Our national discourse is so fractured between the apologists to Britain and the real revolutionaries that with the passage of over 70 years since independence, the fire to live and die for the motherland does not inspire many anymore. The younger generations seem to be bereft of the nationalistic fervour that had prompted the youth of the pre-independence days to take up arms against the British and free the motherland from foreign yoke. They are content to lead the good life themselves while the millions suffer deprived of the basic necessities of life. When they attempt to lead us on to the path of wisdom they ought to take stock of their own credentials before hazarding opinion.
Character which is the bedrock of all social change and all national transformation must be first built on the secure foundation of renunciation of the ephemeral pleasures of life. It is only then that humility born out of wisdom will show them the path to achieving real good for themselves and the nation. Till then they ought to work on their own self-evolution and keep away from posing to be omniscient repositories of the truth about our great revolutionaries like Netaji and restrain themselves from making hazardous and laughable comments about the so-called personal lives of these redoubtable ones without furnishing an iota of evidence to back up their claims.
The problem is that in these days of quick attention-seeking and thoughtless repartee, the seeker of truth is rare and a cursory course in any historical episode makes one in utter ignorance of the real facts of a case, nonetheless, in self-estimation and in peer appreciation, the apostle of truth and knowledge about the stated case. This is, of course, our national disease, this superficiality about everything and the consequent exhibition of ignorance in articulate terms.
One more thing. It is indeed regrettable that in the absence of knowledge of the true facts of the freedom struggle, thanks to successive governments that have derived benefit out of such sacrilege, the youth are devoid of the fire in their belly that would have made them manifest a bit more of virility and made the prospects of our national life that much better. But, alas, that is not to be in this age of gross and coarse culture where the delights of the senses have blinded them to the higher aspiration of the spirit founded on renunciation and sacrifice. Governed thus by the more mundane elements of nature, they naturally find it difficult to comprehend the glory of continence and can unhesitatingly commit even a personality extraordinaire like Netaji to carnal connections liking the same to soft romantic dalliance so very natural to fallible man.
So far as feeling for the nation in blood-boiling terms, in great national pride and in the sense of belonging to the motherland, experiencing her pain in one's very nerve-centre and exhilarating in her attainments, those days when such virile sons and daughters were born who donned the colours of her revolutionary march to freedom are gone, blown into the wilderness of a remote past with which these novices of today have no bearing or kinship. Yet, they reserve for themselves the audacity to preach words of wisdom to us who have bled in every fibre of our being for the well-being of our only mother, our beloved motherland. Suffice unto the day is the evil thereof and it may be redressed only by rewriting the entire narrative of the freedom struggle for men of the morrow to know that we did not win our freedom by spinning yarn but by the blood and toil of our revolutionaries and their deathless defiance in the teeth of terrible tyranny that drove the enemy out of our own terrain. Many a feather will be ruffled by such disclosure, so a marooned nation says, "Let the sleeping dogs sleep while we ruminate how the Mahatma walked us, nay, cake-walked us to freedom." Jai Hind!
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