Swami Vivekanandas Message Series - II Two New Indian Festivals

Swami Vivekanandas Message Series - II Two new Indian festivals Today is 26th January 2014. It is celebrated in our College, in fact all over India, as Republic Day. On 15th August, we celebrated Independence Day here. These celebrations are new to this country. Now, what do these days signify? As I had mentioned during our 15th August celebrations, we were an enslaved people for a long time, for about 400 years. We believed that governance was the Kings job, and that we were all subjects. On 15th August, all that changed overnight. We were each of us kings in our own right. All the power lodged in the absolute monarchs that ruled this wonderful land for so long now got invested in each one of us. We became politically free. Freedom however is more troublesome than slavery, for most people. As Eric Fromm has pointed out in his masterly books A sane society and Escape from freedom, freedom is actually terrifying to most people. Why is that so? Freedom is terrifying because freedom means responsibility. Up until 15th August 1947, whenever we were dissatisfied with anything in our life, we could conveniently blame it on our rulers. From that day onwards, no matter what goes wrong in our country, we have no one to blame but ourselves! Now, that is indeed terrifying, isnt it? It means that each one of us has to start thinking in national terms. We all do small, seemingly insignificant jobs; some of us are students, some of us teachers, some again are janitors & drivers. Yet, we have to develop a sense of the nation as a whole. The nation has to be factored-in in all our deliberations. Once we become free politically, the entire burden of governance was upon our own shoulders. So, we needed some guidelines along which we could work. We needed a set of rules and regulations to direct our actions so that we dont work at cross purposes. It is indeed a matter of great good fortune for all of us that the founding fathers of this Nation decided unanimously that we would adopt a Constitution for this purpose. So a committee of some of the best brains of the country of that day sat together for about 800 days and finalized a written set of rules and regulations. We have the largest written Constitution in the world. On 26th January 1950, we formally adopted this Constitution. We became a sovereign republic on that day. What then does this day signify? It signifies something called the Rule of the law. There are two ideas in governance; one is called Rule by the law and the other is called Rule of the Law. Rule by the law means that there is a person, or a group of persons who ensure that all the people live according to certain rules and regulations in the country. Of course, they themselves are immune to those rules and regulations. The rulers themselves are not governed by those rules! Rule of the law signifies that everyone in the nation, even the groups of people who rule the nation, are governed as much by those rules as anyone else! This kind of living is something that is absolutely new in our country. Never before has everyone been treated on the same standards here. Since it is a new phenomenon, it is still taking some time to take roots, but, we have already started getting results. For one, the putrefying institution of caste has been completely shaken to its roots! A person may be of any caste by birth, but in India, he/she can achieve anything one aspires for. Even the so called traditional egalitarian countries like USA havent had a woman head of state while we have already had two! It took more than 200 years for USA to elect a black man to its highest office, while we started off with a low caste man as our first Deputy Prime Minister. And within 50 years of gaining independence, we had a low caste person adorning the highest office of President of India!

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Swami Vivekanandas Message Series - II Two New Indian Festivals

