Seventy-six years ago, free India’s first Prime Minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru’s call for kindling the scientific temper among Indians remains ever-relevant today, and will remain so in future. It was not a political call. It was a call for development – of mind, body and the nation. In his famous “Tryst with destiny” speech at the stroke of the midnight hour when India stepped into the world of freedom, he said: “The service of India means the service of the millions who suffer. It means the ending of poverty and ignorance and disease and inequality of opportunity.”
A decade earlier, Nehru had declared while stressing on the importance of freeing the country not just from the British, but also from deprivation and backwardness, “It is science alone that can solve these problems of hunger and poverty, of insanitation and illiteracy, of superstition and the deadening custom and tradition, of vast resources running to waste, of a rich country inhabited by starving people.” In the last 76 years, India has significantly progressed in science and technology, and will continue to do so at a faster pace in future. And yet, we have continued to be at the mercy of communal, caste-based, linguistic and region-based hatred.
We are yet to achieve that zone “where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection; where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit...”, to quote from Rabindranath Tagore’s famous poem “Where The Mind Is Without Fear...” Science has no age. It is all-pervading, everlasting, encompassing countless galaxies in the universe, each with millions of stars. So, there is no reason why people in a country called India, located on pale blue dot we call Earth, cannot benefit from it to achieve freedom in its truest sense, and set an example.