VIVEKANANDA AS HE WAS IN PERSON AND NOT AS HE IS PROJECTED

VIVEKANANDA AS HE WAS IN PERSON AND NOT AS HE IS PROJECTED

What we need is revolutionary fire, not the one of Bolsheviks but that of Vivekananda as ignited in the hearts of the Bengal revolutionaries. Give up Gandhi-Nehru et al of weak apology before the British masters to grant us freedom or even as Gandhi pretended to secure it for us through weak, debilitating nonviolence befitting effeminates or as Tagore exhorted us through his manifold verses or even as Sri Aurobindo in his later years inspired many to pursue human liberation from bondage to material inconscience, and accept wholeheartedly the mighty utterance of the Master, the leonine prophet-soul, the harbinger of India's hopes, the organ-voice of the muted millions, the pulsating personification of patriotism, Vivekananda. Do not insult the Swami by following his passive followers but honour him by becoming active protagonists of his cause by yourself becoming a living flame of freedom in every sense. No pandering to the vanities of the senses, no demeaning his cause of total transformation, of wholesale subjugation of the senses for the higher cause of nation-building, but a virile plunging in to the emancipation of the masses through living action, through bleeding for the motherland, through self-immolation at her altar. Fire ! Fire ! This is the watchword. Vivekananda was a forest in conflagration, a volcano erupting to metamorphose humanity unto a higher order of terrestrial existence where the  feet are firmly planted on the earth and the head soars high into the heavens, not a caricature of human independence devoid of self-respect, an abasement not befitting a free man who has to compromise with his colonial consequence and the corrupt forces of the Crown that precipitated it. If such a sense of supreme dedication to the cause of Vivekananda is lacking in his passive followers, let us rise to the occasion and embrace his ideals wholesale, without distortion or dilution or in compliance with the powers that be. Let us be volcanic sparks of the original yet erupting from the Vivekananda Volcano. Let us not fail the Swami for all he did for us and all he expected us to fulfil. We want the liberation of India, undivided and whole, from the shackles of neocolonial bondage as yet in full force now. Justice for all, liberation for all, the spiritual rise of the motherland, undivided and whole, and the spiritual transformation of humanity en masse.

Written by Sugata Bose