GAHANANANDA --- A GLANCE 1

In the long line of illumined souls that the Ramakrishna Order has given to the world, Swami Gahanananda stands out as the unique exemplar of little talk and much service. He had great clarity of conception about work and its secrets and was a perfect karma yogi.

After taking over from Swami Dayananda as Secretary of the Ramakrishna Mission Seva Pratishthan, then Shishu Mangal, Swami Gahanananda laboriously and with great foresight converted it from a 32-bed maternity and child-care medical unit to a 550-bed full-fledged general hospital.

Firm in his views, resolute in mind and indefatigable in work, Naresh Maharaj, as he was popularly known to devotees, never lost his poise or balance of mind despite steering Seva Pratishthan through the most trying of circumstances in turbulent times in West Bengal when politics of a perverse kind tore life in the metropolis apart. A delightful combination he was of head and heart, a rare fruition of personality harmony, what Swami Vivekananda used to refer to as one having 'immense idealism with immense practicality', and a character to back it up, built on the granite foundation of implicit faith in Sri Ramakrishna and surrender to his ideals.

Swami Gahanananda belonged to that rare breed of humanity whose fidelity to the force it hails from, loyalty to the cause it represents was unimpeachable and, thus, he was a pivotal power of the organisation (Ramakrishna Math and Ramakrishna Mission) when things went awry in those calamitous days of perfidious politics in West Bengal that threatened to seal the fate of the academic activities of the Mission. The monk in him stood still amidst a raging political typhoon that dragged the Mission to Court, and like a deft helmsman he steered the ship of the Sangha safely home unto calmer waters. The threat to the Mission that day was on all sides and was weathered by Swami Gahanananda and his monastic brothers conjointly but all concerned admit that the steely resolve and unruffled calm of Naresh Maharaj carried many a day when a less determined stance would have played the Mission's interests into the hands of the political masterminds of the day debilitating the Order for good. These are contentious issues and need not be dwelt on in this essay at length but suffice it to say that the Mission in all its glory still stands supreme thanks to the labour of love of monks like Swami Gahanananda whose hearts ever bled to secure the well-being of the Mission.

Such are the children of the Lord, such are the sages and saints of the Ramakrishna Order who behold the Master embodied in the organisation and serve it with their hearts' ardour to to do justice to their spiritual vocation. Swami Gahanananda stands at par with the luminaries of the Order and it was our privilege to have beheld him and to have been blessed by him for the life eternal. Jai Gurudev!

HE IS, SO WE ARE

The spiritual power of this towering personality is evident full-scale with the passage of a decade when it is discovered by the disciple that his subconscious drives have been transformed unknown to him and the spirit within has begun blossoming without any conscious attempt on his part. Such is the grace of this divine personage who disciples call their Guru or the spiritual preceptor. Swami Gahanananda remains with us as our inexhaustible source of strength and succour as we wend through the labyrinth of life. His glorious life of service and renunciation is the beacon that guides us through the turbulence of the times, his supreme sanity serving as the ideal which we may hold on to as the nucleus of our efflorescent spirituality. He is our anchor, our repose in this storm-tossed life. He enfolds us in his arms even as a mother does her infant one, securely drawing us to our eventual end in union with the divine beloved. Our prostrations at Gurudev's lotus feet. Jai Guru!

THE DECADENCE OF THE DAY AND THE FUTURE FRUITION ... 1

There is such a deal of disguised unemployment of talented people who could be of yeoman service to the nation that it feels frustrating at times. Mediocrity rules the roost in this age of falsity and fabrication when the connoisseur's eye to detect talent and the patron's support to nurture it are a thing of the past. Now the genius is a vanishing tribe and the pedestrian performer by common consent is ascribed the selfsame title. Culture is plummeting by the day as retrograde cultural democracy by force of popular mandate dictates tastes to the groundling. Values are being devalued and sophistication of art and artistry attributes of a bygone era. In such a dismal scenario it is meet that we attempt at least to take stock of the situation and redress, if possible, the cultural mess we find ourselves in. At the outset we must identify talent and make fullest use of such in national interest. Men of merit must be made available their proper work-sphere and a congenial environment for their highest fruition. Overall literacy levels must be improved and for this massive governmental funding and infrastructure-building are necessary. Priority must be given to higher education in India and the training of teachers to equip them to train students who are the future of our country. Instead of blind westernisation of the academic system, emphasis must be on nationalisation of education along its brightest grain. A community of well-educated students can in due course of time set in a cultural revolution whence will emerge New India with the vision for the future.

