DECLASSIFY NETAJI FILES 2

69 years have rolled by since the mysterious disappearance of Netaji and even today the Government of India is apprehensive about the repercussions it will have to face from the people of India if it declassifies the 130 odd Netaji files in its custody and 64 more such files in the custody of the Government of West Bengal. The Russian KGB files on Netaji are classified as well and  so are all such files on the hero in Great Britain, China and Japan. What is the real reason behind such secrecy? Did Netaji then not die in the reported air-crash at Taihoku Airport on the 18th of August as has been consistently maintained by the Government of India? Was the air-crash report an elaborate hoax to help Netaji escape to a safe destination once the INA had surrendered to the British at the end of World War 2? Did the men in political power in India then gain anything from such a disappearance of Netaji from the national scene and did they thereafter connive with the powers that be to keep Netaji away from India for good? After all, Netaji’s return to India post-independence, in the hypothetical case of his survival till and beyond 15 August, 1947, might have spelled the political doom of many a shrewd contriver in the then Congress Party including its top leadership. So, did anyone within the hierarchy of the ruling party then play foul with Netaji and, with the help of foreign powers such as the erstwhile Soviet Union, prevent his return to his Motherland to take his rightful place at the helm of national affairs? If so, who? Where did Netaji go after 18 August, 1945 for we all know that there had been no air-crash on or within a few days of 18 August, 1945 at Taihoku Airport nor is there any crematorium report to validate the claim of Colonel Habibur Rahman and company that Netaji had succumbed to third-degree burn injuries subsequent to the crash and had been hurriedly cremated there in Taihoku, and this we know on the basis of the Government of India instituted Mukherjee Commission investigating into the Netaji disappearance? The Mukherjee Commission has categorically rejected the Air-Crash Theory and has thrown the doors of investigative research into the disappearance case wide open for serious students of history and political thinking to come up with plausible alternative theories aided especially as they today are by the Right to Information Act which allows them to be privy to many an erstwhile inaccessible State document. But here the researchers are facing the stumbling block of the Netaji Files being held as classified by the Government of India and so long as this impasse continues there is absolutely no chance of the truth to surface. The BJP Government is likely to be more helpful in unearthing the truth as opposed to the last Congress Government which rather unceremoniously had rejected the Mukherjee Commission Report without citing any sufficient reason for such summary dismissal and, therefore, it is being urged that all those who admire, love and honour Netaji should today join hands to press on the demand for declassification of all Netaji files so that truth may at last prevail as to what happened to our missing hero. After all, he was truly the liberator of India from British subjugation as Clement Attlee, the Labour Party British Prime Minister who had presided over the Transfer of Power leading to Independence, had later confided to a legal luminary in India. Attlee had said that it was Bose’s INA offensive that had started a train of revolts among the armed forces serving the British in India that made British rule untenable beyond August 1947 and the British quit in a hurry. They found Gandhian non-violence much easier to negotiate but the nation-wide repercussion of Bose’s armed struggle impossible to contain for the very armed forces they had historically used to suppress the Indian freedom struggle had now turned on them. History ought to be re-written in India whereby Netaji and his INA’s epic struggle to successfully liberate India will be given its due place and rightful honour. And for all this the Netaji Files must be immediately declassified so that truth may shine on our country and shed its lustre for the progress of the Motherland. Jai Hind!

DECLASSIFY NETAJI FILES 1

The Mukherjee Commission has categorically rejected the Air-crash Theory of Netaji’s death, yet the official version of the Government of India which, incidentally, rejected the findings of the said Commission on unreasonable dubious grounds, continues to be that Netaji had died of third-degree burns suffered in the plane crash at Taihoku Airport. This is a dubious claim, unsubstantiated by documentary evidence and one that stands nullified by the findings of the Mukherjee Commision. The Commission Report says that on the fateful day of 18 August, 1945 there had been no air-crash at Taihoku Airport, neither is there any record of the cremation of Netaji  at the local crematorium. On what grounds then does the Government of India keep on spreading the myth of Netai’s air-crash death when all evidence points to the contrary? Equally shameful is the role played by certain historians in attempting to perpetuate the myth but theirs is an exercise in futility for Netaji’s immense popularity will have eventually put paid to their malicious designs and established the truth, once and for all, the day the Netaji Secret Files are declassified by the Government of India followed by a like declassification by the Governments of other countries such as Russia, Japan and England. The oft-stated reasons for debarring the files from public scrutiny, that of possible law and order unrest in the country and damage to relations with friendly countries, are untenable for a person dead in Governmental view since 1945, unless of course there are sinister motives hidden beneath the cover of the ‘corpse’ and the forebodings of a reprisal subject to a ‘resurrection’ of the repressed hero.

