PONDER IF YOU WILL AND IF YOU HAVE THE HEART AND CHARACTER TO DO SO

PONDER IF YOU WILL AND IF YOU HAVE THE HEART AND CHARACTER TO DO SO

1. A welcome move among the Indian youth would be, ''I wish to rise to raise others." But the unfortunate part is that, more often than not, it is the reverse, which is, "I wish to rise at the expense of others, to keep others down. What care I for a society that exists only to serve my interests? My motherland lives only to nourish me. It is her duty to do so. What duty have I towards her? None whatsoever. My highest dharma is to seek self-benefit wherever opportunity affords me. Let the teeming millions that afforded me the best of nourishment, the best of education, the best of opportunity by denying themselves so, live in grinding poverty while I make hay hither or elsewhere wherever life carries me."

2. The grinding poverty of the masses cannot be removed by making cosmetic changes. What is needed is 'root and branch reform', to quote Swamiji. What Swamiji must have thus meant was not only surface alteration in the stem of society but a total transformation right from the root of its spiritual and material consciousness and in the overhauling of its decadent feudal and capitalist socioeconomic structure. So often this aspect of Swamiji's revolutionary thinking and proposed programme which failed owing to the exigencies of the times, owing to the unripeness of the age, is forgotten or deliberately suppressed and Vivekananda made into a toothless tiger munching gorgeous grass, but that is not who Swamiji was. He was not only the prophet of the modern age for the entire world but the messiah of the masses in India, born to rescue them from their pitiable plight for which none shed tears nor found means to ameliorate. Swamiji has thus to be studied in all his corrosive comprehensiveness (allusion to his definition of 'truth' in a letter to Miss Mary Hale) and not with a compromised cushion of capitalist comfort beckoning one unto social aid while refusing to address the central problems of the socioeconomic structure that ceaselessly create needless poverty through exploitation and ignorance.

3. In India we are sinking into a culture of mass mediocrity. The ordinary is being limelighted as extraordinary, the erroneous expression being hailed as work of art extraordinaire and the pedestrian performer being feted as maestro. This is, perhaps, an inevitable phase of the demographic transition from the age of aristocracy of artistic excellence to the age of industry with all its crass consumerist appendage. But culture plummeting, as if in free fall, is to be resisted if the best of heritage is to be preserved. Mere memory of past perfection in terms of relic is a sad end to its existence in lifelike terms and must not be allowed to happen, and to this end we must strive by ceaselessly toiling for perfection. Connoisseurs must not be an obsolete species for they bear in their refined judgement the standard of culture and provide the resistive base to prevent its precipitous fall. Do not, therefore, hail the mediocre as the master and the ordinary as genius. Be truthful, even brutally frank in your assessment. May truth triumph !

Written by Sugata Bose