MY TRIBUTE TO A NEAR-NONAGENARIAN, Satyanand Bhattacharjee, FOR HIS UPRIGHT MORAL STANCE WHICH I DEEM EXEMPLARY IN AN AGE OF ABIDING DECADENCE

MY TRIBUTE TO A NEAR-NONAGENARIAN, Satyanand Bhattacharjee, FOR HIS UPRIGHT MORAL STANCE WHICH I DEEM EXEMPLARY IN AN AGE OF ABIDING DECADENCE

@Satyanand Bhattacharjee (ex-IIT Kharagpur Professor, my Facebook friend of 89 years and going strong) : A near-nonagenarian's appreciation is most valuable and most valued by this writer of incessant attempts to awaken sleeping society. That those of the younger generation are of lesser mettle is proved by their passivity in response which does not augur well for the future of our polity. Accept my reverential pranam, dear Sir of much experience, more ethical substance than younger people today can conceive of or bear. A revival of morality in both private and public life, greater decency, better discretion and higher aspiration is the imperative of the hour if our nation is to progress to the millennium of the idle imaginings of our Central leadership. 

An ignorant society does not make for Vishvaguru, nor does vain posturing before the camera to the delight of multitudes of fools, the easy prey of these political predators. Nor is the ordinary citizen/citizeness of much mettle. They have become self-indulgent men and women of no consequence, perhaps the inevitable result of demographic transition in this fake commercial age of consumer necessity induced by crafty advertising and the mass media's subtle control of public consciousness. Even spiritual organisations of erstwhile highest repute---leave aside pseudogurus and their ashramic accumulation of the copper coin---have become terribly compromised with wealth-gathering in the name of raising funds for philanthropic activity which though conducted is not commensurate with the amount of funds raised. These spiritual houses---I call them houses, after business houses, for they so resemble them in their corporatisation of activity---are more material than spiritual and they utilise public sympathy gained over earlier decades of genuine charity when their wherewithal was low, and they sell their gained goodwill for gold, a metal in emphatic terms renounced by the peerless Paramahamsa of Dakshineshwar. Indeed, 'dharmaglāni' (the decline of virtue) has become so apparent now that its symptoms have now manifested as disease proper. In these terrible times when even monk loses the contemplative bearing to self-advertisement and the seeking of crass copper, when his flattery of crooked politicians to gain grant and other facilities for conducting welfare programmes of much benefit to society, while otherwise maintaining a convenient apolitical status to avoid involvement in issues that are eating into the vitals of our society, you with your moral bearing stand out as exemplary before younger folks who have sold soul to convenience, commerce, self-interest and plain worldliness which is evident everyday in their attitude online, myself not privy to mass-contact otherwise. My salutations to your generation of receding numbers and sublime evenglow even as I gain inspiration from their association, albeit at an unbridgeable virtual distance. Stay healthy and happy, Sir, and in the God who animates man as His highest living temple. 🕉

Written by Sugata Bose