MY MOTHERLAND ... 14
This song and dance sequence must give way to kshatriya valour. Otherwise, there is no way out for our country. Rani Lakshmi Bai did not start singing in the midst of battle. She wielded her sword to overcome the enemy till she herself was overcome. Then she perished by her own hands to save her honour. Such should be our stance as well as we battle to build our country and defend our sovereignty. This capitulation to the delights of the senses, this abject submission to the low calls of carnal nature masquerading as culture, this effeminacy in exhibited colour and contour, words and images, flesh and form, notes and pitches -- all these must go and manliness manifest in virile action if we are to survive as a continuing spiritual culture spanning ten millenia that compromises not on ideals but crushes beneath its heels all forms of debasement with an equal contempt.
Why are our men here in Bengal so effeminate that tears are valued above all other virile emotions as expressive of the deeper impulses of the mind? Why are our women of an equal weakness that they cannot censure their men for exhibiting such unmanly surface emotion of such a degenerate kind that merely revels in drawing cheap sympathy from the audience? What is the substance of this hollow artistic culture devoid of purity, reserve and depth of being? Is this sensitivity to high civilisation? Is this sensibility of an exalted order to the refinements of culture? No, this is abject degeneracy of character, manifest in material terms and carefully camouflaged by the foliage of culture. Hence, the state of Bengal what it is today. However, it is very much in keeping with the tradition of Bengal handed down by creative individuals and seminal geniuses like Tagore -- to highlight the most high-profile among them -- down the last few hundred years, although, by way of fair-play and justice, it must be said that the original impulse of the grand tradition was clear of all its later corrupting accretions. And against this racial rotting stood Swami Vivekananda to rectify the straying national course of his people with his fiery personality and preaching, and we must follow him with perfect adherence to his message so that we may rid ourselves of this cancerous growth of social corruption that prevails among our people by propensity and by circumstance.
We need stronger blood today like the Marathas, the Rajputs, and the Sikhs have streaming in their systems. We must practice continence as a people to be able to appropriate the valorous martial culture of our forefathers. Better death in combat in the battlefield of life than this vegetating spectacle of a slow-poisoning self-destruction.
There comes a time in a nation's life when it has to be strong in every sphere as opposed to weakness injected into the bloodstream of the nation through debilitating music, weak literature, rampant commercial culture polluting social behaviour and an overall succumbing to the snares of sensuality. We are such a crossroad where we must choose our path of future national advancement. The urban population has been well nigh reduced to a caricature of the westerner and has lost its own moorings in national culture. Advertisement of a debasing kind, the cinematic culture, the commercialisation of everything worthwhile, crass consumerism, the corruption of relations in a breakdown of civil restraint in speech and manners, the selfish aim of self-prospering to the exclusion of any consideration for the benefit of the wider society, this total selling of the inner person to the demands of the outer, all these are proving instrumental to the plummeting of culture in a land that prides itself as having been the cradle of human civilisation.
The situation on the surface seems hopeless as the city-bred man becomes more and more a heterogeneous mixture of elements from diverse sources absorbed but not quite assimilated into the system harmonically to produce a cohesive and wholesome personality effect that will yet reflect the national characteristics unmistakably. Today's urban western-educated person is a 'curious medley of personalities', to pilfer the phrase from Vivekananda, and is an individual lost in the confusion of the data flooding his brain. What is needed is to root out these shallow foreign inductions and to be instead rooted in our indigenous culture which is natural to us. The rural situation is the silver lining in this darkening sky of western corruption affecting our polity. The villagers are still unaffected by this rampant global westernisation on account of their innocence of the mores and modes of the western world. And herein lies the hope.
Unfinished and expanding ...
Written by Sugata Bose
This song and dance sequence must give way to kshatriya valour. Otherwise, there is no way out for our country. Rani Lakshmi Bai did not start singing in the midst of battle. She wielded her sword to overcome the enemy till she herself was overcome. Then she perished by her own hands to save her honour. Such should be our stance as well as we battle to build our country and defend our sovereignty. This capitulation to the delights of the senses, this abject submission to the low calls of carnal nature masquerading as culture, this effeminacy in exhibited colour and contour, words and images, flesh and form, notes and pitches -- all these must go and manliness manifest in virile action if we are to survive as a continuing spiritual culture spanning ten millenia that compromises not on ideals but crushes beneath its heels all forms of debasement with an equal contempt.
Why are our men here in Bengal so effeminate that tears are valued above all other virile emotions as expressive of the deeper impulses of the mind? Why are our women of an equal weakness that they cannot censure their men for exhibiting such unmanly surface emotion of such a degenerate kind that merely revels in drawing cheap sympathy from the audience? What is the substance of this hollow artistic culture devoid of purity, reserve and depth of being? Is this sensitivity to high civilisation? Is this sensibility of an exalted order to the refinements of culture? No, this is abject degeneracy of character, manifest in material terms and carefully camouflaged by the foliage of culture. Hence, the state of Bengal what it is today. However, it is very much in keeping with the tradition of Bengal handed down by creative individuals and seminal geniuses like Tagore -- to highlight the most high-profile among them -- down the last few hundred years, although, by way of fair-play and justice, it must be said that the original impulse of the grand tradition was clear of all its later corrupting accretions. And against this racial rotting stood Swami Vivekananda to rectify the straying national course of his people with his fiery personality and preaching, and we must follow him with perfect adherence to his message so that we may rid ourselves of this cancerous growth of social corruption that prevails among our people by propensity and by circumstance.
We need stronger blood today like the Marathas, the Rajputs, and the Sikhs have streaming in their systems. We must practice continence as a people to be able to appropriate the valorous martial culture of our forefathers. Better death in combat in the battlefield of life than this vegetating spectacle of a slow-poisoning self-destruction.
There comes a time in a nation's life when it has to be strong in every sphere as opposed to weakness injected into the bloodstream of the nation through debilitating music, weak literature, rampant commercial culture polluting social behaviour and an overall succumbing to the snares of sensuality. We are such a crossroad where we must choose our path of future national advancement. The urban population has been well nigh reduced to a caricature of the westerner and has lost its own moorings in national culture. Advertisement of a debasing kind, the cinematic culture, the commercialisation of everything worthwhile, crass consumerism, the corruption of relations in a breakdown of civil restraint in speech and manners, the selfish aim of self-prospering to the exclusion of any consideration for the benefit of the wider society, this total selling of the inner person to the demands of the outer, all these are proving instrumental to the plummeting of culture in a land that prides itself as having been the cradle of human civilisation.
The situation on the surface seems hopeless as the city-bred man becomes more and more a heterogeneous mixture of elements from diverse sources absorbed but not quite assimilated into the system harmonically to produce a cohesive and wholesome personality effect that will yet reflect the national characteristics unmistakably. Today's urban western-educated person is a 'curious medley of personalities', to pilfer the phrase from Vivekananda, and is an individual lost in the confusion of the data flooding his brain. What is needed is to root out these shallow foreign inductions and to be instead rooted in our indigenous culture which is natural to us. The rural situation is the silver lining in this darkening sky of western corruption affecting our polity. The villagers are still unaffected by this rampant global westernisation on account of their innocence of the mores and modes of the western world. And herein lies the hope.
Unfinished and expanding ...
Written by Sugata Bose
No comments:
Post a Comment