THE CURSE THAT IS POVERTY

Those who attempt to eradicate poverty must comprehend the depth and magnitude of the problem and its real causes. The selfish desire to possess is at the heart of the matter and springs from the sense of desolation of the physical body marooned in this island called Earth where life is but a flicker and survival so insecure. Thus comes the propensity to hoard wealth, earn it at the expense of the well-being of others even by means patently unethical and to create a system whereby such selfish activity of self-preservation may gain perpetuation and validity in the eye of law and social opinion. That countless millions will thus be grounded to the dust merely to gratify the millionaire's dust of desires is the scant object of the rich man's attention. His life is an endless pursuit of the ephemeral emeralds of this earth and his chariot of coarse collection charts its course over the corpses of countless commoners who have not yet learnt so well the art of deception or profit-making from one's own mother.

As the multitude suffer, the rich man seeks the perverse pleasure of providing the dole for the poor, scant realising or oft realising full well that such poverty thrust upon the masses is his own handiwork. Thus, the handful enjoy the elixir of life while the rest of the populace, the teeming millions must wait on these princes and princesses to fulfil every whim of theirs as if they are by birth or buying entitled to the ownership of all that is considered worthwhile in life. While life is festive somewhere, full of the delicacies of the palate and the senses, in far too many places it is a veritable damnation as vitality saps in the individual owing to unlivable conditions of living.

What more can I say than to empathise with my sisters and brothers eking out their existence on earth and awaiting final release from their daily death. I wish man awakes from his slumber and stops murdering fellow man in this bloodless cruel way as capitalism enjoins him unto doing.

SHADOW ON THE DOOR

How symbolic the photograph of Bose with Hitler and Ribbentrop is in the light of the shadow of Bose's profile cast on the door! Chasing the mirage of the Indian dream, ever-drifting, ever-shifting as in a sunlit desert, Bose entered Hell itself to win his Mother freedom. The shadow of his personality would loom large in Hitler's mind for sure as reverse after reverse in the ensuing battles would drive home the validity of Bose's prophesy about the Russian misadventure to the Fuhrer. Who can say how many times Hitler must have thought of the phenomenon that Bose was, for only a lion can recognise a lion, never a sheep as a timid Mahatma nor an opportunist as a cowardly perfidious Pandit? The later developments of Netaji's life have remained so shadowy in the wake of his mysterious disappearance post 18 Aug,1945 that the shadow cast on the door seems indeed symbolic, portentous of the life to follow.

WORDS OF TRUTH

1. First consciousness, then poverty, finally enlightenment. The three follow each other in invariable succession.

2. The disciple of devotion is the preceptor of the morrow.

3. Fill the mind with noble ideas all tending to a glorious ideal. Out of such fullness of thought will emerge the man of realisation.

4. Thou art the greatest God there can be, never belittle thyself. To quake in front of an imagined God does not befit thee. Arise!

5. Hitler, full of vanity springing from race superiority complex, failed to appreciate initially the full sweep of Bose's personality.

6. The Nazis must be given their due and so much more the Japanese for their great help in the liberation struggle of India.

7. Some say Netaji is still alive; others that he is dead. Some others will not hazard opinion in the absence of evidence. What do you say?

8. To charge the Fuhrer in his own office and ask him to expunge from his book racist comments made by him against Indians requires extraordinary valour.

9. How symbolic the photograph of Bose with Hitler and Ribbentrop is in the light of the shadow of Bose cast on the door!

