HAIL THE QUARTER-BAKED POSERS WITH THE PRETENCE OF SCHOLARS!

HAIL THE QUARTER-BAKED POSERS WITH THE PRETENCE OF SCHOLARS!

This country has as yet a long way to go before its great men and women get their due recognition. Right now it is hype and hoopla holding sway. Genuine progress is as of now a far cry, a distant dream. Unless the race honours its great men and women in the rightful way, it will neither get direction nor arrive at its destined end which it must, though, in the long run when the greats have been duly honoured and their message heeded to. Popular culture is on now with 'quarter-baked scholars' posing as preacher perfect for a public that knows little other than how to dance to the tune of these dance-masters. The stage is now set for such pretentious practitioners of piety and policy pleasing and appeasing the public of puerile pastimes. This is the scene now of increasing GDP and decreasing culture, increasing desire and decreasing satisfaction, increasing aggrandisation and decreasing effacement. Where is there room enough for progressive thinking, progressive means and measures other than such ones of a grosser breed? So, let the greats languish and let charlatans and hypocrites take their place. Let less than mediocrity reign, that of the 'quarter-baked' scholars infertile to a fault.

Written by Sugata Bose 

Photo: Bāchchudā, a genuine intellectual with a seminal sense and a philosophical profundity that was singularly brilliant, an uncommon character of concentrated culture, a solo soul in solitary sojourn through the desert-sands of desire-stricken life that yields but its secrets to only snatch away its carriers before comprehension be complete. Above all, a devotee dipped in divine love, never quite so immersed as to find fulfilment in peace, never quite so straying as to forsake his inheritance, that of the nectarine spray of the sea of love---Ramakrishna. Ever a man floating in limpid spaces of the Divine, ever a man struggling to break through the network of Maya like a lion enmeshed and battling for freedom. Bāchchudā remains the 'song celestial' in my life which was fashioned first in philosophy by his ardent assertions, by his creative, inventive genius, and guided along the route to the endless end where perchance we shall meet again to discuss the deep divine. My salutations to my earliest mentor in the spiritual line.