Our culture has gifted us with insights into the nature of the universe and the scheme of life and death, but today our obsession with a lifestyle that ignores questioning and skepticism has brought us to a decline. We emerged as a civilization of thinkers and scientists; alas we have demoted ourselves as slaves of our own political and economic bias. Rajit Roy
Nehru in his Independence Day speech had remarked-“A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the long suppressed soul of a nation finds utterance.” Today, 70 years after freedom, as we look at our India, we fail to reconcile with that utterance that was long sought. As a democracy, we have indeed gone far; we have evolved as a republic, but so far as our intellectual and philosophical culture is concerned, our progress seems stagnant. We are no longer the guardians of knowledge that we used to be. Our religious ego has banished the legacy of our philosophical quest. In the stream of shallow modernity, we have forsaken the grandeur of our thoughts. At the CERN laboratory in Geneva, the particle accelerator is guarded by an image of Shiva, performing his tandava as a symbol of the dynamism of cosmos. Our culture has gifted us with insights into the nature of the universe and the scheme of life and death, but today our obsession with a lifestyle that ignores questioning and skepticism has brought us to a decline. We emerged as a civilization of thinkers and scientists; alas we have demoted ourselves as slaves of our own political and economic bias. In our universities today, we no longer engage in discourses, we are too preoccupied with our grading system. Science has lost its charm amidst the desperate crowd of technology and the race for recognition. On Independence Day, I find it fitting that we introspect on our journey, as individuals and as a society, as a civilization in fact, and put our efforts in trying to answer the questions of our conscience. Our progress largely depends on how well we understand our legacy, how well we preserve our heritage, and how efficiently we evolve as an assortment of ideas and philosophy. “We are not cabin-dwellers, born to a life cramped and confined; we are meant to explore, to seek, to push the limits of our potential as human beings. The world of the senses is just a base camp: we are meant to be as much at home in consciousness as in the world of physical reality.” ~The Gita
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
About Me
Rajit Roy
An existential romantic, an agnostic and a prospective biologist. Archives
September 2018
Categories |