VANDE MATARAM ... 6

VANDE MATARAM ... 6

My countrymen, read more. In it lies the country's resurrection. A greater degree of activation of the national mind will conduce to our faster progress and along the right lines. Right now ignorance abounds everywhere and it is pulling us down as a civilisation. Study more, extensively as well as intensively.

The national mind must be deepened. Right now shallowness and superficiality masquerade as culture and depth is an alien entity. This is ever the seed of the eventual destruction of a civilisation.

'Men, men, these are wanted. Everything else will be ready.' -- these were the words of Swamiji. What did he mean by them? He meant that man is at the centre of human civilisation. It is the civilisation of man, it is built by man, is nourished by man and it is geared towards the best and the fastest evolution of man as well, his evolutionary end lying in his attainment of freedom from the shackles of the senses, from the transmigratory cycle of birth, life, death and rebirth, seemingly endlessly.

There are problems galore in the world. Our nation is no exception to this general state of things. There are a myriad problems besetting our country and we need to find solutions to them.

It is in the nature of things that there will be problems but it is also true that every problem carries in its womb its solution. The solution arrived at, one finds another problem arising out of it. This is the dialectical development, Hegel's triad of thesis, antithesis and synthesis in an unending progressive cyclical pattern leading to higher and higher development of human society. Of course, this does not mean that there will be a seamless, continuous movement towards higher evolution. No, not so at all. There will be periods of retrogression as well when humanity will seem to be utterly lost but such periodic phases will merely be interludes punctuating the overall general progression, much like an ascent along a mountainous detour. However, even appreciation of such abstruse philosophy needs a strong academic culture in the country in whose absence it will sink into crude errors whence recovery may well-nigh be impossible. That it has happened already to us several times in the past, history bears ample testimony to. Therefore, we must avert such a future fate all over again. Our independence has been hard-won and we must preserve it with all our might. Hence, the spread of knowledge is important but the depth-cultivation of culture is vital.

Why I stress this element of upgrading education in every sense in our country and also proliferating it is because there has of late been its terrible downgradation. The cultural scenario is bleak as crony capitalism has joined hands with religious revivalism of ignoramuses which is spreading its vermin through and through the body politic of India,  corrupting the minds of the youth with fantastic ideas of a pseudoglorious cultural revival in line with our age-old spiritual civilisation. But ignoramuses are ignoramuses and they fail to achieve any worthwhile national goals of progress or prosperity or the welfare of the masses. Politics and business have as usual formed an unholy alliance and both practised commerce and propagated culture have become corrosive for the country with impending peril staring stark at us. This has to be averted and how best to do it but build up a resistive force in the polity through massive education and quality education at that.

The problem has been diagnosed, its solution determined but how will the execution take place? Will the government help? Will it be an active participant in the process of arresting this decadent trend? Will it be true to the promises it made to the people who elected it to power? None whatsoever. Governments in today's democracies are hands-in-glove with the capitalists who fund them to power during elections and the latter do not forget to extract their pound of flesh when laws are passed and policies made. As Einstein in a lecture in 1949 had said rightly that the capitalist class in a democracy comes in between the legislature and the polity and controls governmental policy. How insightful was the scientist's statement for this is exactly what happens in reality everywhere and is rampant today with the development of capitalism round the world.

So, crony capitalism has to countered and that means bringing about such a revolutionary change in the socioeconomic system as only enlightened socialism can. But can it? And the very attempt to bring it into being would mean a second independence movement that we must fight as Bhagat Singh had rightly conjectured following his Marxist study should our freedom movement against the British be a bourgeois revolution. Here (in the instance of a socialist revolution) Einstein does seem troubled by the thought of power passing into the hands of a handful of leaders forming an oligarchy in the name of socialism and a bureaucratic machinery aiding them to crush the aspirations of the people. The enlightenment that is needed in men to bring about a just order of social existence is a far cry at the present state of human evolution, Einstein reckoned, when barbarism yet rules humanity in the main with competition, fraud, vice and violence ruling the roost, taking the cue from mankind's savage past for several millions of years before the light of civilisation broke in a few millenia ago, and, to supplement his words with mine, in much of Europe only a few centuries ago.

The ethical question has to be solved both in theoretical terms and in its practical connotation. It is after all a biological question, a genetic one that has to tackled through progressive education but the path is difficult even as the razor's edge is, to quote the Kathopanishad, and difficult of access. But the sunlit summit beckons even as humanity suffers in its trudge through the dark night of ignorance along the rough-hewn path of progress and the ascent, however arduous, must be made. The rope of the climb is education.

Written by Sugata Bose