If even today we do not raise our voice in unison to uncover this most malevolent murder of truth in the name of ‘national interest’, we lay ourselves culpable to being dubbed a generation of spineless acceptors of falsehoods by posterity, and therefore, it is meet that we muster force to deliver our Grand Deliverer from the shadow of oblivion to his rightful place among the leaders of mankind. We must by conjoined effort prevail upon the current Government at the Centre to forthwith declassify all files related to Netaji that the mystery surrounding his disappearance on the 18th of August, 1945 may be dispelled once and for all. India needs Netaji today more than ever before to shine upon her people as the beacon that will guide her through the turbulence of the times. Jai Hind!

THE MYSTERY THAT IS THE MASTER

Who Sri Ramakrishna was is impossible to determine. I am of the opinion, and it is entirely my personal observation, that even ‘The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna’ cannot quite reveal the true depth of the personality of the Master for it seems that the written word invariably deflects from the truth, bound as it is in the limitation of the literary form. ‘The Divine Play of Sri Ramakrishna’ offers another clue to the mystery that is the Master but fails to plumb the fathomless depth of his personality for the word ever falls short of the Word that has become flesh. While ‘The Gospel...’ articulates in dramatic style the words of the Master, albeit, slightly polished for propriety’s sake, it, therefore, necessarily suffers from the defect of the ‘drama’ in not allowing enough time lapse for the long pauses which used to occur between phases of the verbal torrents of the Master. It is stylistically bound to the dramatic form and is, therefore, an incessant outflow of the Master’s words which gives the impression to the reader that the Master was constantly in the mode of speech quite contrary, though, to the actual state of things as recorded by Mohendranath Datta in his ‘Sri Sri Ramakrishner Anudhyan’ where he beautifully brings out the long pauses between the articulations of the Master and the rapt silence that enveloped the atmosphere around him, transporting his listeners to an ethereal world, quite beyond the senses, a world of subtle ideas and conceptions, a realm of consciousness quite beyond the humdrum reality of everyday life, a world so different that the author admits his inability to clearly express it in words.

Other versions of the Master’s life and words abound, those of Ram Chandra Datta (refer, ‘Sri Sri Ramakrishner Jeevanbrittanta’), Girish Chandra Sen, Suresh Chandra Datta, Swami Brahmananda, Swami Vivekananda (refer,‘My Master’) and Akshay Kumar Sen (refer, ‘Sri Sri Ramakrishna Punthi’), but all these succeed merely in giving partial or self-coloured representations of the Master’s personality. It seems that the Master was so wide a being and with such profundity of personality that anyone, however great, and this includes the mighty Vivekananda as well, could at best present only a fractional view of his great being and the perceptive reader would have to form his image of the Master by resolving all these different biographical impressions in his meditations to arrive at a totality of personal understanding of the Master. Such an impression would, however, again fall short of the real magnitude of the Master’s being but, then, what can be done about it? Can the infinite ever be apprehended by finite means, that of the material mind of mortal man? That is an impossibility. So, where does it all boil down to eventually? Back to ‘The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna’ and ‘The Divine Play of Sri Ramakrishna’ for hints and clues to the unravelling of this marvellous mystery, the Master. Let us be original and don our spiritual sleuth-selves as we follow the terrestrial trail of the Master in finally discovering him our way. May the Master himself bless us with this revelation!       

THE FROG AND THE NIGHTINGALE

The poem ‘The Frog and the Nightingale’ has a layered text with a deep social significance running through the surface narrative as an underlying current. The poet makes a social comment in this poem about the evil of crass commercialization of life by unscrupulous and crafty businessmen and the plummeting of culture, often its very death, with it.

The nightingale represents a sublime feature of the natural world, rhapsodic in its rendition of soulful music which enthrals one and all. The frog represents the other end of the spectrum, coarse and gross, gluttonous and pitiless in its material dealings, an exploiter of its fellow beings and a ruthless mercenary.

The scene is set in the poem, the stage the sumac in Bingle Bog, a marshy forest area. The nightingale, the epitome of culture, is perched high on the sumac tree while the frog with all its lowly crookedness of spirit is located in the swampy base of the sumac tree. There is a critical significance in the difference in altitude of the habitat of the two creatures, symbolic of their cultural status in life. However, craftiness and cunning find their dubious ways of clever communication and so did the frog with the nightingale. Initially entranced by the bird’s rapturous melody, the frog hit upon a plan to exploit the situation to the hilt. He quickly perceived the prospects of making quick money by selling the nightingale’s talent to all and sundry in the forest. For this he had to manipulate the bird and control her to suit his sinister ends. He posed to be a connoisseur of music, nay, even pretended to be a musical maestro and by deft dealing manipulated means to become the musical master of the nightingale.