Today, whether a Govt temp or the Chief Minister embezzles public funds, both get the same treatment under the law of the land. We have seen many examples of this egalitarian process within the first 50 years of our political independence. So, although our country seems to be a huge mass of confusions and contradictions, the Rule of Law has taken firm roots here in India. The Rule of Law may be considered as the equivalent of homeostasis in living beings. It was the advent of homeostasis that enabled the evolution of primates into Homo sapiens. Similarly, Rule of Law will enable this nation of ours to achieve great glory in the years to come. It is interesting to note that Swami Vivekananda specifically said that it is high time that our society had a new Dharma Shastra that would govern our social behavior. What did he mean? Firstly, we must understand that there never existed a political entity called India. India, as a Nation in this world, was the creation of the British. What existed for over 5000 years was a group of independent kingdoms, with constantly changing political boundaries. However, all the kingdoms lying within the geographical confines of the Himalayas and the Indian Ocean were governed by certain law books called Dharma Shastras. These law books were compiled by men of high caliber like Manu, Yajnavalkya, Narada, Vishnu, etc. who were acclaimed spiritual leaders of their times too. Since the basis on which the subject people were governed was the same, the political changes did not matter at the ground level. Hence, these people never developed any political sense, in contrast to the developments in Europe. However, when the British colonized this region under the British Crown, they did a good job of integrating certain aspects of the existing laws with certain basic laws governing human society in Britain giving the people of this region, for the first time in its known history, a sense of political unity. Although civilization existed here for over 5000 years, never before were they all ruled by a single authority; neither under the Guptas, nor the Mughals, nor even under the Mauryas! It was the British, who, while attempting to colonize this motley population, ended up in uniting them under one Law, one currency, one system of education and one language! Swami Vivekananda was able to discern this wonderful effect of the British domination over us and therefore believed that it was now time for these people to have a new Dharma Shastra that would reflect the changed social circumstances, especially the collapse of the caste system and the rise of the egalitarian system. However, he also firmly believed that, unlike in the past, no spiritual leader should attempt to dictate the social norms and that exalted persons from within the society, from all walks of life, must frame this new Shastra. He had his strong reasons for saying this. And thus, we believe that the present Constitution of India is but a fulfilment of this desire of the Great Swami. Swami Vivekananda made another most interesting observation with regard to the nature of the Indian people. He said repeatedly that if anything political or social or economic has to be taught to the Indian masses, it has to be couched in the language of religion. It is only then that they will understand it and not otherwise. This is because religion is the backbone of this nation. Take a look at the history of the different community festivals that we have in different parts of the country. Bengal has its Durga Puja, Kali Puja and Jagaddhatri Puja. Maharashtra has its Ganesha Puja. North India has its Rama Navami and Sri Krishna Janmasthami. The monks have their Kumbha Mela, Gangasagar Mela, Amarnath Yatra, Kailas-Mansarovar Yatra, etc. If we study the history of each of these community celebrations, we will not fail to see that each of them was initiated by some particular king or royal family with an aim of uniting the people of their region into a cohesive unit. Over a

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Swami Vivekanandas Message Series - II Two New Indian Festivals

protracted period of time, these celebrations achieve sanctity and its own cultic status. And each of them revolves around a particular deity. In December 1893, on the last island of the sub-continent, Swami Vivekananda sat for meditation, after touring all over the length and breadth of the land. What was unique about this particular meditation was that he meditated not on his Ishta Devata, but on India, conceiving her as a Deity! This was unique. We must acknowledge that conceiving ones Nation as a Goddess or as a Mother-Figure was not something new in human history. We have thus had the conceptions of Germania and Liberty. Right here at home, in fact, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee had long before Swamiji formulated such a conception in his famous novel Ananda Math. However, Swamiji did something more than just conceptualizing. His philosophy of Vedanta enabled him to visualize the Nation as a Mother-Goddess. And his highly developed spiritual insight perceived that She was not just a figment of imagination of poets, but a living entity, who had been awakened by Sri Ramakrishna in the spiritual realm. He said once, On our work depends the coming of the India of the future. She is there ready waiting. She is only sleeping. Arise and awake and see her seated here on her eternal throne, rejuvenated, more glorious than she ever was this motherland of ours. The idea of God was nowhere else ever so fully developed as in this motherland of ours, for the same idea of God never existed anywhere else. He came out of that unprecedented meditation and formulated a new kind of ritual of worshiping her. A few years later, he returned from the West and again toured the length and breadth of India, rousing the sleeping deity with his fiery speeches, just as a High Priest does with his powerful chanting of Mantras. And then, he established the Ramakrishna Mission with a view to initiating the new ritual for this recently awakened deity, in the form of worship of the Virat, [i.e. the visible form of this MotherGoddess] which the monks of the Ramakrishna Mission now perform through their various activities. Thus, for us, 26th January is not just a day on which we remember the efforts of the founding fathers of India in establishing the Rule of Law. It is something much more than that. This is the day when we worship our Mother-Goddess, the living deity, our Nation. We believe that as time passes, as the years roll by, these two celebrations Independence Day & Republic Day will achieve a status very similar to Durga Puja or Ganesha Puja in India. For the fiat has already gone forth and none can stop the consequences from occurring anymore! ***************

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