Sri Aurobindo’s message on Aug. 15

Mahatma Gandhi may have been declared (where?) as the father of the nation, but Sri Aurobindo believed that the fact that India’s Independence Day fell on August 15, his birthday, had spiritual significance.

At the request of All India Radio, Sri Aurobindo  sent a message which was broadcast on Aug. 14, 1947.

The first point Sri Aurobindo made was that the ‘coincidence’ of  the date of Independence with his own birthday was not chance, but a mark of the ‘sanction and seal of the Divine Power’ that guided his steps.

Sri Aurobindo then went on to list his dreams and predict their achievement.

He had dreamed on a free India and it had become a reality. As part of that dream was his vision of a united India. It must and will be achieved, he wrote.

 

His second dream was that of a resurgent Asia with India playing a leading role.

The third dream was that for a ‘world union, forming the outer basis of a fairer brighter and nobler life for all mankind’.

The fourth dream was about India’s gift of spiritual knowledge to the world.

The fifth and consummating dream was that of a step in evolution which would raise man to a higher and larger consciousness (this, he knew, would begin the solution to the problems and perplexities that beset him since he began to think).

While Mother India is surely making her spiritual presence felt all over the world, it is a great sadness that here in India forces inimical to her innate genius are working against her.

How else would you explain, for instance, Assam being inundated with Muslim infiltrators from Bangladesh and the so-called national party encouraging the infiltration as part of its vote-bank politics?

While one can be sure that the tapas of India’s Mahatmas protects her in every way, its citizens too have to stand by their nation and serve it as best as they can. For India is not just a country, it is a civilization, it is a culture, it is a spiritual hope for the entire world.

The goddess of small things….

‘Pour me another small…’ Arundhati to bartender.

‘….Shall I make it large…you have been drinking umpteen smalls’.

She gives him an icy stare…(which he cannot see in the semi darkness)…but when she crushes the glass and it crumbles to pieces….he is shocked.

‘Did nobody tell you that I hate large things? That is why I am and wrote the god(ddess) of small things’

Thankfully the bartender has another customer he has to tend to and so does not have to answer or mull over crap.

As Arundhati drains the small on the rocks and awaits her next small hungrily….her inner demons issue out of her and begin their rock dance.

‘I hate large things…and the largest thing around me is India…how big…how dirty…I will smash it to a million pieces…I will keep smashing it with naxalite rockets, secessionist drone attacks…with paper tigers…I will smash it to such tiny bits that the last bit will be smaller than…than…me…and I will be the goddess of all small things…Goddess..Goddess…small…small…’

The bartender heard the small one slouching across and hurriedly poured the small…and dropped some ice into the glass…(better to keep this one cool…one cannot say what these puny monster will do next…perhaps ring up the proprietor and say something in a small husky intimate voice against him…could be fatal).

‘I hate everything big…big dams…for instance…and when I stand in front of one and raise my voice it echoes all over and I feel big…as big as a dam……(at the bartender). damn..you…don’t pour the small all over me’

‘I love Pakistan because it is small…and I love it when elite Indians…—a small section and I love them for it…loveable traitors they are – make me their goddess. I am small… I love small…small…small…’

It was time for the goddess of small things…to see the bill. She almost faints when she sees it.…it is big.

But when she thinks of the moolah she will make spewing venom at India with her small but infinitely crooked mouth, a warm feeling tingles all across her small heart.

‘The West will love me…hail me as the Katherine Mayo of the 21st century…..and my fame will be large large….so large that it will fill the world…and I will be the goddess of small things…but large…large..and larger…’

As the bartender poured out another large….he wondered what hat gotten into the puny creature that was jabbing at the air with thrusts of an imagined sword as it went..

As he saw the small thing exiting, he had the feeling that the bar had suddenly grown large. How much space some small things occupy, he thought..

Sania set to spark a mania?

After scandalising some Muslim conservative fringes with her short skirts, Sania must have warmed many a heart with her choice of Pakistani cricketer Shoab Malik as her groom.

But possibly, other than short-term love or infatuation, greater calculations on a boom in TRP and its implications on boosting her image in the media, swayed the tennis star with a hard forehand.