BUILD WHERE THEY BURN THESE FAIREST FLOWERS OF THE VALLEY

The average culture of a nation must rise through education before it is able to protect its interests in an evolving world. Education must, therefore, be the top priority of our government and the children of Kashmir must not be allowed to fall victim to the jihadist agenda of indoctrination in madrasas. Schools must be quickly built for them and, that too, in an integrated way and not in any haphazard manner as they now obtain. There must be integrated school campuses where thousands of children will be able to study together without fear of terrorist attack or vandalization, such must be the security cover of these premier academic institutions. A generation of well-educated citizenry will change the intellectual landscape of Kashmir and take power away from the perfidious wielders of such at present to build a Kashmir which will be well-integrated in the body politic of the nation and will serve to strengthen the motherland rather than weaken it through mindless militancy.

The Indian Government has a huge task at hand to look after the education of the children of Kashmir so that they flower into the most beautiful blossoms of the motherland rather than into misguided militants who murder their essential humanity under madrasa indoctrination. 'Send the children to schools, not merely to madrasas' must be the clarion call of the government and it should back it up by building effective academic infrastructure for the benighted province. The children of Kashmir are our fairest flowers in bud and need this support to blossom from the bud-state into the springtime of fragrant efflorescence.

Imagine a Kashmir without militancy, peaceful and tranquil, full of the ethereal beauty that surrounds it whose parallel may not be found on this earth, about which has been said, ''Gar firdaus bar-rue zamin ast, hami asto, hamin asto, hamin ast" which translates to "If there be a heaven on earth, it is here, it is here, it is here." Will such a day come? Sure, it will and we shall celebrate together the resurrection of this paradise on planet earth, the whole of humanity will. Kashmir, the defence of India from foreign forces across the Himalayas, Kashmir, the seat of Lord Amarnath, Kashmir, our kith and kin, in blood-bond with the rest of India, may Kashmir awake to its sense of belonging to the nation and seek its rightful place in it, never an alien but ever in the sanctum sanctorum of its being! Jai Hind!  

