This blog is dedicated to the luminous wisdom of Dr.(Prof.)Rakesh Biswas,a physician,a scholar,a teacher,a philosopher,a visionary,a non-compromising humanist,and above all a truely great human being.Years after sharing,in our medical college,six long years of frienship that was restrained by cultured sophestication,he continues to Lead Kindly Light and inspire me in all walks of life as a guiding philosopher to this very day.
A couple of days back he mailed to me the following lines.
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"A nation, in the sense of the political and economic
union of a people is that aspect which a whole
population assumes when organized for a mechanical
purpose . . . it is merely the side of power, not of human
ideals . . . but when with the help of science and the
perfecting of organization this power begins to grow
and brings in harvests of wealth, then it crosses its
boundaries with amazing rapidity. For then it goads
all its neighboring societies with greed of material
prosperity, and consequent mutual jealousy, and by
the fear of each other's growth into powerfulness. The
time comes when it can stop no longer, for the
competition grows keener, organization grows vaster
and selfishness attains supremacy. Trading upon the
greed and fear of man, it occupies more and more
space in society, and at last becomes its ruling force
. . . when this organization of politics and commerce,
whose other name is the nation becomes all-powerful,
at the cost of the harmony of the higher social life,
then it is an evil day for humanity . . . This abstract
being, the Nation, is ruling India . . ."
- Rabindranath Tagore,
Nationalism, (1916)
It is a feeling of haunting bewilderment that grasps me when I read and re-vise Tagore's lines again and again,written almost a century back.I remember reading this prose-piece in vernacular named "Jatiyotabodh" in a series of articles grouped together in a literary piece called "Shobhyotar Shankat"(of which my poor translation would be somewhat like "The Crisis of Modern Civilisation").Written in a confused socio-political environment in India(which was changing with rapid dynamism in relation to a proactive nationalist movement against colonial rule)and against the backdrop of a mindless war that had engulfed the entire world with frenzied desparation,it is amazing to note how correctly Tagore had noted to qualify the innate psychology of Indian humanism and the prognostic picture of its dynamic interactions.
Tagore is not particularly famous as a political observer and I'm sure he would have loathed at the prospect of being tagged one by commoners like me. Yet I just cannot help but rue the fact that while we(again mostly commoners like me)have continued to bathe blissfully in the sublime brilliance of Tagore's artistic creations,we have not evaluated to the full,the philosopher in Tagore.Of course,we do 'feel' the philosopher in his musical compositions,verses and prose-pieces and keep on contemplating on his personna on a personal and social level on a daily basis,our appreciation seems to fall grossly short of the superlative adjection that should have been there,then and now.And we still need a 'push' from sudden exposures to literature like these dug out of the subconscious mind in a moment of inspired vigour ,to wake from a vain,collective stupor which seems to have engulfed the Indian mind(and the universal mind too),resulting in humanistic values(of which Tagore must have dreamt while writing these words)being degraded to a frustrating inert state,and which seems to hold back an evolution of consciousness as a whole.
It seems to be an utopian exercise now but had we read Tagore's lines correctly,dentifying the visionary that he was,today's situation wouldn't have been exactly similar to what the great man had thought of,a 100 years back.He seems to have dissected the story of pre and post-Independant India to the core,and today as a nation India has managed to position herself qualitatively in the exact state globally that Tagore had identified then. It clearly exposes the utter futility of the philosophy underlying the socio-political exercises that the country has taken part in since then,both nationally and at the global level. It would be grossly wrong to assume(if one reads this article and looks around today) that the revered fore-fathers who had grafted the foundations of independant India and those who have taken up the responsibility of guiding the nation forward,had done so with a self-less humanist ideal. We have always tended to visualise a nation as just a formal integration of individually diverse social,ethnic and economic entities forced by non-scrupulous politics,to stand together with a distorted definition of nationalism under one flag.
This,unfortunately,does not hold true for India alone.All countries,developing and developed,have retained/or developed the same distorted pseudo-nationalistic pattern in mind to earn their respective places on the global map.The cause-effect profile of the international scene is there for everyone to see.Countries have grown into units of 'power'.We have diplomatically made friends or become enemies of others,we have aligned ourselves with diametrically opposite axes of power for selfish benefits and(shamefully so)for mere survival. Scientific and economic progress have resulted in wars and battles which have left not an inch of habitated world space unscarred.Nuclear arms proliferation,biochemical warfare,militant movements guided by distorted ideals ultimately resulting acts of violent terrorism,illegal international trading of arms and substances of addictive abuse,periods of cruel dictatorship with black records of mass genocide under the guise of governance have dominated the global scenario through the 20th.century only worsening to flourish in the new millenium.
All the benefits advancement in knowledge has endowed upon human civilisation tend to get significantly nullified when 40 million people are wiped off the face of earth by a pre-planned,calculated act of genocide which gets imprinted in the pages of history as a World War.Yet we don't seem to learn from history still. 4 years after the Second World War in which genocide in one of its most brutal forms was facilitated by volitional use of nuclear technology,2 countries coaligned in the war became polarised into 2 global 'superpowers' with concepts of democracy which annihilate each other in theory and in practice - exactly what Tagore theorised to write(here I am wilfully refraining from using the word "Predicted"as we are talking about Tagore and not Nostradamus,and we shouldn't be in the mood to marvel over and glorify the results of prediction-intellectual or by divine interference.We've had enough of morbid
glorification!) 34 years before human history attained the shameful landmark of an event.
One of the foremost and most direct results of this political polarisation(under the excuse of differences in Nationalistic Approach!)was that we engaged ourselves in developing more lethal devices of mass destruction by thermo-nuclear kinetics in the form of hydrogen bombs et al.The Cold War followed which saw through the abject surrender of nationalistic philosophies of countries in front of political empowerment of identities,the major countries madly aligning themselves with the power axes for survival and control-again exactly echoing Tagore's lines to the very word. And since then,nations continue to stand as pawns in a global game of chess played by elements of power,jealousy and corrupt greed.
Nobody,not even Tagore,has ever dared to dream of a world as one nation.But in his lines Tagore wanted to underline the concept of Humanism as the basic element to build a nation.He clearly shows the potential results if humanism could not be imbibed into our consciousness with evolved spontaneity while we were building our nation. But we have smugly kept humanism away from our consciousness,from our daily lives,from society and from our philosophy of nationalism.(And India is not the only country).We have proceeded mechanically to put to practice,policies interacting between sociology,economics,human resources,politics and military power.And one has to just look around,or open the daily newspaper to see the result.
I seem to be satisfied with the state of affairs.Because my little retreat was not bombarded yesterday.I do not want to think of tomorrow.If I've woken up now,this time I better not go back to sleep.
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