IN DEFENCE AGAINST ASPERSION CAST ON ME AS NOT FOLLOWING SRI RAMAKRISHNA'S WAYS PROPERLY BY ONE WHO ASSUMES OFTEN THINGS IN THE NAME OF SUPERFICIAL RATIONALITY

You are being utterly incongruous in your comparison of your queries with those of Swami Vivekananda. Having insulted me as one who is not following my Master's message and then begging for forgiveness for having unwittingly perhaps hurt me, you are not only expressing your supreme vanity but also terrible hypocrisy as well. I hope you will desist from this futile denigration of my affiliation to Sri Ramakrishna's cause and learn to be more civilised.

Distortion of truth as you did about my affiliation to Sri Ramakrishna's principles are always going to recoil on you and that is what is now tasting bitter to your palate. Better refrain from this sort of vilification of others who are innocent of the perfidious charges levelled against them and you shall, God willing, be nearer the truth which you apparently crave for.

You have been abysmally disrespectful to me through your unthinking diatribe and cannot defend this nastiness under the garb of respectability apparently won through rejection of so-called facile theories which do not fit in to your minuscule estimations of reality.

A LITTLE BIT OF SELF-HELP PLEASE

A little bit of research will be well worth doing instead of constantly asking people to clear your doubts. Researchers take the pains through extensive reading to clear their own doubts and do not thus depend on others to do so while setting conditions on them. So, it will be better if you clear your own doubts and spare us the trouble to do so on your behalf. People maintain their own standpoints rigidly while expecting others to fit into theirs. You are entitled entirely to your opinion and none would wish to change it. What was in the DNA of Netaji only his spiritual mentors Ramakrishna and Vivekananda know and I may only say that it is puerile to thrust our microcosmic ideas on to a vast personality as Netaji merely to suit our myopic ends. Like it is futile to forcefully impress upon others the monk incognito theory, it is silly to keep pestering others for explanations of their suppositions. Let people believe what they will, O Lord be Thou my guide alone in the unravelling of any mystery, be it that of the Atman within the cavity of the heart or Brahman in the wide world or even Netaji in his mystifying disappearance.

A WORD TO THOSE THAT CLAMOUR ... 1

If the Netaji disappearance mystery is to be solved, then the people working at it must manifest character enough to do it. Complete self-effacement is the key. There must be no personal agenda pursued in the guise of propagating theories about Netaji's disappearance as well as attempting to suppress such movements. The slightest attempt to popularise oneself or to win name and fame and money will backfire on such offenders to the cause which is built on the dead bodies of the revolutionaries at the scaffold or on the roads and in the jungles of Burma en route to India.

Netaji was a supreme sannyasi, quite in the heroic mould of Krishna and Rama, and Vivekananda of modern times. This is no exaggeration and will be borne out by an in-depth study of his life. He was the yoddha-sannyasi or the warrior monk, an incarnation of the kshatriya spirit of age-old India whose primary focus was the liberation of the motherland from the foreign yoke that was bleeding her to death. A disciple of Swami Vivekananda in every sense of the term, Netaji epitomised the national ethos and went about bringing it to fruition through his epic struggle against the British Empire.

THE NEW PRESIDENT MAHARAJ, SWAMI SMARANANANDA

Swami Smaranananda, 16th President of the Ramakrishna Order, a simple and highly renounced self-effacing monk, will now adorn the office vacated by the demise of the 15th President of the Order, Swami Atmasthananada. A disciple of the venerable Swami Sankarananda, the 7th President of the Order who was the disciple of Sri Ramakrishna's spiritual son, Swami Brahmananda, our President Maharaj, Swami Smarananandaji is in direct line with the Master in an unbroken sequence of preceptor-pupil tradition (Guru-shishya parampara) whereby he will now be the earthly repository of Sri Ramakrishna's spirituality.

Swami Smaranananda was in charge of the Ramakrishna Mission Saradapeeth at Belur Math for 15 long years. It was then that I chanced to be present at a spiritual discourse delivered by him in 1983 if I am not failing in my memory. At one point in the discourse he uttered a profound statement. He said that he who the monks and the devotees worship as Sri Ramakrishna is who the Vedantists address as the Atman and the Brahman. That Brahman is the Atman and is manifested as the Avatar Sri Ramakrishna. This statement made a profound impact on my young mind and set me thinking. This was my first meeting with Swami Smaranananda.

A MALICIOUS MALIGNER OF NETAJI

I initially entertained a soft corner for this gentleman and even praised him for his argumentative power and focus of thinking. But as the months have rolled by, I have begun to realise that he is a colonial remnant and is bent upon denigrating our greatest freedom fighter. With his perverse logic and text-torturing tendency, he perverts historical interpretations and presents them to the public to appease some queer and compulsive malice which he bears Netaji. How unfortunate he must be that he fails to realise the glory that is Netaji! How the hour flits by and instead of maligning Netaji, how with his considerable intellectual power and prowess of writing, he could have influenced the youth towards a higher understanding of history! But, then, such is the state of India as she struggles against these elements working against her best interests, to rise to her full stature as a civilisation once again and occupy the premier place among the comity of nations as the preceptor of all that is bright and beautiful in the world of the Spirit. I pray to Mother to cure this depraved individual of this strange malady that has of late afflicted him unless of course this is his innate attribute marring his good sense since inception into this beautiful world.

A NATION OF PERFIDIOUS INTELLECTUALS, MACAULAY'S CHILDREN

Those that denigrate Netaji under any pretext are wicked. Nehru and Gandhi have done great harm to Netaji. Hence, the public wrath. Other than crooked intellectuals, nobody speaks ill of Netaji. The common man throughout India honours Netaji and never can even imagine castigating him. But Nehru and Gandhi are for their misdeeds frequently the butt of public ire.

A nation of English-educated cowards, Macaulay's children, cannot understand the worth of Netaji but the common man with his common sense and vigour born of the struggle for survival can better appreciate it.

Those that revel in their borrowed culture of the West and roll in the lap of luxury can scarce comprehend the terrible torment the revolutionaries smilingly bore for the freedom of the motherland and in this I do not include the likes of Nehru and Gandhi who compromised with the British and the Muslim League to set the seal on India's fate for a long time yet to come.

We who daily suffer from the effects of the perfidies perpetrated by the mild mutilators of the motherland in the high-sounding name of non-violence and truth must never forget that we owe our independence to the lifeblood spilled from the arteries of the extreme revolutionaries whose resolution came forth in the personality of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose.

MUKHEREJEE AND THE SAHAY COMMISSION?

Abhijit Chatterjee, Justice Mukherjee will drop his views, why? He believed in what he had said and must have been reasonably satisfied to have had his assertion in private but could not as a judge pronounce a verdict his way in the absence of evidence that was 100% legally conclusive. There are legal standards which have to be adopted and he had done so. You may rather put it this way that Justice Mukherjee instead of dropping his views may now opt to depose before the Sahay Commission to submit his personal view in this matter, one that has been the bone of much contention ever since it was unfairly beamed by Amlan Kusum Ghosh despite having been requested by the venerable judge to keep it private. Justice Mukherjee's deposition may settle the dust over this issue finally and give us further leads into the Gumnami Baba case.