| Anything So Altered?
There has been a bit of permutation and combination in the Tarun Gogoi ministry after changes in the portfolios of some ministers and induction of Akon Bora as Social Welfare Minister replacing Ajanta Neog, who has been given the charge of PWD. What this means, only time will tell. But the fact that Mr Gogoi has been forced to effect a change in his ministry by circumstances that reflect on the performance of his government that is worse by any measure than its first term and on its perverse, anti-people policies, is not lost on the people of the State whose cause the Chief Minister gleefully tends to trample over when it comes to protecting illegal Bangladeshis and rewarding them with the status of Indian ‘minorities’. This time, Mr Gogoi’s is not a routine reshuffle of ministry. It has been necessitated primarily by (1) the Ripun Bora disgrace; (2) allegations of corruption against Bharat Narah whose department, Water Resources (now given to Prithivi Majhi), has become the greatest source of water woes for the State due to the kinds of works undertaken by it — patronizing contractors more interested in swindling money without the slightest fear of being caught because they know their political masters would back them up — that are a direct fraud on the people held to ransom by floods every year; and (3) the overall inertia of the Gogoi ministry in pursuing development agendas with honesty, sincerity and commitment to the cause of the people of the State.
Having said that, no one will believe that the Chief Minister is not aware of what faces him straight: the ‘privilege’ of presiding over a government that does not have a separate home and finance minister — even after the alteration of the ministry. Mr Gogoi continues to hold the two portfolios, so crucial for a State like Asom whose law-and-order situation has gone completely anarchic with the government have chosen to be blind to see and realize the gravity of it all, and whose financial health — due mainly to the anarchy — is a running commentary on the perilous direction the State is taking, despite the pompous claims of the State being the ‘fastest mover’ under Mr Gogoi’s ‘visionary’ stewardship. Since the State does not have ministers exclusively for the Home and Finance portfolios with the Chief Minister having to burden himself with the two — apart from Political, Personnel, Planning and Development, and any other departments not specifically allocated to other ministries — what is crystal clear and so very discernible even to the man in the street is that among the Congress MLAs in the State there are none who are competent enough or can be relied upon to discharge their duties as home and finance ministers. The Chief Minister has no option but to look after the two departments all on his own — which is a pity in the face of the Congress’ pretence and its overdrive to win votes on the strength of dull gimmickry and demagoguery.
This is not to be unfair to the Chief Minister though. If the retention of Home and Finance portfolios by Mr Gogoi is to be read as his proven abilities to steer the two and take the State forward for the people (not illegal Bangladeshis) of the State to benefit from, should not one wonder as to why Mr Gogoi should still cling on to other departments and not take over the one of Implementation of Assam Accord from Bhumidhar Barman as a personal initiative to hasten the whole process towards saving the Asomiyas? Or will that be too costly, given the benefits accruing from being the messiah of aliens — as time has proved?
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| Radhakrishnan on Religion
Dr Jyotsna Bhattacharjee
Religion has become one of the most controversial and misconceived topics in the present era. The word ‘‘religion’’ refers to a particular system of faith and worship. The Oxford dictionary says, ‘‘Religion is recognition on the part of man of some higher unseen power as having control of his destiny and as being entitled to destiny and as being entitled to obedience, reverence and worship.” As such, this dictionary meaning is applicable to diverse religions and there should not be any conflict among various religions. But it is not so and religion has been misinterpreted and misused by a section of opportunistic followers.
The present-day world is heading for disaster, and to rescue it from ruins, man has to do something. If we go deeper into this problem, we will find that the chaos has arisen due to man’s overemphasis on materialism; hence it is imperative to revive spiritualism to solve the problem. In spite of all the progress that has been achieved by science, man is tired, lonely and bored to death amidst everything. He is craving for peace and to be free from his anguished existence.
Dr S Radhakrishnan believes that for attaining peace, spirituality is indispensable and spirituality can be achieved only in religious experience, which is different from ordinary experience. Religious experience cannot be expressed through codes or rules. It is termed as experience because it produces an objective awareness — sort of inner satisfaction. It is called religious because of its uniqueness that cannot be found in any other experience.