10. Those who attempt to eradicate poverty must comprehend the depth and magnitude of the problem and its real causes. The selfish desire to possess is at the heart of the matter and springs from the sense of desolation of the physical body marooned in this island called Earth where life is but a flicker and survival so insecure. Thus, comes the propensity to hoard wealth, earn it at the expense of the well-being of others even by means potently unethical and to create a system whereby such selfish activity of self-preservation may gain validity in the eye of law and social opinion. That countless millions will be thus grounded to the dust merely to gratify the millionaire's dust of desires is the scant object of the rich man's attention. His life is an endless pursuit of the ephemeral emeralds of this earth and his chariot of coarse collection charts its course over the corpses of countless commoners who have not learnt so well the art of deception or profit-making from one's mother. As the multitude suffer, the rich man seeks the pleasure of providing the dole for the poor, scant realising that such poverty thrust upon the masses is his own handiwork. Thus, the handful enjoy the elixir of life while the rest of the populace, the teeming millions must wait on these princes and princesses to fulfil every whim of theirs as if they are by birth or property entitled to the ownership of all that is considered worthwhile in life. While life is festive somewhere, full of the delicacies of the palate and the senses, in far too many places it is a veritable damnation as vitality saps in the individual owing to unlivable conditions of living. What more can I say than to empathise with my sisters and my brothers eking out their existence on earth and awaiting final release from their daily death. I wish man awakes from his slumber and stops murdering fellow man in this bloodless cruel way as capitalism enjoins him to doing.

PROPHET OF NATIONALISM ... 1

Churchill's befriending Stalin did not make him a communist, neither did Stalin thereby become a capitalist. How did Bose then become a fascist by alliance with Hitler?
Those were heady days with the entire world in turmoil and Bose utilised the force-field of the World War to give British imperialism the necessary shake to overcome its inertia and reduce its citadels to ruins. His motion to free his motherland in effect released such revolutionary fervour in the whole of Asia that he became the catalyst and the inspiration for suppressed peoples everywhere. Bose in retrospect has thus assumed a far bigger significance than was evident at the times when he made his gigantic presence felt across the world. He was the mainspring of revolutionary activity in India, the mighty force that brought down British India to its knees and sent the colonists packing.
Bose careered the downfall of the British Empire by setting India free. It was but a matter of time before other colonies took the cue and launched their liberation struggles. Leaders across Asia except the top brass of the Congress who had plotted the downfall of Bose unsuccessfully were lifted into inspirational heights to emulate Bose and brought their countries freedom.
The British Empire's sun did set at last where it had scorched the people for two centuries and had plunged the ancient land, the mother of civilisations, into servile darkness. But what happened to Bose? Where did he vanish from Leon Prouchandy's house in Saigon on the 18th of August, 1945?

PAUSE TO REFLECT

1. Stop exploitation, else, there will be a revolution.

2. Capitalism has provided comfort to many but reduced the masses to abysmal poverty where life itself is hell.

3. Let us help the Ramakrishna Mission fulfil its numerous unfinished projects of social good. Let us serve the Mission.

4. What we hold as our own belongs to the world, to larger humanity. Our labour cannot claim its fruit to be its own.

5. Act while there is time yet. Soon it will be past the mid-night hour and the dark will envelope all.

6. No system can remove exploitation unless there be men in large numbers with developed character to run the system.

7. The Indian society built about the axis of spirituality, if freed from social restrictions and democratised, will be the ideal one.

8. Why blame any for their misdeeds? Just spread the Word and see what a wonderful change will come about.

9. Change does not come about by activism of the sort we see but by contacting the Divine that is at the heart of phenomena.

10. The nation is too divided today in terms of ideology. Let a common ideal, the well-being of all, inspire all. That is nationalism.

11. Long before religion arrived on the scene, long before God hijacked the masses, men were divine as much as they are today.

12. Vedanta freed man from bondage to matter and Vedanta freed man from bondage to God. Vedanta declared the divinity of man.

13. Man in essence is none but God. God is but the shadow of that Man. The Real Man is not this puny earthly figure.

14. There is an identity of God and Man which is so difficult to comprehend, yet so very true it is. The foundation of all is the One.

15. Netaji was preeminently a spiritual person who had turned revolutionary to deliver his motherland from imperial-colonial bondage.

16. Alliance with Hitler was not a spontaneous decision for Bose but one enforced by Gandhian non-cooperation and Stalin's refusal.

17. The exigencies of the times, the unique historical opportunity to utilise the War situation to free India impelled Bose onward.

18. The German-Soviet Non-aggression Pact was tottering. Each feared the other's invasion. Stalin compromised to befriend Britain.