Thus began a tormenting relation between the teacher and the taught with the gifted pupil being made to sing night and day to enthral the forest audience and thereafter relentlessly hone up her skills with the view to increasing the gate receipts. Though initially the nightingale managed to mellifluously keep up to the rigorous schedule set by the frog, it gradually began to tell on her physical and psychological health. The bird grew pale and tired and morose, lost her buoyancy of being, and carried on singing insipidly with no trace of inspiration or joy but with the monotony of the rigorous routine which neither captivated the audience as before nor pulled them in to hear her anymore as the nights rolled on inexorably towards the impending doom of the hapless soul. She was now singing under compulsion, out of fear of her malicious mentor, till she could carry on no more and perished in the process.

The frog, foul even in its terrible folly and unrepentant, nay, even insensitive to the death of the beautiful bird for which he was solely responsible, hypocritically pronounced the age-old adage that one must be true to one’s own identity and must resist being influenced by others for the worse. Thereafter, he went on blaring away with his grotesque mode of music, damning the ears of all who came within its pernicious range. He reigned supreme in the Bog with his version of subverted culture coursing out of his coarse self.

This is the narrative of the poem and how true it is to the narrative of the wide world around us where capitalist gluttony ruins prospective culture and the very soul of things, sublime and serene, benign and blissful. How many a frog with coarse culture is the cause of the ruination of how many a nightingale of lilting melody, ethereal and elevated, the high watermark of civilization. How often do we see civilization subverted by brute force of an inferior order and culture plummeting thereby to its nadir. This is the sad state of the world today in its third epoch, the Capitalist Age, when the almighty dollar rules and the human soul is held as sacrifice in this vast ceremonial reigning in the world. Nightingales are scarce and the melody of the soul a vanishing quality as crass commercialization controls the destiny of the world, driving out the least vestige of humanity from the spectacle that is life. Nightingales perish, their art vanishes from the face of the Earth and the frogs fill the air with their cacophony and babble. What a woeful world!

The poet ruefully has spent many a line as a tribute to a vanishing tribe, the supremely talented, and as sarcasm against the emergent mass of mercenaries masquerading as the protagonists of culture. 

CULTURAL FREE-FALL OR A RISE THEREOF?

The cultural decline consequent on the proliferation of education among the masses is a proof of the Law of Conservation of energy as applied to the human species. A gain in cross-sectional area leads to a loss of depth for the same mass of fluid in a containing vessel. Likewise, education of the masses has necessarily lowered its standard and with it there has been a steep decline in the cultural level of the world. This, by no means, is an attempt on my part to demean the value of mass education or to make an oblique reference to its negative impact on society for I sincerely advocate a 100% literacy for all and I wish to see that the masses reap the benefits of education and thereby become worthwhile citizens and enjoy life to its fullest as opposed to their enduring an ignorance-ridden wretched existence called life, but is rather a statement of fact founded on a perception born out of my analysis of Swami Vivekananda’s utterance that culture decays with the rise of the Shudras (the proletariat). The problem, therefore, is to overcome this cultural decline by the adoption of effective measures but is it possible? Is it something intrinsic, a feature built into the fabric of human nature that cannot be averted for it is in line with natural law, or is it alterable, re-fashionable by human hand, modifiable by method and means that man may devise? Swamiji was not so hopeful that this collective cultural decay could be arrested, yet we must strive to make adjustments to this growing downward trend in matters massive in human society.

The problem is that the disease is so widespread and has so penetrated the consciousness of humanity in every phase that it has become a ‘natural’ for most and few are even aware of its symptoms. If anybody attempts to even point out this pernicious presence in popular culture today, he is dubbed as being over-puritanical and brushed aside, for such is the fallen state of things. And, why alone popular culture? Even the representatives of culture classic have sadly strayed from the standards of old and have reduced or are still reducing time-honoured traditions of excellence to levels of mass mediocrity. Pertinent here is the way Hindustani classical music is being taught in schools, reputed and repugnant for their horrendous caricature of Raag music. No less offence is borne out by the popular artistes who have made a sham of Tagore’s songs by their perverse presentation of these priceless pearls when performance is punctuated by pecuniary pressures. And worst of all, when untrained novices, untalented and utterly deficient in musicality, by dint of position in an organizational hierarchy run by equally mediocre material, regularly mar cultural programmes by their messed-up mediocrity, what may one do to redress the issue when the rot has entered deep into the citadels of those that were to protect and preserve culture? Who will understand a Vivekananda as he laments in the wilderness of genius and the domain beyond? Who will give shape to his dreams of reshaping the human condition along the lines of pristine culture, pure and perfect, sublime and subtle? Where are the men who will even understand the true import of the Swami’s renascent message, much less giving life to it?

