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Thursday,
April 12, 2001, Chandigarh, India  
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Old ties, new
thrust Case of missing
courts Massacres in
Nepal |
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Ranjit Singh’s place in history
Bahadur Shah Zafar’s “dastar khwan”
$ 5 billion a bomb shatters Pak
economy
Check it out!
Discovering the divine in
man
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India is rejigging its old relations with Iran to face today’s problems. Harping on ancient ties is alright but not very relevant. Since independence the two countries had drifted apart first because of Iran’s Shah’s dictatorship and his role as the US policeman in the Gulf and later because of mullacracy. Today that country is being torn apart by a tussle between old style religious leadership and moderate democrats. From President Mohammed Khatami’s point of view, Prime Minister Vajpayee’s visit is one more vote in his favour while his warm praise for this country’s secularism is a welcome endorsement at this juncture. Two issues dominate the talks. Most worrisome is the desperate Taliban leadership and the equally desperate people on the brink of starvation. Iran is concerned over the safety of the Shias living in the western part of the country. The Sunni Taliban may even join hands with ultra religious groups in West Asia to launch attacks on it. Iran, which made theocracy fashionable, is fearful of a ferocious form of the same ideology in Afghanistan. For India Taliban is a direct and present danger as it pushes murderous militants into Kashmir. Both countries will like to see the end of the present rule and its replacement by a less rigid and more tolerant regime. But they have very little influence to shape events in the land-locked country. Hence the determination to stamp out terrorism (Iran’s view) and cross-border terrorism (India’s) is not likely to alarm the Taliban. The second important item on the agenda is a gas pipeline from Iran. The sensible thing is to lay it across Pakistan and build into it several engineering and legal safeguards so that there is no disruption. India is against this as even a temporary stoppage will affect industrial activity in a broad swathe of western India. Instead it favours an undersea pipeline even if it costs much, much more. The second option also suffers from being unattractive to investors. An overland pipeline has the additional advantage of being extended to the gas-rich Central Asian Republics to meet this country’s growing energy needs at a reduced cost. The risk of sabotage by militants is real but equally real is this country’s distaste to provide economic help to Pakistan when it is supporting the armed struggle in the valley. At one time Iranian students preferred Indian universities; now this is being revived in information technology. The diplomatic advantage of forging close relations with Iran lies in weakening Pakistan’s clout in the neighbouring Islamic countries. Iran has snubbed Pakistan by not inviting it for the proposed dialogue of civilisations. There is only Indian civilisation and India symbolises it, it had said to still Pakistani protests. |
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The tendency of the judiciary to drag its feet in deciding cases results in justice being denied to the aggrieved parties. However, given the present scenario a litigant whose case is accepted for hearing should count himself lucky. He only has to peep out of the overcrowded courtroom to see the ever-lengthening queue of litigants whose cases are not being heard for want of sufficient number of courts and the delay on the part of the government in filling existing vacancies. Law Minister Arun Jaitley recently pointed out that the 21 high courts in the country were supposed to have a combined strength of 647 judges. However, no effort was being made by the courts concerned to appoint judges against181 vacant posts. No appointments have been made in spite of the efforts of the Chief Justice of India to have the process of recruitment expedited. The due process of appointing judges is evidently as cumbersome as following the due process of law for deciding cases. It is difficult to understand why those who are in a position to make the "due processes" of appointing judges and deciding cases are the ones who do nothing expect talk about the need for judicial reforms. If making public speeches and expressing concern could help take care of the mounting backlog of cases, India would by now have become judicially the most advanced nation in the world. If the files of all the pending cases, spread across the length and breadth of the country, were to be put at one place, they may end up touching Mount Everest. The right to free and fair trial mean nothing to the sufferers of delayed justice. The situation in the lower courts is much worse, which is largely responsible for the creeping in an element of corruption in the judicial process. For meeting the mounting backlog of cases in the lower courts the Centre had asked the sate governments to set up 1,734 fast-track courts by April 1. The deadline has come and gone. The promise of speedy justice was a cruel April fool joke played on the people by the political leadership. The states where the problem is acute are the ones that have lagged behind in setting up the required number of fast-track courts. Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, not surprisingly, are way ahead of other states in not giving due importance to the Central directive. |
