A very big 'thank you' to all of you who have thus made my mother's 86th birth anniversary one her most memorable. I gave her a detailed account of all who wished her on her birthday and she was feeling so happy to belong to all of you. Your spontaneous outpouring has overwhelmed her and is a pointer to how much each one of you love your own mother and so many miss her, too.
This element of respect and love for our elders distinguishes our Indian culture and is essentially a spiritual feature of our civilisation. The prostration we do at the feet of our elders is inherent in our culture and we live by the grace of these venerable ones through the trials and tribulations of life. When any of them is honoured, it does good not only to those that honour the one but it serves our tradition and culture well and keeps alive the flame of our ancient civilisation.
We are born of the Mother, subsist in the Mother and in the end dissolve in the Mother, such is our understanding of the philosophy of life. And the earthly mother stands as the terrestrial symbol of the Divine Mother and serves as the conduit of the Universal Mother's love for us. She is the living symbol of the Goddess and ought to be looked upon as such. But our familiarity drops that vision from our sight and even as it brings her close to us, it often secularises our conception of her. No wonder Sri Ramakrishna had said to Swami Brahmananda's father that Rakhal (Swami Brahmananda in his pre-monastic days) would learn to appreciate who his father in reality was if he spent his days in Dakshineswar with Sri Ramakrishna. The idea was that our spiritual vision must open before we truly can gauge the depth of the personalities that appear as our parents.
It is a sad feature of our modern-day living that our families are getting fragmented in a manner that is making old-age in isolation from children a dangerous proposition. The old-age home is certainly not the place where we ought to keep out parents when they become infirm and can no more contribute to our earthly advantages. Life is not a material progression and we ought not to think thus in utilitarian terms alone. After all, our parents are the givers of life to us and deserve our highest reverence, not our despicable desertion of them nor our selfish segregation of them from our lives when they are in their twilight years and seem, so unfortunately though, a burden too big to bear in our desire-laden lives. We can surely reverse this trend by altering our ideals in life, our objectives and our overall spiritual bearings. And we must do it. A system of education and living that does not foster basic spiritual values is so much recycle bin stuff and it must be relegated there where it rightfully belongs.
The thanksgiving is turning rather long and monotonous, so, I will end it here with a plea to all to be kind to our elderly people, to be loving and even worshipful towards them, for in it lies our humanity and all that we ought to cherish in life. The baby and the aged are much alike in their innocent helplessness and in their capacity to draw us to be a family close-knit even as the rishis (seers of transcendental truth) had envisaged the whole of humanity to be. Mother remains the one beacon to all of us in this dark night of the soul where we traverse through uncharted seas unto a destination that does not show through the nightly dark. On the 3rd of July we had become one family, so many of us. May we continue that way for the rest of our days is my prayer to Mother! Jai Ma!
Written by Sugata Bose
P.S. :
Sugata Bose Perhaps, one of the most best photographs of Ma that I have ever seen. You are right, Tia (Rajesh Ghosh) in your observation, and it so beautifully brings out the bond across generations. This photograph will last.
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