THE HATE IN THE MINDS OF THE IGNORANT

THE HATE IN THE MINDS OF THE IGNORANT

The amount of Nehru-hate that is there in the socio-political environment today is in direct proportion to the massive ignorance that permeates the minds of these haters. Would it were that they'd be more literate to understand issues better, more scientifically and with more reasonable and truly discerning eyes that allow for critical appreciation and appraisal of the personality and attainments of a seminal national leader of historic heights !

What a sad state of mass ignorance we witness today when people criticise Marx and Lenin without ever having read them, when men vituperate against other religions without bothering ever to read their sacred texts and when people glorify their own religion without ever having cared to have gone through the pages of their scriptures !

It is mass culture of a lowly kind that is afflicting the middle class of erstwhile refined culture and it is the degenerate middle class that is showing the masses 'the way of all flesh' wittingly or unwittingly. To be well-informed about the subject one chooses to subject to coarse denunciation is no more deemed necessary. One may vilify as one pleases and there will be hundreds of like-minded fools who will join the bandwagon to add fuel to the foul fire thus lit up.

This is a regrettable state of affairs and is in no way the consequence of a reaction to colonialism or Islamic conquest or even domination by the Congress Party but is plainly the manifestation of petty people gaining the platform to utter gibberish, which is fair in one sense provided one does not give too much importance to them and does not get carried away by their vile vituperations. But when it becomes the norm rather than the exception and from leader to proletariat all are being led by its sway where disrespect of great men, irreverence of seminal personalities and open reviling of their life and deeds become fodder for the public, there we have a case for serious concern. Then the perceptive observer begins to reflect, "Whither are we headed?''

What then remains the solution? Why? The dissemination of knowledge to dispel ignorance. The rest will take care of itself for truth makes its own way through once we have unlocked it from secret chests.

Written by Sugata Bose