It were better if people did not resort to artificial ways of talking in public with a typical affected style of theirs, a la pseudo-poetic style that smacks of a terrible falsity of the heart and a crookedness of the spirit that shows through. Naturalness is the best way to impress people if anyone is aspiring to do so. Else, it, at any rate, is the best way of communicating with others, especially, when one is addressing the audience from the rostrum.
Spontaneity is the style of the self and carries its signature mark that it leaves on the listeners. This must be understood. Any attempt to impress beyond what one deserves to with one's power of personality naturally percolating through one's words is an exercise in futility and must be given up as such.
Caricature of culture is not culture itself. It remains a poor copy of the original and jarring at that. This is the idea that Swami Vivekananda had emphatically sounded at the very beginning of his 'swadesh mantra' (national formulation) when he exhorted his countrymen to give up imitation of others.
Swamiji remains today as then a forlorn figure in a Bengal that never shies away from affectation of all sorts, especially those obtaining in the decadent pursuit of the fine arts. This must change if this race has to assert its strength and relocate itself on the national map as a people who had dared the most dastardly regime of all time and dislodged it for good from the soil of this province. This debilitation in the name of song and dance, poetry and decadent politics must be supplanted by a Vedantic virility that will lend the race a robustness worthy of its best traditions.
So, off with all sorts of weakness, my Bengali friends, and be up and awake to the clarion call Swamiji has sounded from Colombo to Almora.
Written by Sugata Bose
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