IN RESPONSE TO A READER'S COMMENT IN REGARD TO THE APATHY OF ONLINERS TO READING FACEBOOK POSTS OF CONSEQUENCE WITH ANY DEGREE OF SERIOUSNESS OR DUE ENGAGEMENT

IN RESPONSE TO A READER'S COMMENT IN REGARD TO THE APATHY OF ONLINERS TO READING FACEBOOK POSTS OF CONSEQUENCE WITH ANY DEGREE OF SERIOUSNESS OR DUE ENGAGEMENT 

It is sad to see the sinking intellectual state of a rising nation. The average onliner seems just the variety you (Deep Mukherjee) have succinctly stated---absorbed in petty, superficial self-indulgence. The more eminent ones are busy in self-propagation. A third kind is better than the worst and worse than the best but utterly impatient to read---as you have rightly stated---and are given to silly emoji-giving or eulogising the pictures appending the posts which they deem it to be revering the great ones therein held in optical frame. None of these are thinkers, in the absence of which the nation is sinking to an abysmally low intellectual level which augurs not well for its future prospects.

Swamiji had in his San Francisco lecture 'Is Vedanta the Future Religion?' said, "Let men be thinkers." Alas, his exhortation has fallen on deaf ears which is why Mark Antony was made by the Bard of Avon to exhort, "Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears." Alas, ears they have, our countrymen, and yet they do not have! 

Swamiji had died a frustrated man in worldly terms, a voice in the wilderness whose echoes some yet hear and respond to, but the vast majority of educated fools and learned nincompoops busy bloating about self-accomplishment, or those basking in ancestral glory who are intent on engaging people's attention to such hoary inheritance of little consequence, though, in terms of personal attainment, or at least of not much significance to the polity at large whose sinking fortunes do not seem to quicken a sufficient response in them in so far as is apparent from their casual and convenient commenting, do not care for the seminal sage beyond such insincere, cowardly posturing.

This, alas, is the fate of our rotting polity whose nerves and neurons are but, hopefully speaking, beginning to thrill to the clarion call of the monk from the Madras Presidency who had thundered in such utterly loving tone, "My India, arise!"

Shall India arise? If she does---which she must and which she will---she lives. Else, she dies and dies with it the world of men, for the brutes remaining will make a forest, not a civilised human society of whatever hue anymore. 🕉

Written by Sugata Bose