Her ‘chaman ki asha’ is also going to delight the proponents of ‘aman ki asha’ with a neighbour who is actively involved in killing Indians by sending terrorists of various hues to wage war on it. Would it be ironical for the couple to be feted at the Taj, the same venue on which Kasab and his comrades inflicted blood gore and fire.

The Padma Shri and Arjuna award winning player of India has opted for a man who is not even a good loser. Receiving the runners-up trophy at the end of the T-20 final in Johannesburg in 2007, Malik was thanking a pan-Muslim fraternity for supporting Pakistan.

He said something like, “I want to thank you back home (in) Pakistan and where the Muslim lives all over the world”.

With this sort of attitude as well as poor communication skills, will he be able to keep a meaningful conversation with his prospective wife, is the question.

You must also remember that the would-be groom was (temporarily) banned by his country’s cricket board for ”causing infighting within the team”. Will he be able to avoid it in his own close-knit team of two?

One only hopes that patriotism or the lack of it, tennis, or cricket, or any other extraneous consideration, does not come between the relationship of the two persons.

For, even just as the great ‘progressives’ of India are celebrating the supreme court’s green signal to live in couples, two celebrities are going in for the much maligned institution of marriage flinging even nationalistic considerations into the dustbin.

Two international sports-persons have decided to ignore national boundaries to play the biggest game of marriage. We will have to wait to see whether their team will win, or whether in the end, religion, nationalism, or just plain expediency will overtake them!

M.F. Hussain sentenced to ninety lashes in Saudi Arabia, sentence in abeyance after India’s intervention

(This report is unofficial, so please take it with a daub of paint).

After getting Qatar citizenship ‘India’s pride’ M.F.Hussain was emboldened to travel west to hold an exhibition of his paintings of nude Hindu gods in Riyadh, the Saudi Arabian capital.

The exhibition went on for three days because many of the Arab artlovers who saw the paintings could not make head or tail of the great Indian Pic-ass-o (hyphenation not intended).

When the implications to the anatomy of some of the paintings (Durga on a lion, for one) began to sink in, the Arabs were scandalised. What sort of bestiality is this, they cried out. The imagination of the Arabs, who love their camels, was ignited by Hussain’s libidinous leaps of genius.

Under a legal system which began with the inception of Islam in the region 1300 years ago, the Saudi authorities earmarked ninety lashes for Hussain.

Curiously the bearded painter is a nonagenarian and the number of lashes corresponds almost to every year of his life.

But after India, whose passport he has surrendered upon getting Qatar citizenship, made importunate pleas on his behalf, the Saudi authorities have decided to keep the sentence in abeyance.

‘Fully clothed series on camels’

The exhibition in Riyadh has been quietly suspended, and the paintings smuggled back to Qatar.

Meanwhile, Hussain is said to be contemplating a series on camels. A special feature of this series is that all the camels will be fully clothed.

Good Neighbour and German Bakery

Shahrukh Khan’s good neighbour across the Arabian sea gestures in PoK, that there is going to be a blast in Pune, and up goes German Bakery near the Jewish Shabad house in smoke with foreigners there being despatched without visa to the ultimate foreign destination.

The Good Neighbour stabs India in the heart, stomach and the soul…and all that ‘My Name is Khan’ can do is go to the United States and yell at the President that I am Khan and I am not a terrorist!

Pakistan is the Duryodhana that was born with India…It was born with the wrong genes and will never cease from the dictates of its distorted soul.

Yes, Pakistanis were Indians before they chose to be baptised in the waters of communalism. But down the decades Pakistan’s spirit has been so caught up with hatred for the other rather than self-respect for itself, that the demons of the mind have come to acquire a life and soul of their own.

Not that all the chaps are bad…The human soul defies even the crooked commandments of a hate-filled polity….and flowers despite the stymying injections at the root.

The only language that a braggart and bully understands is the language of strength. Untill that happens, god knows in what manner, the challenges from across the border will never stop.

Aman ki ashas…won’t work. Not even Aman ki Badshahs can work.

What then will happen to Duryodhana? What price will Bharat pay to rid itself of the thug from across the border? The ball is in the court of the future.