Leaders of the masses, secular and spiritual, take heed. It is you who are divested of all brilliance. Yet, it is you who are masquerading as mighty torch-bearers of culture when in a former age you would not have stood the chance of an audience with the connoisseur for all that you presently present. Mediocrity runs deep in you who are drunk with the mandate of the masses and who may merely measure out the monotony of method bereft of the flights of fantasy, of inspirational delight, of originality, of perfection that peaks in the mind of man and doth not parley with the rabblement for sustenance or support. Men of genius have become a rarity indeed in a world increasingly peopled by pretenders to perfection. And these are our cultural ambassadors, what a shame! One wonders what may be the eventual outcome of all this as everything in the cultural field careers downward. Will there be a free fall after all? Or will an asymptote arrive in due course of time to brighten up the scene? Only time will tell. Till then let us labour to retrieve the golden days of yore when an Altamira cave painting of a charging bison put to shame the Da Vincis and the Michelangelos of the Renaissance, what to speak of the modern destitute masquerading as masters of the trade! Let even a minority stand up to the truth sounding in the soul of man and we shall yet work up a revolution, for such is the promise of the times despite the fall, such the call of the wild, the advancing tide beckoning us on to the shore of our awakened selves, the mountainous detour reaching us to the sunlit summit of our realization.             

A FULLY LITERATE INDIA WE WANT

The literacy level in India is abysmally low (74%) for a country that aspires to be a leader in world affairs and needs to be upgraded with immediate effect for the country’s overall good. All the developed countries of Europe and U.S.A. have a literacy level of 99% and the result is but apparent, their enviable economic development. Even China has a 95% literacy level which has careered it on to becoming the second largest economy in the world. India most urgently needs to address this issue and with rapid strides arrive at 100% literacy level if she is to overcome her manifold problems of socio-economic development.

More than a century ago, Swami Vivekananda realized the importance of education as the effective tool for India’s development and even before him the significance of education was understood in its full sweep by Raja Rammohan Roy. Thereafter, Vidyasagar, the Brahmo leaders such as Keshab Chandra Sen, the Arya Samaj founder Swami Dayananda Saraswati, Sister Nivedita, Rabindranath Tagore, Sir Ashutosh Mukherjee, Ramakrishna Mission, Tata Sons’ Trust and a host of other foundations and, of course, the Government of India and the States have all made significant contributions to spread education in India and thanks to their untiring efforts today we have a solid base of academic institutions all over India which is the nucleus of India’s wonderful developmental programme. But we may not rest on laurels while other nations go past us in many a field on the basis of a higher literacy rate. Time it is therefore to set our records straight and go full-swing to educate each and every child of India, nay, even more, each and every living Indian. Come, join the movement for 100% literacy for our Motherland.   

QUAKE IN PERSPECTIVE, NEPAL, 2O15

As the ground under Nepal and Northern India shakes with catastrophic consequences, one cannot help reflecting tragically on the lines composed by Swami Vivekananda in 1898 in Kashmir in his now famous poem ‘Kali The Mother’:

Come, Mother, come!

For Terror is Thy name,

Death is in Thy breath,

And every shaking step

Destroys a world for e’er.

As a bereaved mother recounts the death under rubble of her two year-old daughter, as a father anxiously awaits the recovery of the live or dead bodies of his four children lost to human hope under the debris of his collapsed home while his wife inconsolably weeps on, one cannot but question the rudimentary principles of life and living on a planet which itself is getting hijacked through unknown terrain by unknown forces. What after all is the stability of life when a slight shift in subterranean tectonic plates sends civilization reeling for survival under the starry skies, again reminding one of the epic Vivekananda lines in ‘The Song of the Sannyasin’:

Have thou no home. What home can hold thee, friend?

The sky thy roof, the grass thy bed; and food

What chance may bring, well cooked or ill, judge not.

Today, the whole of Nepal is living outdoors in the care of Mother Nature as a series of severe after-shocks following the original 7.9 Richter quake on 25 April has rendered them homeless, a nation destituted overnight while the world witnesses this horrific sight in abject submission to the grand truth that man is powerless against the fury of Nature. And what fortitude is on exhibit as these sturdy Himalayan people face the terrible trial of their individual and collective life with a wistful smile even now donning their mountain-merry faces and await the call of their numbers or their dear ones to the kingdom of the dead or perhaps they hang on the hinges of hope of a brighter day when their lives will again light up with the merriment of their mountainous mores!