This refers to the article, “India lags behind socially” by Freddy Dias (Herald, March 4). Unfortunately, after 69 years of independence, India is still facing the music of malnutrition (40m children), child labour (10.2m child workers), slavery (18.35 million slaves!), unemployment (28 per cent), illiteracy (25.6 pc) etc.
But what is the cause of such maladies? Why do we still remain prisoners of prejudices, superstitions and colossal wastage of human potential? Almost a century ago, in 1920, Sri Aurobindo had diagnosed India’s disease as “thought-incapacity” or “thought-phobia”. In his letter to his younger brother Barin, he said, “My idea is that the chief cause of the weakness of India is not subjection nor poverty, nor the lack of spirituality or dharma (ethics) but the decline of thought-power, the growth of ignorance in the motherland of Knowledge. Everywhere I see inability or unwillingness to think, thought-incapacity or thought-phobia. Whatever may have been in the middle ages, this state of things is now the sign of a terrible degeneration. The middle age was the night, the time of victory of ignorance. The modern world is the age of the victory of Knowledge. Whoever thinks most, seeks most, labours most, can fathom and learn the truth of the world, and gets so much more Skakti. If you look at Europe, you will see two things : a vast sea of thought and the play of a huge and fast-moving and yet disciplined force. The whole Shakti of Europe is in that.”
He further said, “People say Europe is running into the jaws of destruction. I do not think so. All these revolutions are the pre-conditions of a new creation. Then look at India. Except for some solitary giants, everywhere there is your “simple man”, that is, the average man who does not want to think and cannot think, who has not the least Shakti but only a temporary excitement.”
Then, what he said has, unfortunately, remained as relevant today as it was almost hundred years ago, “Our civilisation has become an achalayatana (prison), our religion a bigotry of externals, our spirituality a faint glimmer of light or a momentary wave of religious intoxication. And so long as this sort of thing continues, any permanent resurgence of India is improbable.”
Truly, it is axiomatic that we will get the government and society, we deserve. We have no other way but to “develop the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform” in ourselves to let our country awake.
