A CURIOUS QUESTION AND TWO SELF-DEPRECATING ANSWERS TO GLORIFY THE ONES WHO DESERVE GLORIFICATION

A CURIOUS QUESTION AND TWO SELF-DEPRECATING ANSWERS TO GLORIFY THE ONES WHO DESERVE GLORIFICATION 

Question. If you were born when Netaji was alive, what would you have done?

Answer 1. I would have been the first coward who would have deserved to have been shot for his cowardice.

Answer 2. I would have been just another insect [allusion to Sri Ramakrishna's 'lok na pok' (man or insect)] under the boots of the British. [No offence meant to fellow countrymen now or then.]

The questioner, intent on glorifying me, was stopped short by these radically unexpected answers and there the conversation ended. Let us be realistic and not over-estimate our powers and love for the motherland and, so, inadvertently reduce the sublime love and sacrifice of the revolutionaries for securing freedom. Many of us, certainly I, evidently fall well short of the expected standards of a standard freedom fighter, far less that of a revolutionary, to even contemplate such comparisons. Let us prove our mettle now in terms of worthwhile and selfless service to the motherland in whatever station we may be so that the sacrifices of the revolutionaries go not in vain. Instead of idle speculation as to what we might have been or done in that age of intense revolutionary activity were we then living, let us do some realistic service, selfless and sublime, to the cause of strengthening our country today. Vande Mataram!

Written by Sugata Bose 

N.B. The aforementioned answers came fast and flying to my lips without any forethought whatsoever.