thy life are not for sense
pleasure, are not for thy individual happiness, forget not that thou art born as a
sacrifice to the mother's alter, forget not that thy social order is but the reflex of the
infinite universal motherland, forget not that the lower classes, the ignorant, the poor,
the illiterate, the cobbler, the sweeper are thy flesh and blood, thy brothers. Thou brave one, be bold, take courage, be proud that thou art an Indian, every
Indian is my brother. Say: The ignorant Indian, the poor and destitute Indian, the Brahmin
Indian, the Pariah Indian, is my brother. Say : The soil of India is my highest heaven,
the good of India is my good, and repeat and pray day and night, 'O Thou Lord
of Gauri, O Thou Mother of the Universe, vouschafe manliness into
me ! O Thou mother of strength, take away my weakness, take away my unmanliness, and make
me a man ", thundered Swami Vivekanand, who, merely uttering five words "Sisters
and brothers of America" produced a magic spell on the huge audience at
the Parliament of Religions in Chicago in September 1893, heralded the new
awakening in the west about the glory of India, Indian philosophy and Indian way of life.
"However much you may parade your descent from Aryan ancestors and sing the
glories of ancient India day and night, and however much you may be strutting in the pride
of your birth, you, the upper classes of India, do you think you are alive? You are but
fossils ten thousand years old. It is among those whom your ancestors despised as 'walking
carrion' that the title of vitality there still in India is to be found, and it is you who
are the really walking corpses? Your houses, your furniture, look like museum specimens,
so lifeless and antiquated they are and even an eyewitness of your manners and customs,
your movements and modes of life, is inclined to think that he is listening to a
grandmother with you, one returns home, one seems to think one had been to a visit to the
painting in an art gallery! In this world of maya you are the real illusions, the mystery,
the real mirage in the desert, you, the upper classes of India! You represent the past
tense with all its varieties of form jumbled into one. That one still seems to see you at
the present time, is nothing but a nightmare brought on by indigestion. You are the void,
the unsubstantial non-entities of the future. Denizens of the dreamland, why are you
loitering any longer? Fleshless and bloodless skeletons of the dead body of past
India you are, why do you not quickly reduce yourselves into dust and disappear in the air?...And
let New India rise in your place. Let her arise out of the peasants' cottage, grasping the
plough, out of the huts of the fishermen, the cobblers, and the sweepers. Let her
spring from the grocer's shop, from beside the oven of the fritter-seller. Let her emerge
from marts and from markets. Let her emerge from groves and forests, from hill and
mountains. These people have suffered oppression for thousands of years suffered it
without murmur, and as a result have got wonderful fortitude. Skeletons of the
past! There before you are your successors, the India that is to be. No sooner
will you disappear than you will hear the inaugural shout of Renaissant India, ringing
with the voice of a million thunders and reverberating throughout the universe, Wah
Guru Ki Fateh - Hail unto the Guru."Could
any Karl Marx say in better words than the great saint of India, Swami Vivekananda's. |