The purpose of science, as expounded by Thomas Huxley, the collaborator of Charles Darwin in the 19th century, was not only the advancement of knowledge but also ‘the alleviation of human suffering’. If the first is to lead to the second, there is need to wed the pursuit of knowledge, i.e. education, with the humanistic impulse. Unfortunately, after independence, we divorced our education, politics, and administration from this humanistic impulse; so these lost the capacity to alleviate human suffering; some of these, especially politics, developed on the other hand, even the capacity to aggravate human suffering, by infecting and distorting our education, administration, and labour movement.
So, along with human unconcern, and always as a result of it, we witness the spiraling of social evils like bribery, corruption, tax evasion, smuggling, lack of citizenship virtues like duty, punctuality, honest work for the remuneration one gets and public spirit.
The types, varieties, and range of malpractices that our people indulge in today are unprecedented, not only in our own history, but in all human history. Along with the physical malnutrition of our millions, the spiritual malnutrition of the educated and well-fed classes of our nation today is writ large in every field of our national activity.
Swami Vivekananda’s luminous man-making and nation building ideas and ideals, scattered in the eight volumes of his Complete Works, contain the much-needed spiritual nourishment for our people today. Here are two sentences from his letters, which have reference to our education and to our dignity as citizens of free India, respectively. Says he in a letter addressed from Chicago to his dynamic and dedicated young disciple in Madras, Alasinga Perumal, in 1894 (The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, Vol V, p58). “My heart is too full to express my feeling -- you know it; you can imagine it. So long as the millions live in hunger and ignorance, I hold every man a traitor who, having been educated at their expense, pays not the least heed to them!”
Again, in a letter written to the Maharaja of Mysore on 23 June 1894, he says (ibid, Vol IV, P363): “This life is short, the vanities of the world are transient, but they alone live who live for others, the rest are more dead than alive.’
Anyone who has studied his literature will be impressed by its constant stress on this human orientation. He awakened our long dormant national energies and impressed on them this humanistic touch. During our immediate feudal past, there was very little of this human orientation; it was often anti-human, with caste exclusiveness, untouchability, and human exploitation as its outstanding characteristics. Our upper classes missed the great opportunity then to educate and raise our common people and build up a great nation; not only did they fail to do this, but they also sat heavily on the common people and fattened themselves, by doing which they brought themselves and the common people under the shame of foreign domination and humiliation for centuries.
In spite of this unhappy experience of the immediate past, how did our educated classes slide quickly from the ecstasy of freedom of our independence day on 15 August 1947 to rank selfishness, human unconcern and complacency thereafter? Many of our educated countrymen today are “dead” people, according to that dictum of Swami Vivekananda given in the letter quoted above, because they live for themselves and have forgotten to live for others, forgotten to live and work for the nation. Having got educated at the cost of the nation -- for the fees a student pays for his or her education is only a fraction of his or her total educational expenses -- he or she has forgotten the nation, neglected to serve it and raise the rest of the people; they have thus become traitors to the nation, in the pungent but true words of Vivekananda quoted above. Vivekananda will teach all such people in our nation today how to live, in the true sense of the term, by living for others, and how to cease to be traitors to the nation, by serving the common people with their knowledge and talents. He will inject this much-needed human motivation into their actions and thoughts.
