What was the secret of that gigantic intellectuality, spirituality and superhuman moral force which we see pulsating in the Ramayana and Mahabharata, in the ancient philosophy, in the supreme poetry, art, sculpture and architecture of India? What was at the basis of the incomparable public works and engineering achievements, the opulent and exquisite industries, the great triumphs of science, scholarship, jurisprudence, logic, metaphysics, the unique social structure? What supported the heroism and self-abandonment of the Kshatriya, the Sikh and the Rajput, the unconquerable national vitality and endurance? What was it...

The quality and soundness of a culture depends entirely on its education system. Today, under the complete influence of the utilitarian spirit, the chief aim of education – which should be “… to help the growing soul to draw out that in itself which is best and make it perfect for a noble use” and “…not to prepare a man to succeed in life and society, but to increase his perfectibility to its utmost..” – has become to prepare oneself to “….pass examinations with success, for with diplomas, certificates and...

- By Dr. Ramesh K. Bhatia The present educational system in Indian cities is crumbling under its own weight. Far from helping the best to grow from within, children right from the beginning are crushed under the weight of information and given false values. All originality, independent thinking is almost completely forced out by the time school is finished. And then begins the round of college admissions. In Delhi alone, hundreds and thousands of students seek admission to colleges and only a small percentage gets into a decent college. The remaining,...

Medical professionals are rarely seen to offer treatment out of any sense of service or duty. If the driving motive behind medical profession is money and fulfillment of the medical practitioner’s own physical and vital desires and interests, then the relation between a doctor and a patient becomes purely commercial like that of a buyer and a seller. In such a case, nothing good can be expected from the medical system and it truly becomes, and in fact has become, a nemesis for the country. Here is a glimpse of...

America is not a Christian nation. We are, it is true, a nation founded by Christians, and according to a 2008 survey, 76 percent of us continue to identify as Christian (still, that’s the lowest percentage in American history). Of course, we are not a Hindu—or Muslim, or Jewish, or Wiccan—nation, either. A million-plus Hindus live in the United States, a fraction of the billion who live on Earth. But recent poll data show that conceptually, at least, we are slowly becoming more like Hindus and less like traditional Christians...

It might be an exaggeration to say that the history of a nation or civilization shapes the character of its people but nobody can deny the reality that it has a significant bearing on the way in which the people of a nation or members of a society evaluate themselves. The presentation of the history of a nation is one of the most important factors which determine its existing religious, social, political and economic structure. History can thus be of critical importance, particularly when distorted and misinterpreted and guided by...

“August 15th, 1947 is the birthday of free India. It marks for her the end of an old era, the beginning of a new age. But we can also make it by our life and acts as a free nation an important date in a new age opening for the whole world, for the political, social, cultural and spiritual future of humanity. August l5th is my own birthday and it is naturally gratifying to me that it should have assumed this vast significance. I take this coincidence, not as a...

Sri Aurobindo wrote in 1919, “Apart from all phenomena of decline or deterioration we should recognise without any sophistical denial those things in our creeds of life and social institutions which are in themselves mistaken and some of them indefensible, things weakening to our national life, degrading to our civilisation, dishonouring to our culture. A flagrant example can be found in the treatment of our outcastes. There are those who would excuse it as an unavoidable error in the circumstances of the past; there are others who contend that it...

“This great and ancient nation was once the fountain of human light, the apex of human civilisation, the exemplar of courage and humanity, the perfection of good Government and settled society, the mother of all religions, the teacher of all wisdom and philosophy. It has suffered much at the hands of inferior civilisations and more savage peoples; it has gone down into the shadow of night and tasted often of the bitterness of death. Its pride has been trampled into the dust and its glory has departed. Hunger and misery...

“India is a protected land, the land of Sri Aurobindo.” *** “Spiritual aspiration develops very strongly and spontaneously as soon as one comes to India. Those are graces. Graces, because it is the destiny of the country, it has been so through out her history, and because she has always been turned much more upward and inward than outward. She is now losing all that and wallowing in the mud, but anyway…it was like that and still is like that.” “India is not the earth, rivers and mountains of this...

“If Britons love England with all her faults, why should we fail to love India whose faults were whittled down to an irreducible minimum till foreign conquests threw the whole society out of gear? But instead of being dominated by the natural ambition of carrying the banner of such a civilisation all over the world, we are unable to maintain its integrity in its own native home. This is betraying a trust. This is unworthiness of the worst type. We have not been able to add anything to this precious...

What is Mother India Each nation is a Shakti or power of the evolving spirit in humanity and lives by the principle which it embodies. India is the Bharata Shakti, the living energy of a great spiritual conception, and fidelity to it is the very principle of her existence. For by its virtue alone she has been one of the immortal nations; this alone has been the secret of her amazing persistence and perpetual force of survival and revival. Even as the individual has a psychic being which is his...

