A HIMALAYAN BLUNDER

A HIMALAYAN BLUNDER

Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel was the one who should have been the Prime Minister of independent India. Then India's fate would have been changed. He was the perfect foil for the perfidious Jinnah. But for Gandhiji's intervention, India would have had him as Prime Minister. Alas, that was not to be and we are in the sorry mess that we are !

Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel was the Prime Minister elect, 11 votes out of 13, of the Congress Working Committee and India was set on her course to adequate recovery before Jawaharlal Nehru decided to stand apart in such a case from the scenario and the Mahatma relented. This was the single biggest blunder that Gandhiji made and the result inevitably followed.

Pandit Nehru was a moderate, a liberal, a politician too gentle to deal with the harsh realities of communal politics that prevailed then, and the blunders he made in his enlightened liberalism, an ideal too far-fetched and lofty for the turbulent times, caused irreparable damage to the emerging nation.

History had given us twice the opportunity to have a strong leader at the helm of affairs and twice the Mahatma's intervention thwarted us of that good fortune. He foiled Netaji and he foiled the Sardar.

The country stands now where it stands and we have to take it forward. Come, let us contribute mightily to this sublime endeavour of rebuilding the motherland and bring to fruition the aspirations of the martyrs to her freedom.

Written by Sugata Bose

FROM THE ADMINISTRATOR'S DESK ... 6

FROM THE ADMINISTRATOR'S DESK ... 6

Spewing venom in the name of devotion to Netaji against other seminal leaders of the nation is hardly like being truly devoted to him, to his ideology or to his manner and means in life. It were better if devotees and followers of Netaji, not all but quite a substantial section online, were to refrain from such indulgence in spreading hatred against Gandhiji, Pandit Nehru and the like and rather engage themselves in educating themselves better in the life and activities of Netaji which were so sharply in contrast to what these so-called devotees of the leader exhibit in their vicious attacks on the great one's colleagues and compatriots in the Congress. This sort of vilification of the nation's greats is an exhibition of the utter hollowness of these offenders and is a sad reflection on the regressive culture of the polity. I sincerely wish that the members of this group will abstain from such lowliness as has been evident thus far in the name of so-called patriotism and devotion to Netaji.

Written by Sugata Bose [Administrator]

CHILD-CARE

CHILD-CARE

Allow children to question. Do not indoctrinate them with anything, most certainly not principles of religion. Let them think. Let them reject what they think contradicts reason and let them accept what conduces to it.

Let the creativity of children be not stifled. Let them flower into fine specimens of the human species instead of turning out into machines programmed to thinking along the line of ancient or medieval scriptural injunctions or modern-day political ideologies that are totalitarian in approach and crush the freedom of the individual person.

Let democracy of the political system truly extend to democracy in human thinking such that the best of human resource be available to solving life's problems. That is called proper child-care. The abilities that Nature has endowed a child, let them flourish in an atmosphere free of indoctrination, in a field of free play of the faculties. Teach the child only how to concentrate his mind best without in any way imposing on his or her mind any of the theological principles that come traditionally in its wake. Let freedom be for freedom to arrive at.

Written by Sugata Bose

SINGAPORE AND ITS LEADERS, A MODEL FOR MANY A NATION

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pK094NJH5lE

SINGAPORE AND ITS LEADERS, A MODEL FOR MANY A NATION

See what a leader should be like -- highly educated, strong, forthright, decisive, nationalistic, pragmatic and, yet, a visionary. PM Lee Hsien Loong, the present and the third Prime Minister of Singapore, is the illustrious son of an even more illustrious father, the first Prime Minister of Singapore and its founding father and architect, the great Lee Kuan Yew who remains to this day one of the great statesmen of the world and one who has an incisive understanding of China.

I exhort all to follow the history and development of Singapore so as to be fired up with hope and aspiration for the building up of our motherland, along our own lines, though. The sheer drive that these Singaporean leaders have and the way they have, despite Singapore being such a tiny country that is smaller than most major cities of the world and has hardly any natural resource to rely on, mobilised their people towards developing their country into a top first world one, has drawn the admiration of the whole world, but Singapore, despite such attainments, does not rest on its laurels and pushes on towards higher achievements. For, as Lee Kuan Yew has said, there is always the possibility of Singapore sliding down the ladder of development and ruining its past attainments through future inadvertence. Therefore, the motto of Singapore is to move on ever onward, maintaining a strict vigil on its present abiding state and possible future states.

