A CALL TO THE CITIZENS OF THE NOONS OF THE FUTURE
Sharad M. Joshi
[Text of a speech delivered by the author at The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda
on the Occasion of Independence Day on August 15, 2006]
Dear syndicate and senate members, deans of the faculties, teachers and students, ladies and gentlemen and the members of the administrative staff, ‘greetings from The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda on the sixtieth independence day of our motherland, India’.
Our esteemed and honourable vice-chancellor Dr. Manoj Soni has conveyed his heartfelt greetings on this sacred day of India’s independence to the University Parivar.
"Sri Aurobindo’s life and
his message in his profuse works
of thirty five volumes
hinge upon one refrain.
Man is essentially spiritual,
and in the progress march
of evolution, now,
he is poised to work for the next step
in the evolution of a spiritual man
leading to the manifestation
of a supramental being,
the god, the Devmanava."
Fifty nine years ago, we achieved independence and gained our rightful place in the comity of free nations. Our freedom marked a new chapter in the future ‘march of mankind’ for it opened up a possibility of immense and untold potentiality for humanity. For with independence, India gathered a new force of rejuvenation. Whereas several civilisations like those of Greece, Rome and Egypt declined and died and are effaced from the face of this earth, India of old outlived the forces of decadence and with achieved independence entered into a phase of revival of her life force and spirit force. After a few millennia of immense labour of a splendid creation of a rich and many sided civilisation and culture, she went to sleep and rest for a thousand years to recoup her life forces and mind forces and with the renaissance in the later part of nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century showed a sign of re-awakening. After half a century of struggle of a unique kind — a struggle on the basis of the principles of non-violence — she was victorious to regain her freedom of choice, to choose her own future and make it accepted by her own children and humanity at large.
With her splendid spiritual culture of a unique kind in the past and the potentiality of an even more splendid culture in the future, she is poised today to make a tremendous choice of the future, a future in which the first dreams of humanity in French Revolution — the dreams of liberty, equality and fraternity — can be made practical and realised in a concrete way in a peaceful and harmonious human race of the future. For this, she is experimenting with the idea of unity in diversity instead of uniformity in place of diversity, in a general political atmosphere of democracy. She must triumph in this experiment and weld the diversity of Indian races into a harmonious unity. But to achieve this, she must first acquire wealth. She, now with her knowledge power gaining credence, is on her way to become a developed nation. But what will she do with the wealth and development? Will she create another hegemony of her kind like the one prevailing today of which the leaders of the developed nations of today are the torch-bearers? If she does that, she will lose her soul.
