CHICAGO -- A MOMENT CRYSTALLISED IN TIME
To denigrate Vivekananda may be the fashion of liberals intensely devoted to the flesh and culpable to pecuniary susceptibility when it comes to advancing the cause of fanatical faiths thrust on us through invasion but can in no way diminish the splendour of the soul that Vivekananda was.
The leonine Swami remains the iconic figure for all that is best in the Indian tradition and for all that is best in the broader culture of humanity as well. He was the culmination of the spiritual development of the ages and its climactic utterance as well. There was nothing mean or small about the Swami as he represented the best strands of the human endeavour in his celebrated Chicago addresses that became a moment crystallised in time. The East and the West, the past and the present, science and religion, the secular and the sacred, all these diverse elements, contrarily disposed for long, fused in his being into the integrated vision of the Vedanta which he preached across the length and breadth of vast America and Europe before thundering his motherland with the clarion call for freedom.
11 September, 1893 became the contact point in time, the moment of fusion when history took a turnaround and altered course for good. It will take centuries for the real significance of this day to dawn on all those who are inebriated by Maya and, in their altered state of understanding, take up cudgels against the Swami but for whom the day would have been darker and night, a veritable Erebus on Earth.
Written by Sugata Bose
To denigrate Vivekananda may be the fashion of liberals intensely devoted to the flesh and culpable to pecuniary susceptibility when it comes to advancing the cause of fanatical faiths thrust on us through invasion but can in no way diminish the splendour of the soul that Vivekananda was.
The leonine Swami remains the iconic figure for all that is best in the Indian tradition and for all that is best in the broader culture of humanity as well. He was the culmination of the spiritual development of the ages and its climactic utterance as well. There was nothing mean or small about the Swami as he represented the best strands of the human endeavour in his celebrated Chicago addresses that became a moment crystallised in time. The East and the West, the past and the present, science and religion, the secular and the sacred, all these diverse elements, contrarily disposed for long, fused in his being into the integrated vision of the Vedanta which he preached across the length and breadth of vast America and Europe before thundering his motherland with the clarion call for freedom.
11 September, 1893 became the contact point in time, the moment of fusion when history took a turnaround and altered course for good. It will take centuries for the real significance of this day to dawn on all those who are inebriated by Maya and, in their altered state of understanding, take up cudgels against the Swami but for whom the day would have been darker and night, a veritable Erebus on Earth.
Written by Sugata Bose
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