Singapore is driven like a corporate house and is a capitalist state through and through that relies on profit generation for its survival in an unapologetic way and with a clear developmental conscience for its people. Singapore is a modern state that is completely non-racial and non-communal in attitudes, aspirations and executive action which has helped it to forge the bond of national unity across the cultural and community spectrum. In foreign affairs Singapore's policy is to maintain perfect amity with all its Malayan neighbours so as to keep its own domestic peace and communal harmony. All these things are worth pondering for us who also aim to build a strong nation but along our own civilisational line.

Written by Sugata Bose

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pK094NJH5lE

Photo : Lee Kuan Yew

BOND OF BLOOD AND THE BOND OF THE HEART

BOND OF BLOOD AND THE BOND OF THE HEART

There is a bond that runs deeper than that of blood. It is the bond of the heart. And out of this the bonds of blood are freshly forged. Often, though, the bond of the heart is not consummated and hangs in air as sublimity of the soul, as pulsating beats in delightful resonance, requited or unrequited, it matters not. What matters is the intensity of feeling that lends truth to the relation that transcends the structural limitations of society. Such a love is, verily, freedom on this very earth that otherwise binds with its myriad fetters.

Written by Sugata Bose

THE ABSOLUTE AND THE RELATIVE ... 1

THE ABSOLUTE AND THE RELATIVE ... 1

Endless are the mercies of the Mother. Her inscrutable ways, who knows? But She exists despite the protestations of erudite atheists, anti-theists and nihilists of all order. Mother is, so, we all are.

The Vedantic idea of Maya is mostly misapprehended by by lay aspirants to scriptural understanding. Even monastics are misled by Shankara's non-dual philosophy for few, alas, few are intellectually or spiritually equipped to comprehend the subtle truth. 'The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna', though, is an adequate guide to the eventual truth if one follows the directions of the Master strictly. The removal of ego is the one thing needful and submission to the will of the Mother. Else, it will be like moving about in circles at the basement of the spiritual tower, to spell it out as Sri Aurobindo had put it in somewhat altered terms.

Maya is not false as men make it out to be, having failed to apprehend the meaning of what Shankara had said when he formulated his epic principle of the absolute and the phenomenal reality thus : "In half a couplet shall I enunciate what has been thus far elaborated in tens of millions of books, and it is this -- Brahman is Truth, the world [phenomenal universe] is false and the sentient beings are none other than Brahman."

This single verse has been most misapprehended by the followers of Shankara and all that followed in the wake of this grand pronouncement, so much so that it took a series of future Acharyas, sages and divine incarnations thereafter to rescue the Indian people from its erroneous interpretations that negated the world as falsely false. Ramanujacharya, Vallabhacharya, Madhvacharya, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, Kabir, Nanak, Meera Bai and a host of other spiritual luminaries have consciously or unconsciously made so many attempts to reconcile the inharmonious interpretations of the Advaita philosophy with the rest of the grand system of spiritual thinking in India but it was left to Ramakrishna-Vivekananda to eventually set the scales straight and bring home to one and all the core content of the text on Maya.

End of Part 1
To be serialised

Written by Sugata Bose

THE MASTER AND THE MINNOW IN MUSIC

THE MASTER AND THE MINNOW IN MUSIC

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBasSgRpr-c&feature=share&fbclid=IwAR1rQkzkNbST6GxLCprfe2a-KE6PiMKduSlS5pSHC82bRNLoIpvsNMl5xQg

The best rendition till date unlike the more popular singer of the Order who has made a mockery of music. The latter one ought to learn the ABC of music from renditions such as these, but, alas, in a country where mediocrity must inevitably rule the roost, the good is ever substituted by the desperate decadence that goes by the name of music. Would it were that these latter aberrations in the name of artistes were to train their ears first for lifetimes before attempting to please the audience in some future incarnation with their unwholesome presentation that is made to go by popular decadent consent by the name of music ! However, that is not to be in a country that has lost its ancient moorings in the art of discernment of that which is delectable from that which is decadent and one must endure the inharmonious strains of what is being passed off as music to the horror of the ears that must endure the pathetic rendition of the otherwise sublime composition of the Swami Vivekananda.

In a like manner at the Mayer Bari {Mother's House], Baghbazar, a sublime rendition used to be and, perhaps, still is, of the song, 'Prakriting paramaang abhayaang varadaang', at the vesper hour, which has been horrendously distorted in tune at Belur Math and is sung so during the vesper service, an alteration which has made of a skylark flight of inspiration through limpid spaces into a morose nocturnal gravitating mass that is materially earth-bound and can only dampen the spirit instead of uplifting it.

These then are the musical tendencies of the times, the handiwork of the legatees of the Swami Vivekananda whose music used to send God into trance. Indeed, men like me are condemned to listen to these routinised rough renditions of what had originally promised to be the sublime savouries of the soul.

Written by Sugata Bose