the nation.

4. The democrat and the liberal often fail to achieve the high goals of civilisation in a world vitiated by greed, power-drunkenness and violence. The dictator, narrow in his designs and focused in his ulterior motivations, achieves within a short span what it takes liberalism much longer to attain. But the fruits of tyranny are short-lived and decay sets in the race that subscribes to absolutist reign for long. Contrarily, democracy for all its obvious faults is more enduring in its benefits and is a boon unto humanity. Civilisation is the march of humanity unto the destination of freedom and democracy with its diverse checks and balances seems the very way to achieve it.

5. When the winds of change blow, the existing order gives way to an altered circumstance in which old links are severed and fresh ones forged. The world then takes on to a new flight along an altered trajectory to pursue an ideal thus far suppressed but never obliterated quite, for it is in the very nature of evolution to ascend the peaks of fulfilment along a mountainous detour. Thus, proceeds the march of civilisation and thus advances man.

6. Let truth prevail free of fear, fancy, fantasy or fiction founded in facile imagination. May reason temper emotion and probability balance possibility! The nation needs to know the truth about Netaji, every aspect of his much-debated life, every shred that is shrouded in mystery. And the only way to go about it is to practise what Gorbachev had dubbed 'glasnost' (openness), in matters related to Netaji. Let the Governments of the world be made to release the classified files on Netaji and may individuals privy to vital information about the hero bring to light the same as well. Only through such openness can 'perestroika' (reconstruction) of our benighted nation be possible, for in the knowledge of our nation's true history we will be in line to link ourselves to our heritage in the rightful way and so become empowered to fulfil her future mission.

7. We have been blessed with a veritable galaxy of great men and women who we, at this distance in time from their mutual historical differences, ought to celebrate knowing full well that rare indeed is a nation so endowed by Providence with such a plethora of talent and genius and the supreme spirit of service and sacrifice, call it what you will.

8. Do activists determine from now on what we are going to post on Netaji on our facebook pages? Are they to be the sole arbiters in this matter? Is our freedom hostage to their whims from now on? In a democracy freedom of expression within reasonable bounds is a sine qua non and curtailment of adequate freedom is, therefore, contrary to the spirit of the Constitution of the land we inhabit. The threat to democratic discourse on Netaji is, therefore, a matter for serious cogitation and ought to engage our best minds on the decadent trend to demonise so-called adversaries to certain set beliefs held by fanatical followers of our supreme patriot. I earnestly wonder what our leader (Netaji) would have to say on this issue were it possible, hypothetically speaking, to elicit his views on the retrograde trends of recent times which have disgraced democracy yet again in this motherland of ours famed for civilised discourse.

9. If you are free of egotism, you are free indeed for nothing binds more than this false sense of self-importance, nothing causes greater restlessness and lack of spontaneous joy than this false sense of sense-identification.

10. As I burn my midnight oil, I wonder, who did Netaji in? There was so much treachery. Oh, how did he bear it all?

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