NETAJI AND SWAMIJI ... 4

In his sixteenth year he encountered Vivekananda which transformed his entire personality and set it along the path of service and renunciation. Yogic experiments followed and so did excursions to holy places in search of a spiritual preceptor who could guide him in his spiritual progress. The young Subhas was not alone in this quest but had formed a band of like-minded spiritual seekers with whom he spent his time, now in practising spiritual disciplines, now again in visiting villages where they would render service to the locals, and yet again in leaving home and hearth on pilgrimage to near and distant sites where they would interact with holy men of diverse types. All this meant defiance of familial authority and Subhas became a law unto himself in this phase of his life, taking especial pleasure in doing what he felt was spiritually right irrespective of his parents' directions or desires spelt out to him. His studies suffered from want of attention and this caused a fair bit of consternation among his teachers at school who expected him to perform to his potential instead of wasting away his final year before the Matriculation Examinations chasing wild geese as they would have understood his spiritual pursuit then. His parents were also disturbed at the turn of events as Subhas was swept along by the current of his spiritual propensities in a direction totally unfamiliar to he, himself, as to all who had thus far known him. Vivekananda loomed large in his horizons and beckoned him unto a wider world of self-abnegation where the individual self had to be sacrificed for the common weal as one strode along the path of spiritual perfection.

However, all these things did not quite happen all at once or in a ready sequential order but they were all being resolved in the complex mind of this acutely sensitive soul that Subhas was with considerable tension and torment in its wake as its inevitable price that had to be paid. Conflicting theories, contrasting conditions between the outer and the inner worlds, ceaseless battle with the psychological propensities to subdue the carnal currents, all these and the evolving mind's increasing adjustments to the treachery of the times when the country at large was in its death-throes under the brutal British colonial regime, rendered the young Subhas' mind a veritable war-zone where the forces physical and psychological were being measured out and set and reset till the resolution was complete and the personality cast in a definite mould for its emergence in the field of adult life.

Despite all his preoccupation with his spiritual pursuit though, Subhas triumphed in the Matriculation Examinations almost with effortless ease to place second in the University. His parents pleased after all, he was dispatched to Calcutta for furtherance of his academic career and to cure him of his spiritual maladies.