19. Bose arrived at Moscow to seek Soviet help. But Stalin, sensing impending German threat, refused. Hence, onward to Berlin.

20. Read the Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, otherwise, you will never be able to fully appreciate the life and works of Netaji.

NETAJIPREMI DUI PAGOL BHAKTA

Dhanyo lekhani apnaar, Ashraful Islam! Ki anuraag Netajir prati, taar ek kanao jodi amar thakto toh kritaartha hotam! Aar dhanyo Drjayanta Choudhuri! Ini Netaji bishoyok tathyer jnanobhandaar, sakshat cholomaan bangmoy biswakosh!

Rachaita : Sugata Bose

HAPPY 75TH INDEPENDENCE DAY!

What a slap on the face of British imperialism it must have been when in Singapore on 21 October, 1943 Netaji declared the formation of his Provisional Government of Free India (P.G.F.I.)! In essence it meant that Netaji had dared the British and declared Indian independence and what remained thereon was but the eviction of the alien occupier from the motherland by armed assault on them.

Nine States of the world including Germany, Japan, Italy and USSR (?) gave diplomatic recognition to the Provisional Government of Free India and as per international law operative then, India in international legal terms had achieved independence notwithstanding the bulk of its landmass having not yet been liberated from the occupying British forces. Imperial Japan had pledged to hand over to the P.G.F.I. the control of the Andaman and the Nicobar Islands, a pledge which they fulfilled on 29 December, 1943 when formally the islands were handed over to Netaji who headed the P.G.F.I. Thus, the Provisional Government of Free India at its inception itself was legally the administrative organ of the new-founded State of India.

A State by definition must have the following four features:
1. Territory to rule ;
2. Sovereignty, that is, absolute freedom from internal or external control by any agency in its functioning ;
3. Government to administer the affairs of the State, make laws, execute them and safeguard them against violation ;
4. Population to govern, that is, the citizenry.

All these features were existent in the provisional State which the P.G.F.I. represented and this is how they existed:
(a) Japan assured and then handed over Andaman and Nicobar Islands to P.G.F.I. Thus, the provisional State had Territory.
(b) The provisional State was free of all control, external and internal, in its functioning. Thus, it had Sovereignty. It had its own national army (The Indian National Army) to defend its territorial borders (of Shaheed and Swaraj, and all other captured British Indian territory) and to wage war against the colonial-imperial alien occupiers of the motherland. It had its own national bank, State currency, postage stamp, national anthem, national flag and national greeting in Jai Hind.
(c) The Provisional Government of Free India was itself the fulfilment of the third requirement of Government for a State.
(d) P.G.F.I. governed over the resident Indian population of Shaheed, Swaraj and Imphal in Manipur for a sizeable period of time to fulfil the fourth feature of a State.

Thus, to all intents and purposes and fulfilling all international legal requirements for the creation of a Sovereign State, the Provisional Government of Free India came into being on 21 October, 1943 at Syonan or Singapore. This was, thus, a historic happening that may only be called the Independence of Undivided India and as it predated the Partitioned Dominion Status received by the motherland on 15 August, 1947 by just under four years, it must be recognised by all Indians and in consequence by the world as the true date of our nation's independence. However, our belonging to the British Commonwealth evidently stands in the way of our present Union Government from recognising it as such and, so, the saga of feeding Indians with the colonial lie of independence achieved on 15 August, 1947 continues.

But there is no power on earth which can prevent an enlightened citizenry seeing the light at last that we were after all liberated from colonial bondage 74 years ago on this very day and we are, therefore, treading a hallowed hour, the 75th independence day of our ancient undivided beloved motherland. We must, therefore, not let this hour go past without breathing in its holy air, the air of genuine freedom, undiluted and undivided, full of the pride in our people's struggle for this liberation achieved, soulful remembrance of the martyrs to this freedom and full of the resolve to fight on for achieving the territorial solidarity of our partitioned motherland. Jai Hind!

P.S. Spare some time today to duly celebrate this day of our motherland's true and honourable independence, the fruit of the labour of love of countless revolutionaries climaxing in Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose.