Sugata Bose: THE EXTREME ENDS OF THE HUMAN SPECTACLE

Sunday, 5 July 2020

THE EXTREME ENDS OF THE HUMAN SPECTACLE

THE EXTREME ENDS OF THE HUMAN SPECTACLE 

"So long as even a dog remains famished, my only religion will be to feed it," roared Swami Vivekananda in indignation at Sadashiv Deuskar and company in 1901 at Belur Math when, after a lengthy conversation with his visitors from far-off provinces about the recent deaths from famine in India, one of his listeners lamented that they could not hear some spiritual words of wisdom from Swamiji which they had so aspired for and for which they had travelled all this distance to Calcutta.

That single statement signified Swamiji's spiritual response in so far as oppressed humanity was on this planet, especially so in his own country, groaning under the heels of oppressive colonial conditions and going down more and more into the morass of material extinction.

Winston Churchill should have heeded it. But, alas, British arrogance ! 35 million Indian lives were snuffed out by British-induced or British-mismanaged famine in 190 years of colonial rule. Of these the last 4.3 million -- Satyajit Ray says in "Ashani Sanket' ('Distant Thunder') 5 million -- were in Bengal in 1943 when catastrophe was orchestrated to precipitation at the instance of the malevolent British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill who in terms of perpetration of barbaric loss of human lives must rank alongside the most diabolical of 20th century dictators like Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong and Pol Pot, says Shashi Tharoor.

But Swamiji's days are not gone. His every word will course through the corridors of power and of common consciousness and come to fulfilment. So shall the world be forced to heed the prophet's message and so shall the world transform unto a more enlightened order en route to the divine goal which is its terrestrial endpoint of evolution. 