THE LAMENTABLE DECADENCE OF RABINDRA SANGEET ... 1

Rabindra Sangeet must be sung with greater vigour, greater virility and with a finer fidelity to the ragas they are based on for the sake of rendering justice to their great composer who was a veritable genius in the musical form he invented. Tagore was not well-rehearsed in the refinements of Indian classical music through rigorous training under a Guru but such was his spontaneous enlightenment in whatever art-form he graced that he ended up evolving that discipline in his own inimitable way. Such was the case with his music, a singular structural form of four phases which he evolved as opposed to the prevalent dual phase of the Hindustani classical bandish (a song in which the essence of a raga is manifest). His compositions were highly original although the bulk of them perhaps owe their tunes to sources other than Tagore's creative mind which were then remoulded by the poet into the form he finally gave them. The final products bore the distinctive mark of the master and, thus, they are called Rabindra Sangeet nonetheless. The songs are varied in mood and character, soft and sensitive often, solemn and grand often as well, worshipful and romantic by turns, patriotic and devotional too, but never quite specimens of degenerate weakness as they are manifestly being made by untrained voices masquerading as artistes who have no claim to classical training whatsoever and hence make a mockery of the beautiful songs set in tune by the poet whose likeness in talent we may find in our history perhaps only in Kalidas, I dare say. This must change. So long as Visva-Bharati controlled proceedings related to Rabindra Sangeet, we had the problem of over-monitoring music and curbing its free flow. But when post 1991 all such restrictions by law remained no more, there sprang the reverse problem of licence with Tagore's songs. The result was a certain dilution of the spirit of Rabindra Sangeet, a certain blatant commercialisation of the genre and, worst of all, a complete deflection of the intent of the songs by ever-weakening performance by ill-equipped artistes motivated by acquisition of cheap popularity rather than a pure rendition that may do justice to the spirit of the songs. When Tagore sings the songs, how spiritual they sound full of throbbing feeling of a higher order, an unearthly beauty enveloping every phrase rolling out in his high-treble sublime voice. But when the same songs are sung by the popular artistes of the day, how profane they sound, how, shorn of all sublimity and grandeur, they are invitations to the mundane elements within man in a most debasing way, for Tagore gone wrong can do great damage simply by the perversion of power. It is, thus, of utmost moment that artistes of Rabindra Sangeet seriously consider purifying their motivations and intents in life before attempting to scale the high peaks of rendering Tagore songs. For they are the ambassadors of the poet to the world at large and are right now doing a great disservice to the poet by misrepresenting him as anything short of the stupendous spirit that he was, mystic, musician rolled into one, profound in his utterance, which found music in his songs, and sublime in his intent despite the vain protestations from the lowly critics of the poet being naughtily otherwise. We look forward to a brighter day, a day of resurrection of the essential Tagore in his songs. We exhort the artistes to spare a thought on this issue and fulfil our hopes and aspirations around the brightest gem in the cultural domain of our country. Jai Hind!

REUNIFICATION OF INDIA ... 1

India must adopt the toughest possible stance in her bilateral relations with Pakistan and should eschew all cultural contact with it till Pakistan learns to respect the sovereignty of India and stops indulging in perfidious activity across the border. It is a tribute to India's tolerance as a nation that she first allowed her partition to give birth to this rogue son of hers who quickly disowned the mother and set about doing the vilest acts of sacrilege against her to restructure the subcontinent. That it failed miserably in its malicious manoeuvrings despite causing significant damage to its enemies through its self-destructive designs, history provides ample testimony of. The State of Bangladesh carved out of this country of criminal intent and the humiliating defeat to India in four successive wars have not, it seems, driven home the message to it that everyone else reads as clear as daylight that Pakistan has entered its death throes and it is but a matter of years before it seeks burial in the oblivion of time as an infamous chapter enacted in the history of Hindustan and India is reunited to regain her former glory which it is her destiny to fulfil. Pakistan will disintegrate and die and the splinters will seek refuge in the motherland, whence they had been separated, to atone for their misdeeds and, thus, being absorbed in the motherland once more, will attain to the common glory which is the heritage and the destiny of Akhanda Bharat (Undivided India). Despite Pakistan's malefic intent and activity, such a day is not far off. We eagerly look forward to the reunification of India and the erasing of artificial borders brought into being by the barbarous elements that mutilated the motherland. Jai Hind! Jai Akhand Bharat!

WOMAN, THE FLOWER OF HUMANITY, CHILDREN, THE HOPE FOR THE FUTURE

The waste of womanhood in servility to man ought to be of immediate human concern if humanity is to advance in civilisation and culture.

When enlightened womanhood asserts its rights everywhere, then will humanity progress towards peace and prosperity. But this entails pure motivations, not merely the tendency to equalise man in every respect but to go beyond to manifesting what is best in being a woman.

Ignorance and egotism go together and unless the former is resolved to nothingness, the latter cannot be dissolved altogether. Then what reigns is knowledge, the perception of the Self.

Who cares for the children? Who cares for their future as adults unthinkingly indoctrinate them in the culture of hate, violence and death? Death-cults thrive on such indoctrination, the baton of fanaticism is passed on from one generation to another through the relay of invidious information which fans up the flames of hatred afresh every time it is the blossom of spring in the lives of these youths freshly grown into the hopes and aspirations of adulthood. Woe unto them as the blossoming buds are consumed soon in the conflagration of communal feelings gone putrid with the perfidies of the sin at source!