For one, Shahrukh may not what know sort of neighbour we have.

We know.

We may begin by saying that there was a gas cylinder blast in German bakery. Then we may point fingers at IM. But the finger of the compass will turn to our good neighbour…

The good neighbour will offer more talks…and our good businessmen will offer Aman ki Ashas and Chaman ki Ashas…Until India itself will become like its neighbour.

That is what our good neighbour wants. A broken and crushed India.

That will never happen.

Because Bharat is born from the wombs of Mother Earth with the song of peace on its lips and with the mantra of Om Shanti in its soul.

Bharat is born not to die in hate but to live in love.

Swami Vivekananda through Sri Aurobindo’s eyes

January 12, 2010 (Swami Vivekananda’s birth anniversary)

Swami Vivekananda, who was born this day 147 years ago is an inspirational figure of India’s renaissance in the modern era.

While asserting India’s spiritual message through the gnostic wisdom of the Vedanta, the Swami correlated the concept of an all-pervading divinity to the need to raise the Indian masses from the poverty and privations they were going through under British rule.

He was the guiding force in welding together the disciples of Sri Ramakrishna, whose prime disciple he was, into the Ramakrishna Mission. The potentiality for ‘divinity’ of all human beings, the harmony of all religions, and serving mankind in the spirit of serving God are among the important ideals of the Ramakrishna Math (monastic order) and Mission (service organisation).

Sri Aurobindo, the Cambridge educated classical scholar who returned to India and became ultra nationalist, was about nine years younger than Vivekananda. Yogi, mystic and poet, he ‘evolved a new method of spiritual practice called the ‘Integral Yoga’, and put it into practice in the ashram at Pondicherry through his spiritual collaborator, The Mother.

The ultimate aim of Sri Aurobindo’s discipline, who envisaged all life as yoga, is the divine transformation of human nature. Pondicherry, where the Sri Aurobindo ashram is located is the centre of the movement. The Aurobindo Society, and Auroville, the international city of dawn, also carry the impress of Sri Aurobindo’s thought and Mother’s action.

The organisations connected with these two seminal personalities of the great Indian renaissance have ostensibly different aims and objectives. But Sri Aurobindo had great respect and reverence both for Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda, and even saw them in yogic visions. He expressed his sentiments regarding both in no uncertain terms.

When Sri Aurobindo was in Alipore prison (1908-09), charged with treason by the British government, he constantly heard the voice of Vivekananda speaking to him for a fortnight. He felt the presence of Vivekananda. ‘‘The voice spoke only on a special and limited but very important field of spiritual experience and it ceased once it had finished saying all that it had to say on the subject’’.

According to Sri Aurobindo, he had also received messages from Swami Vivekananda’s guru, Sri Ramakrishna. While Sri Aurobindo was at Baroda (1893-1906), the message was, ‘’Arobindo..Mandir Karo…Mandir Karo’’. The second, soon after Sri Aurobindo landed in Pondy (1910), was ‘a direction to form the higher self in the lower self’. The third message from Sri Ramakrishna came on 19 Oct. 1912: It said : ‘ Make complete sanyaasa of karma, Make complete sanyaasa of thought, Make complete sanyaasa of feeling, This is my last utterance.’

Sri Aurobindo looked upon Swami Vivekananda as a mighty spiritual force, and perceived ‘‘his influence still working gigantically’’ on the soul of the Mother (India) and in the souls of her children. He was certain that Ramakrishna had expected him to be a great power to change the world mind in a spiritual direction. Aurobindo interpreted Vivekananda’s rise, ‘his going forth into the world as marked out by the Master’, as the first visible sign to the world the ‘‘India was awake not only to survive but also to conquer’’.

The sayings of Ramakrishna and the writings and speeches of Vivekananda’s were Sri Aurobindo’s first introduction to Indian spiritual experience, though their influence on him was ‘purely mental’ .

