WHY THIS APATHY TO READING ?

WHY THIS APATHY TO READING ?

It is disheartening to see people not reading my posts sincerely and only busying themselves with superficial commenting on the posts' appended photographs/portraits/pictures. Whither the reader? Why this shallowness of approach? Are we intellectually dead as a nation? What is the point of writing and attempting to communicate ideas to the polity when there is such a pronounced apathy to thinking? Is this a healthy sign? Or, is this the signature of the nation's impending intellectual demise? I leave you to reflect, realise and rectify stance for in it lies the well-being of the nation.

It is thought that produces works---works of art, literature, philosophy, culture in all its aspects. Reading conduces to one's intellectual nourishment which in turn induces creative thinking that is the mother of civilisation. If a polity fails in this regard---as ours is patently doing---, then it signals its decline as a civilisation. Thus is it that every great culture, flourishing at one point of time, progressively decays till it is drained out of terrestrial existence. Many an ancient civilisation, once grand and great, have met with their decline and death as the system that was produced by generations of thinking men fell into disuse owing to the absence of capable hands in handling them, creative individuals who could have carried forward the legacy of seminal ancestors unto an ever-freshening civilisational advancement. Many such ancient civilisations have thus perished but ours still stands owing to the constant replenishment of seers and sages down the corridors of time.

But only seers cannot save a civilisation. The masses need awakening. It is they who fuel civilisation with their sweat and toil, not merely physical labour, but in this day and age of proletariat rule (capitalistic democracy or the socialistic system), they must fire the social engine with creative thinking as well. To that end readers must lend their efforts and exercise their brains so that their seemingly insignificant acts in cumulative strength lend solidarity to the movement of national reconstruction and regeneration. Else, individual instances of seminal achievement will merely highlight the potentiality of the race but will not see fruition in an overall civilisational rise on account of mass indolence and apathy to thinking. May such a fate not befall our lot as a people who have thus far averted it, ours being the sole surviving ancient civilisation with a continuity of spiritual-social culture for many a millenia whose remotest antiquity lies shrouded in prehistory where the prying eyes of the modern man dares not peep into.

And yet in the dense dark of primeval times Bharatvarsha arose as a civilising force, its Rishis peeling off the face of Maya layer after layer over millenia till they came face to face with the ultimate oneness of existence underlying manifold Maya, the singularity of the Self (Atman/Brahman) holding the plurality of phenomena. Therein, from the summit of unitary spiritual realisation began the march of multifarious national life, each phase throwing up seminal spiritual and intellectual giants who were creatively followed by the thinking intelligentsia and by the unthinking masses till our Puranas had disseminated the highest transcendental message of the Vedas across the length and breadth of Aryavarta and infused into the bloodstream of the masses the fundamental pulse of the nation, its spirituality, its purity, its spirit of enquiry, its universal acceptance of all creeds and kinds, and, above all, its investigative impulse into the spiritual secrets of life. Must we lose that heritage? I ask you this question. 

Written by Sugata Bose

Photo: The sinking sun of Sanatan civilisation or the rising sun of its renaissance?