ARISE! AWAKE! ... 5 (Day edition, 19 July, 2025)

ARISE! AWAKE! ... 5

(Day edition, 19 July, 2025)

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Editorial

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In this age of crass commerce money and possessions have occupied centrestage and idealism has taken a backseat. This divorce of principle from practice, of idealism from enterprise, of ethics from public life and of service from work is eroding culture and proving regressive in the otherwise evolutionary scheme of life. The sine wave of life is now running downward as commerce is becoming core culture in a very coarse way. It is in these hours of mass decline of civilisation that the higher powers are activated which we term as the descent of the Divine. When righteousness declines and unrighteousness is on the rise, God descends on earth to deliver the virtuous, destroy the evildoers and to establish the ethical-spiritual order of the age, and this He does in every age. Today, we are in such an age when the vicious are reigning free and the virtuous are getting throttled everywhere, when the life of the masses is being governed by a band of unscrupulous businessmen aided by even more roguish politicians in a massive crony capitalistic nexus, when morality and ethics are at their nadir and the spirit, even of monastic orders, tainted with ill-begotten money in massive amounts, all the while being justified with convenient quotes and conditional necessity. At such an hour of dire distress when humanity finds itself trapped in the maze of materialism and cannot locate the exit, the Divine descends. We are at the threshold of such a descent as promised by Thakur Sri Ramakrishna. Let us await his arrival and welcome him with these words of his leonine protégé, the Swami Vivekananda. 🕉 

Yours in the Avatār, 

Sugata Bose