The view of Vivekananda on the diversity of religious expressions in India was greatly admired and reiterated by Sri Aurobindo. The European mind ‘cherished the aggressive and quite illogical’ idea of a single religion for all mankind…and so it considered the endless variety of Indian philosophy and religion as not only bewildering and wearisome but also useless. But Vivekananda came and asserted not only the unity of all religions (based on Ramakrishna’s realisations), but also that this unity must necessarily express itself in an increasing variety of forms.

Sri Aurobindo own realisations underscored this fact. Along with Vivekananda he asserted that the perfect state of the unity of all religions would come when each man had his own religion (for spiritual upliftment suited to his nature).

Sri Aurobindo goes on to say that Vivekananda came to assert that in every one of the three hundred million men (and women, of India at the time), from the Raja on his throne to the coolie at his labour, from the Brahmin absorbed in his Sandhya to the Pariah walking shunned of men, God Liveth. ‘’We are all gods and creators, because the energy of God is within us and all life is creation’’.

Like Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo too had the vision that India must be reborn, because ‘‘in her rebirth is the future of the world’’. With Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo too held that India has the undisputed right to extend spiritual sway over the world. This must not of course be understood as some sort of spiritual imperialism…it is the reading of India’s destiny based on deep introspection.

Only a yogi of Sri Aurobindo’s intuitive grasp, could put Swami Vivekananda’s life in proper perspective. He quotes an incident from the Swami’s life to underscore the latter’s spiritual authority and power.
The reference is to a retort by Vivekananda to a Madras pundit’s objection on the basis that ‘Shankara does not say so’’. The swami shot back saying, ‘But I, Vivekananda, say so’.

Sri Aurobindo points out that that ‘I Vivekananda’ may seem to the ordinary eye as the Himalaya of egotism. But it is not what it seems. It is the truth of Vivekananda’s spiritual experience, and the attitude of the fighter who as the representative of something great cannot allow himself to be put down or belittled, says Sri Aurobindo.

Sri Aurobindo is not a mere apologist of the Swami. He is a fraternal yogi, whose deep intuitions make him singularly suited to understand Vivekananda in correct light.

The teachings of Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo asserted, combine the full light of the knowledge of the Upanishads with all life and action in a unique synthesis.

Sri Aurobindo compares Vivekananda with Buddha (the latter indeed was a favourite of the Swami!), saying that just as the Buddha, after discovering Nirvana, turned back to open the way for others, Vivekananda, ‘’drawn by the Absolute, feels the call of the disguised Godhead in humanity and most the call of the fallen and the suffering, the call of the self to the self in the obscure body of the universe’’.

(The All India Magazine, a monthly magazine of Sri Aurobindo Society, Pondicherry has published a culling of Sri Aurobindo’s references to Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda. Through Mother’s blessings it was my good fortune to translate it into Tamil and get it published. It was one of the most heartening experiences of my life).

Rajaji : the action stopped only at the end

 Dec. 25, 2009

This is the day 40 years back when the giant finally slept after a tumultuous 94 years of struggle against British rule and Indian misrule! Quite a guy, this Rajagopalachari! Look at what he does as an octogenarian.

In 1959 (aged 81), he starts the all-India ‘Swatantra party’ in opposition to beloved friend Jawaharlal’s Congress. An old but dauntless man poking his walking stick at the giant-wheel of Congress corruption and Jawaharlal Nehru’s ‘dreamy’ acceptance of Socialist doctrine.

 Swatantra would be a party for free market economy and against ‘permit and licence quota raj’ , the mother of all corruptions in free India, ‘in which money, unlike water, flows upwards’!

Rajaji’s views would find application in India after three decades. No wonder he was famous for gazing into the future!

Comparably, that was a local Rakshasha. He finds an international demon in the atom bomb and campaigns against it with the enthusiasm of a student activist. More or less a 19th century man (he was born in 1878), the 20th and 21st century’s apocalyptic concerns stir up a ‘crusading enthusiam’ in his ageless breast!

US president John F. Kennedy hears the elderly ‘civil resister’ with rapt attention as he argues the case against the A-bomb. (The visiting elder, on his part, is simply astounded by the US president’s complete informality! At first he has not realized that the young man who has come in is Kennedy, and asks, ‘Am I in the presence of the President of the United States’!).