Radhakrishnan says that religious experience is real and it has value. According to him, it has become a fashion to dismiss such experience as nonsensical and imaginative. But he says, “However much we may quarrel about the implications of experience, we cannot question the actuality of experience itself.” Radhakrishnan makes this statement due to the fact that while profound intuitions do not normally occur, their milder forms are possible in case of everybody; as for example, in the case of pure aesthetic joy. When we experience the illumination of a new knowledge, the ecstasy of poetry, the subordination of self to something greater, we have a faint glimpse of mystic moods. For instance, in the feeling of love, or in any feeling of that kind, we forget everything and get absorbed in some experience of the ‘‘beyond’’.
Radhakrishnan says that whenever a man does anything with sincerity, he has this kind of experience. In his Religion and Society, he says, “Any serious pursuit of ideas, any search after conviction, any adventure after virtue arises from resources whose name is religion. The search of the mind for beauty, goodness and truth, is the search for God. The child nursing at the breast of his mother, the illiterate savage gazing at the numberless stars, the scientist in his laboratory studying life under a microscope, the poet meditating in solitude on the beauty and pathos of the world, the ordinary man standing reverently before a sunlit sky, the Himalayan heights or a quiet sea, or before the highest miracle of all, a human being who is both great and good, they all possess dimly the sense of the eternal, the feeling of Heaven.”
It is a fact that man can forget his worries at least for sometime and that clearly indicates that it is possible for man to attain his salvation, which is the goal of every religion.
If we delve into history we will find that religion has often been identified with feeling, emotion, sentiment, instinct, cult or perception. Radhakrishnan says that all these views are right in what they affirm, but wrong in what they deny. Religion does contain all the elements stated above, but it is more than that. It may be said that religion is a synthesis of all those.
Radhakrishnan says that conflicts among different religions arise because emphasis is laid on one aspect of religion, ignoring others. But the other aspects are equally important. If one goes deeper, he will find that there is a basic unity among all religions and the conflicts of various religions do not affect the essence of religion. Actually these conflicts arise due to our misconception of religion. The followers of any particular religion lay emphasis on just one aspect of religion, and hence the conflicts arise. We interpret the Absolute Reality in our own way. We use certain symbols to represent the Absolute Reality and do not realize that at the heart of every symbolic representation there lies something beyond them. It is very true that we do need some symbolic forms for religious concentration, but we must realize that the form is not the reality. There may be diverse forms, but the reality is one. Because of diverse forms, different religions have come into existence, and all these conflicts as well.
Radhakrishnan says that “religion is not a creed or a code, but an insight into reality”. This insight reveals to man that there is something greater than himself, which is immanent in the human soul. This is the Absolute Reality which is present in every soul. But we are not aware of the truth. Therefore, Radhakrishnan states that religion is a kind of discipline, which enables man to ‘‘make a change in his own nature to let the Divine in him manifest himself”. Religion implies a faith in the ultimacy of absolute spiritual reality and a way to realize it.
According to Radhakrishnan, salvation is the ultimate goal of human beings and only through religious experience can salvation be attained. But it is not an easy task — one has to fight against himself to subdue his baser instincts. As Radhakrishnan says, “It is easy to fight non-human nature, forests, floods and wild beasts, but it is difficult to fight the passions in our heart, the illusions that we embrace.”
Discipline is extremely necessary to regulate our mental process. Disciplining human nature is meant for putting a restraint on the passions and feelings of man. Purity of mind is required for bringing a change in the intellectual standpoint, and purity of body stands for ethical discipline. Passions mislead a man and do immense harm to our spiritual endeavour. Hence they must be put under check. Man is a bundle of emotions and consequently he develops personal attachments and strong worldly bonds. That has to be controlled for getting a proper direction in life. Of course there is a great difference between emotions comprising passions and only religious emotion, which implies an emotional relationship of devotion and love to the Supreme Reality. Religious emotion is necessary for the development of our spiritual nature, while emotions comprising passions are detrimental to our spiritual progress.
Passions become prominent because of our overemphasis on ego due to ignorance. As long as we are confined to the ego, we cannot share the delight of the universal spirit. Therefore we must get rid of ignorance to attain true knowledge. It is extremely necessary to know the truth, which happens to be the reality. To realize the truth we must come out of the shell of body, life and mind. This is what Radhakrishnan calls “intellectual progress”.
