I have always been such a mis-fit in companies I kept. At college, and later, I have developed friendships with people I had nothing in common with, come to think of it. I was not an intellectual, and never wish to be one, as meant by college street terminology. I was, am, and will be a down-to-earth and practical "lover of humanity", if you like. I hate organised politics with the same zeal I hate organised religion. And in both, I hate bigotry and rituals. And above all, I have a deep spirituality of my own, and am a Nationalist in the most positive sense of the term. "China's president is my president" is the most hated slogan I heard or read, because whoever is that foreign bloke, he will never be MY president, like he ostensiblty was for India's most anti-national of elements, the pseudo communists of India. "Indira is India and India is Indira" is the biggest lie that was spouted about India by the press, and I always abhorred the Congress party for their systamatic deconstruction of the Indian dream. Instead of wasting time in politics, which has never helped anyone from the begining of history, I prefer spending all my resources for the Bharat Sevashram Sangha, which helps humanity, period.
At college, every time an Ultra-Left Student Politics spokesperson talked about "revolution for the sake of the downtrodden", I invited him/her to come with me and teach children of those downtrodden at our school premises at Bowbazar, or be a volunteer at any of the Mother Teresa institutions, like I was. They never spoke to me again.
I am am unabashed nationalist. There is for me nothing holier than India. I have no other identity as a cultured Indian than that of a Bengali. My Bengaliness pervades me in every nook and recess of my existence. Yet, I love to embrace other cultures and nationalities and get to know and appreciate them. But, never at the expense of my motherland, India alias Bharatbarsha. Never at the expense of my Bengaliness alias Bangaliana.
My Bangaliana and my Indianness has nothing to do with my external attire or my habits. It lies in the value system I hold, the choices I make, I icons I respect and the love that is undiluted and unforced. Because every time you say Che Guevara, I say Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose. Every time you eulogise Karl Marx, I laughingly dismiss him with my preference for Swami Vivekananda. And the more you intelligently quote Pablo Neruda in hushed whispers, I would recite Rabindranath Tagore at the top of my voice.
As I tread the serpentine path to the top of the hill, I always look back. What I see never fails to fill me with sadness and fear... the slowly receding little town at the foothills from whence I started. I fear I might never be back to its familiar comforts. I get sad because the familiar town is getting away from me, gradually but surely it will soon be just a speck to my imperfect human eyes.
But then the town at the top of the hill attracts me, too. I know it will be beautiful, but unfamiliar. I view it with apprehension, but with positivity.
The town I left behind is receding with every turn of the road, and I can't make out shapes any more. But I discover a new pleasure in looking beyond the town into the horizon. It has considerably widened from the time I started walking up. Now, the town is just a part of a vaster plain, stretching all the way to the sea, I know. "So, this is what you get by climbing," I asked myself, "You get to much bigger canvases, and your small world is put into its right perspective in context of its surrounding."
I trod on, content that I am walking forward, and not backwards. Even if I return some day down this path, it will be a forward movement, because I will not come back to the same town I left. I will come back to a town that I know is part of a whole geography of things. When I left, it was a familiar place that existed in limbo, devoid of any contexts of its surroundings. There was no scale to it. Now, it is a part of the strategy of bigger things than the town or me. "So," I mused to myself, "it is all in the mind. How you look at things is more important than what they are."
-- Jayanta Ray
Feb 15th, 2013.