 India’s envoy to the US, B.K. Nehru, who was present with Rajaji and Kennedy, would later write in his reminiscences, that it was one the best argued cases he had ever heard. ‘‘I have had the good fortune of being present when great men have argued their points of view with each other…But I have seldom seen a case presented with such lucidity of argument, such economy of speech, such felicity of language, such gentleness of manner, and such command of facts as Rajaji displayed that day’’.

It was not an idealistic shot at peace from a political pontiff…it was an argument for sanity, the rights of other nations and universal well-being without endangering the United States own interests, given the facts of the case. And the man arguing of behalf of the world was a man of 83 and a half summers!

After the stop at White House, the old man makes a beeline to the Vatican for a meeting with the Pope. It turns out that his talks with the Pope are not barren; later there is a papal circular (encyclical) against nuclear tests.

In Madras, for the 1962 general elections, the Swatantra party gives tacit support to the DMK, the same party that had carried out a relentless attack against Rajaji in 1954 for his new educational scheme! Rajaji campaigns with Anna, and for the first time since independence paves the way for a credible opposition in the state : the DMK with 50 seats and the Swantantra with eight.

In 1965, never afraid of contradictions, the 87-year-old campaigner fights shoulder to shoulder with the Kazhagamites against Hindi imposition. He had been the first to impose Hindi back in the late thirties when premier of Madras presidency. But then there was no fear or question of northern domination and southerners becoming second class citizens. All Indians were anyhow second class under the British!

Coming out from near death in August 1966, Rajaji and Anna engineer a DMK led front to victory in March 1967. Long before Mayavati thought of a Brahman-Dalit front, Rajaji is implementing a Brahmin-non-Brahmin grouping ! Outgoing Congress chief minister Bhaktavatsalam sees a ‘new virus sweeping the state’, while Rajaji sees a ‘burst of political health’ . Who is right?

When Anna dies within a year after a fight with cancer, nonagenarian Rajaji is at the Marina mouring him with a frozen heart, for ‘the people of Tamil Nadu have lost their right arm’.

When the Congress splits in 1969, and the Karunanidhi led DMK joins Indira, Rajaji is back with his long-time Congress rival Kamaraj, with the ‘Save Democracy’ slogan, at the age of 91! How times change, and venerable political pandits are made to look like errant schoolboys! But the old man has in view the bigger picture of a dictatorial Congress’s defeat, and plods on.

The figure of the enemy has got blurred, the battle lines seem fuzzy…but the bow is in one’s hands, and the arrow has been aimed…one musn’t dither! Hark the command of the Geethacharya!

When the Karunanidhi government is returned victorious after the 1971 mid term polls, prohibition is shown the door. The old man makes a visit in ‘uncommonly heavy rains’ to Gopalapuram. Were the rains a prophecy of the coming decades when every street corner would have a government run liquor store and every street would boast of a drunkard lying on the pavement?

The DMK split in October 1972 : MGR starts his own Kazhagam after being expelled. Rajaji is on the dot : ‘The DMK will be the loser in this business’. (Perhaps even he would not have imagined that the ‘business’ itself would be lost to the DMK for 13 long years).

The end come, on Dec. 25, at the very hour at which I am typing these words. The old lieutenant turned political foe, EVR, who was at the hospital, turns up the next day too at the Triplicane cremation. He sits in his wheel-chair mulling god knows over what!

It is a life of ceaseless action…much of it described here carried out after finishing the translation of the Ramayana, which he considered his greatest contribution to society. He translated the Mahabharata too, and bravely trudged on in the Kurukshetra of politics, where truth seldom wins. But dharma has to plod on, even if on one leg.

Nobody dared question his spotless honesty and integrity, though in the murky swamps of caste politics many had gotten away with accusing him of being casteist. It was the bitterest cup he ever drank.

 (Rajmohan Gandhi’s ‘Rajaji – A Life’ is a meticulously chronicled work on Rajaji. It has been my companion for quite some time. Dr. H.V.Hande’s short Tamil biography ‘Mootharignar Rajaji’ is also a useful book…Many publications on Rajaji occupy a separate shelf in my personal library)

Picture – Courtesy Indian Express – Now…The New Indian Express .