Sri Aurobindo’s Translation Mother, I bow to thee! Rich with thy hurrying streams, Bright with thy orchard gleams, Cool with thy winds of delight, Dark fields waving, Mother of might, Mother free. Glory of moonlight dreams Over thy branches and lordly streams,— Clad in thy blossoming trees, Mother, giver of ease, Laughing low and sweet! Mother, I kiss thy feet, Speaker sweet and low! Mother, to thee I bow. Who hath said thou art weak in thy lands, When the swords flash out in twice seventy million hands And seventy million...

The Resurgent India, is dedicated to the integral resurgence of India so that it may assume its rightful place among the community of nations and, by its powerful example and spiritual influence, open for humanity the way leading to its supreme fulfillment. To assume its true position and to fulfil its true role, India must find back and manifest her true soul which, at present, seems to be completely covered up by an overwhelming commercialism which has arisen out of an onslaught on her of the Western spirit of a...

Mother Durga! Rider on the lion, giver of all strength, Mother, beloved of Siva! We, born from thy parts of Power, we the youth of India, are seated here in thy temple. Listen, O Mother, descend upon earth, make thyself manifest in this land of India. Mother Durga! From age to age, in life after life, we come down into the human body, do thy work and return to the Home of Delight. Now too we are born, dedicated to thy work. Listen, O Mother, descend upon earth, come to...

Almost a hundred years ago, in 1914, Sri Aurobindo wrote, “….Mankind can never be wholly rational, because our race is essentially built up of various elements, none of which can be eliminated from its system of being. It is our nature to be physical, animal, emotional & sensational as well as intellectual and the coldest thinker or most inexorable rationalist cannot escape from the constitution of our common nature. But mankind, under the great impulse which overtook it at a certain stage of its conscious activity, felt the need of rationalising,...

(a) What it is not Some critics have branded the Anna Hazare Movement (AHM) as motivated, illegal and extra-constitutional. Now we examine each of these in turn. i). Motivated The recent world wide movements against corrupt politicians and big business are anything but motivated. They are apparently and very visibly spontaneous eruptions of people’s bottled up emotions against the corrupt, unethical and sordid conduct of people in authority. The people who have dubbed it ‘motivated’ may themselves be motivated or confused or too cynical to believe that one can act...

The individualistic age of Europe had in its discovery fixed among the idea forces of the future two of a master potency which cannot be eliminated by any temporary action against them. “The first of these, now universally accepted, is the democratic conception of the right of all individuals as members of the society to the full life and the full development of which they are individually capable. It is no longer possible that we should accept as an ideal any arrangement by which certain classes of society should arrogate development and...

When the British fully took over India, they set upon establishing an intermediary race of Indians whom they could entrust with their work at middle and lower levels of government and administration. Again, ”1 Most of our pre-independence leaders belonged to this class and at independence not only the British education system, but the whole of their constitutional, judicial, legal and administrative system was blindly adopted and remains in effect even today virtually unchanged. Our post-independence leaders too, having been educated and groomed under this system, show little or no...

(a) What it is not Some critics have branded the Anna Hazare Movement (AHM) as motivated, illegal and extra-constitutional. Now we examine each of these in turn. i). Motivated The recent world wide movements against corrupt politicians and big business are anything but motivated. They are apparently and very visibly spontaneous eruptions of people’s bottled up emotions against the corrupt, unethical and sordid conduct of people in authority. The people who have dubbed it ‘motivated’ may themselves be motivated or confused or too cynical to believe that one can act...

There would be no better time to ponder over the farce and paradoxes of India’s democratic process and social ‘welfare’ policies than now, with the NFSB (National Food Security Bill) 2011 providing us with just that opportunity. With the NFSB being paraded aggressively in terms of ‘right to food’, …the nation is once again being tricked into sponsoring another major political gimmick of the Congress party, and above all, the Gandhi family. Since when did Mrs Sonia Gandhi and her elitist band of NAC ‘intellectuals’ assume the authority to so...

a. The Basic or Common Paradigm An overwhelming proportion of humanity has always – through all the ages – been living, predominantly, in the egoism of their physical being (includes the physical vital and the physical mind) – with their consciousness dominated by the pursuit of its interests. The extent of this domination or the colour of the pursuit depends on the degree of the psychological development of the individual and the colour of the age prevailing in the collective atmosphere. For example, in the Satya or Krita Yuga of...

The humiliating and discouraging historical record of the Lokpal Bill in the Indian Parliament, as well as the ineffective functioning of public institutions (such as the CVC) meant to tackle governmental corruption, in the post-Independence period, is well-known. Why does it then come as a rude surprise that the contours of such a dismal tradition have remained unbroken in the recent Lokpal and Lokayuktas Bill 2011? It comes as a rude shock because its callous infliction on the nation mocks the values and demands of the first-ever sustained peoples’ anti-corruption...

British Raj era aquatint of an indigo factory in east India Multinational Corporations which will take over organized retail if FDI is allowed are 21st Century Clones of The East India Company. Do we need them? A profit-sucking corporate food chain; contract farming and mono-cultivation displacing crop diversity; farmers reduced to bonded labour of 21st century clones of the East India Company — such will be the face of Indian agriculture if we let the UPA impose the disastrous policy of FDI in retail on the nation. It is unbelievable...