SHAME! SHAME! SHAME!

It is a shame that we can wake up without remembering the sacrifices of our freedom fighters, spend the day blissfully oblivious of them and retire for the night full of selfish dreams without even feeling the necessity of recalling once the faces of the martyrs to the motherland but for whom we would never have found freedom. This is the state to which we have sunk and such has been the loss of character in us that we do not much mind that our level is not much higher than the selfish brute whose life exists in mere physical survival and in the passing of the gene to its offspring. No wonder we have endured a thousand years of political slavery and moral and spiritual servitude with it, that we have lost our manhood and fail even to feel genuinely proud that we are Indians, for it is the man of strength, of character that feels pride in his heritage and not the debilitated lump of flesh that is termed man merely in biological terms.

Our morality is gone, our practice of piety a sham, our charity not worth mentioning for it is a fast vanishing trait from the Indian psychology and our character a shadow of the substance that makes for the real fibre of a man. This abysmal state of self-satisfaction in mean sensuous living disregarding the higher call of sacrifice for the nation, this self-deception that we have done enough if we have taken the name of the Lord a few times and pretended to all that we are pious, this inglorious attempt to appropriate for oneself all that is the common property of the people, all these must go if we are to reclaim our status rightfully as human beings. Right now we are a species in between the human and the animal, physically human for sure but psychologically animal. And a psychological animal with cowardice compounded to add on to the woes can hardly be called even a semblance of the moral man.

Morality and spirituality are tall terms that we hear easy everyday, especially in the wake of the modern awakening which has been much abused by devotees and detractors alike to suit their selfish ends and what is now needed is a return to roots and a building up of the receptacle that can hold stronger character-currents, conceive higher ideals beyond the utterance of pious phrases and sacred shlokas (verses), and behold the beauty in sacrificial action for the common weal above mere verbal sympathy. The entire narrative of spiritual living must be transformed and its focus shifted from subservience to an imagined incarnation of divinity to service to the real mass of humanity. No divine arbiter in human affairs is necessary anymore for it necessarily fosters superstition. Man must take charge of his own fate wholesale and the sooner he does so, the better for him. Hypocrisy of every form whose most pernicious presence is seen in passive piety must be eschewed totally and a humanity built up in the coming generations free of the fear of a punishing almighty God residing in a superior abode and determining the fate of things.

It is this degeneration of self-dignity, this grovelling before a governing God, this total loss of self-esteem that is at the heart of the cultural decline that our nation faces today. We must win back our mortgaged selves by clearing our debt to humanity and not by appeasement of an extra-cosmic tyrant whose appetite for sacrificial blood knows no limit. Better sacrifice ourselves for the betterment of humanity than for appeasement of an insatiable imaginary entity. This shift is necessary, for power divorced from responsibility inevitably degenerates and this is precisely the state of the vast mass of humanity throughout the world and even more so in a supposedly devout country like India where people trust not themselves but have ample faith in an invisible deity that daily deceives by receiving devotion in non-existence. The heart of the matter is this --- if there has to be a God, let it be understood, once and for all, that visible man and the sentience all around is that God in varying degrees of manifestation of the impersonal spiritual consciousness which is at the core of all personality.