THE PURITY THAT WAS NETAJI (ESSAY)

Do you know who Netaji was? He was fiery brahmacharya, unbroken chastity, absolute fidelity to the national cause. Was he, you think, an irresponsible fool that he would give in to carnal connections, in those tumultuous days of global cataclysm, risking his entire revolutionary movement for freedom? No, no, not he, not he. He was of a sterner stuff, a purer perspective, a supernal soldier of the soul who would never compromise national interest for petty personal purpose, however exalted human relations of whatever type may seem to be in the individual eye of infatuation, but never quite sublime enough in the hero's vision to lower his zeal for liberation of the motherland. For invariably such striking of earthy roots was alien to his avowed being and he had assiduously avoided company of the fairer sex in youth when the passions are heightened and fallibility is at its vulnerable worst.

Netaji had always striven for the spiritual ideal of perfection right from his boyhood days when he was lightening-struck by the integral spiritual personality of Ramakrishna-Vivekananda. Struggling with continence in those initial days of self-awakening, Subhas Chandra had eventually eradicated lust from his body by self-admission but had found elimination of its seeds from the mind a more difficult proposition. His lifelong battle with conquest of carnality continued but that should not prompt one to rush to a hasty conclusion that he did give in to the pleasures of the senses thereof and relinquish his life's pursuit of spiritual perfection. Such a one, weak-willed, short-sighted and lacking in fundamental fidelity to traditional Hindu values and the moral bindings of the day, such a one, given to the fleeting sensations of the hour or the ephemeral dreams of familial life, as he would be should be assume the intimate relations foisted on him to be true, could not have been the Netaji we know and who the world revered, from Hitler to Hirohito, from the commoner to the Crown, and who with his towering self brought down the Empire to its knees. It is conspiracy of a heinous order to so cast calumny on a spotless soul such as he and time will sure erase this blot that has been thrust on he who liberated us.

There were many who profited then and there are many who profit to this day from aspersions cast, myths propagated, character assassinated in relation to the one who truly was the soul of India after the demise of the Swami Vivekananda who he ardently followed throughout his life, whose framed photograph he kept beside his bed and whose idealism fired his revolutionary fibre to the inmost depths of his being. To defame such a one with perfected lies is worse than blasphemy in the fanatic's eye.

And here lies the crux of the matter. Do you love Netaji? Do you also believe in his :
1. death by air-crash?
2. interned body-ash?
3. perverse paternal dash?
If you do not, I am in kinship with you. Else, we severe bonds for such culpability is alien to the truth-seeker, to the uncompromising warrior of the soul.

Jai Hind!