The goal of every religion is to realize the Supreme Being. Man can achieve his goal only through an inward change in his mental process.
(Published on the occasion of Teachers’ Day, Dr S Radhakrishnan’s birth anniversary. The writer is a former HoD, Philosophy, Cotton College, Guwahati) |
| A Philosopher with a Difference
Dr Parag Das Gupta
“If India is to confront the confusion of our time, she must turn for guidance not to those who are lost in the mere exigencies of the passing hour but to her men of letters and men of science, to her poets and artists, to her discoverers and inventors.”
Thus said Dr Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, the greatest educationist of our time, whose lifelong commitment to education continues to influence the Indian academic community, who repeatedly exhorted the academic institutions to make use of India’s rich cultural past as a means of effecting social transformation. He was a staunch supporter of university autonomy and he wanted the universities to become those instruments of transformation by employing India’s rich cultural heritage to shape her great future. As he said, “a university stands for humanism, for tolerance, for the adventure of ideas and for the search for Truth”.
In his convocation address at Aligarh Muslim University, Dr Radhakrishnan said: “We come to the universities to be equipped with the knowledge and the skill by which we will be able to help the building of our country. Are we doing it?.. Are they giving them the knowledge and the skill which are essential for any kind of progress? You come here to study sciences, to study humanities, to study theology also which is not an unimportant science. Science itself is necessary because the wonders of science have transformed this world... It is wrong to think, as once upon a time Bake said, ‘the tree of life is sustained by art, the tree of death by science.’ It is a misleading conception; science may be abused but that is not the fault of science; that is the fault of man.” This is not the utterance of a philosopher or a mystic, but of a practical man looking at the world around him through the eyes of reason and common sense.
Dr Radhakrishnan was, however, equally alive to the use of humanities as a branch of study of no less importance. He felt that humanities tell us about our own nature and also how we have to grow from day to day, how to realize our ideas and aspirations; in other words, how to be materially successful in life. This is no doubt necessary and important, but equally essential is to find out and realize our own worth as human beings, what he calls the ‘‘central being’’ — and here comes the role of religion in education.
Learning cannot be complete and perfect as long as we do not reach the centre of our being from which all other things emanate. Important though they are, neither the sciences, nor the humanities, however, offer the ways and means to contact and comprehend that central being in us, to reveal to us what the living spirit of man is. It transpires, as such, that to Dr Radhakrishnan, sciences, humanities and religion are all equally essential if one has to be truly educated. But what kind of religion? He firmly asserts, “Religion, not in the sense of dogmatic, sectarian religion which makes us hate one another, but the true spirit of religion, inward awareness and outward compassion... It is that religion of recognizing humbly, respectfully, that there is a Superior Being, a Higher Reality of which we are all offshoots.”
As an academic administrator too, Dr Radhakrishnan displayed the same positive mindset and firmness of conviction. In the convocation address of Andhra University delivered in 1927, he pointed out that the university ideal was nothing new to India; for she had her Nalanda, Takshashila, Vikramshila, Benares, Nabadwip and other universities which contributed to the development of the higher mind of the country and its conscience as well as its sense of values and ideals that built her rich tradition and heritage. But he also noted with regret a gradual erosion of those values and the consequent fissure in teacher-student relationship which had always been so cordial, strong and rewarding in the past. But what disturbed him more was the lack of autonomy without which a university could never be progressive in the truest sense of the term, as he firmly believed. That accounted for the tremendous progress and all-round development witnessed by Andhra University during the five years when he was its Vice-Chancellor. He never allowed any governmental or other outside interference to bear upon the academic or administrative matters of the university, including appointments of the faculty members. He appointed the best available talents from all over the country without fear or favour, thereby displaying his openness of spirit and non-partisan mindset.
A similar mental toughness and commitment to a conviction was demonstrated by him when he joined Calcutta University as a Professor at the invitation of Sir Ashutosh Mukherjee in 1920. The same was reflected when he was appointed Vice Chancellor of Benares Hindu University, after his return from Oxford University, where he was Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions for three years since 1936. Dr Radhakrishnan never concealed his strong nationalistic fervour, but as the head of the institution, he had to face a lot of trouble to protect the students from getting into official wrath. Of course, in this respect too, his stature as a great scholar, a strict administrator and a fearless advocate of truth had much to do. |
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