Jawaharlal Nehru says in ‘The Discovery of India',
“All of us talk of
India and all of us demand many things from India. What do we give her in
return? We can take nothing from her beyond what we given her.”
Those were the days when the country was
reeling under the yoke of foreign rule. The people of India had to earn the
freedom of the country not by demands and petitions and asking but by rising
against the mightiest country of the world at that time. In this process the
Motherland had to be given hard work, and not only sweat and tears but life and
blood itself.
There were plenty of people who gave and gave
to the country. They gave their riches, their toil, their families, their
energies to the country. And the country sustained them, unasked for.
Freedom came on 15th August 1947.
With it came the upsurge of selfishness, lust
for money and power, ambition, self-aggrandisement. With the passing away of
the old generation, of those in the old generation who had love of the country
and were servitors of the country, a new generation came which does not even
acknowledge the ideal of giving to the country. Everyone is interested in
himself, in what he can get from the country, and for grabbing from the country
no means is regarded as foul.
We are bereft of the idea of service to the
country. We do not think and act keeping the country’s good in front of us. We
wish to appropriate for ourselves everything that the country can give us,
without caring for the fellow countrymen. For the posterity we have no sense of
responsibility at all.
While doing so in relation to our country,
are we not doing the same wrong as man is doing towards Nature? If we fail to
amend ourselves, we will be punished by the laws of Nature.
In truth, our motherland has been giving us
more than what she has been getting from us.
(From the Editor’s desk, “Some Socio-Spiritual Perspectives”, ‘Sri Aurobindo’s Action’, Shyam Sunder Jhunjhunwala, Sri Aurobindo
Society, Pondicherry)
Sri Aurobindo Says: "India can best develop
herself and serve humanity by being herself and following the law of her own
nature. This does not mean, as some narrowly and blindly suppose, the rejection
of everything new that comes to us in the stream of Time or happens to have
been first developed or powerfully expressed by the West. Such an attitude
would be intellectually absurd, physically impossible, and above all unspiritual;
true spirituality rejects no new light, no added means or materials of our
human self-development. It means simply to keep our centre, our essential way
of being, our inborn nature and assimilate to it all we receive, and evolve out
of it all we do and create."
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