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Nepal is in the throes of violence the like of which it has not seen before. Maoist rebels have launched daring attacks on security forces, killing at least 71 police officers in the past one week. The most gruesome of these took place last Friday in Naumule village in Dailekh district, 550 km from Kathmandu, in which as many as 47 police officers were done to death. The security personnel stationed at remote places are sitting ducks for the hit-and-run guerrillas. Besides, the rebels have bombed ministers’ houses while a general strike called by them brought the country to a standstill. The Maoists started their low-intensity but sustained campaign for a one-party communist republic in the world’s only Hindu kingdom in February, 1996. Initially, they targeted a couple of remote and poor foothill villages. Since then, they have expanded their area of influence and today are active in as many as 30 of the kingdom’s 75 administrative districts. Their hold is considerable in other districts also, although as a matter of policy, they do not target foreign tourists and tourist destinations, because that will harm the country as a whole. So far, violence has claimed 1,658 lives, including those of 344 policemen. Apparently, they have found many sympathisers outside their ranks who are also opposed to the present constitutional monarchy in a multiparty parliamentary democracy. This general discontent and the crippling factionalism in the ruling party have given the rebels a free run. A beleaguered Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala is almost clueless in this difficult hour. He has declared a state of emergency without doing anything substantial to tackle the problem. His deputy, Mr Ramchandra Poudel, has gone so far as saying that his government is ready for talks with “all parties” to help form an interim government and prepare a new Constitution. That shows how desperate the government is. But the rebels say the government is not serious about talks. They are firm on the release of their leaders and an end to police operations against their members before coming to the negotiating table. The Nepal Government has also requested the Indian Government to help eliminate the threat. But Delhi has politely declined to get involved. That is a pragmatic decision. What happened in Sri Lanka is still fresh in public memory. |
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Ranjit Singh’s place in history In 1799 Ranjit Singh captured Lahore. Two years later, in 1801 on the Baisakhi day to be precise, he held some kind of a coronation. Indeed it could not be described as one for, according to the Sikh tradition, he could not be the sovereign. The coins issued at that time described him as the servant of the Guru and not as a king. Two centuries later, however, it may not be out of place to assess his place in Indian history. His first achievement is a part of history rather than contemporary in nature and significance. It was almost after 2,000 years that Ranjit Singh reversed the trend of inroads into India. There are references to Chandra Gupta Maurya venturing into Central Asia. There are one or two other similar instances also, like that of Kanishaka. Otherwise, for the most part, people came into India rather than go from India to other countries. With the turn of the first Christian millennium, things began to change in a significant way, however. The earlier invaders generally came into India and settled down here. Most of them hardly professed any kind of a faith. When they entered India they continued to stay in an undefined, pagan kind of way and gradually got merged into the Indian population. That some of them got assimilated into the Hindu Varnashrama is evident from the fact that Rajputs, Gujjars, Jats and several other war-like tribes got accepted into the Hindu fold. This is something so widely known that it should not be necessary to dwell on it. What happened at the turn of the millennium was different. The advent of Islam into India was unlike the earlier forays. Islam was a well defined religion. Even though the Caliph’s army had invaded Sind in the 7th century A.D., that did not have much impact. The impact came with the repeated invasions of Mahmud of Ghzani. In the wake of those invasions, the northern belt of India gradually embraced Islam. By the time the Sultanate era was inaugurated in the early 13th century, everyone to the north of the river Indus had turned Muslim. Elsewhere too conversions had taken place. The structure of society in that area was tribal unlike those parts of modern Punjab which lay to the south of the river Jhelum where the caste system was as much a fact of life as in the rest of India. Without going into further details, one may jump to the early 18th century when the Mughal empire was given a knockout blow by Nadir Shah. Everyone submitted tamely except the Sikh missals who plundered him relentlessly when he was going back. Instead of the Mughals, it was the Afghans who now took over. The second half of the 18th century witnessed seesaw fighting between the Afghans and the Sikhs missals. This culminated in the capture of Lahore by Ranjit Singh in 1799 and he emerged as the new ruler of Punjab. With the passage of time and a squeeze from the East India Company, Ranjit Singh had no choice except to move north and capture the Khyber Pass and its outlying areas. This phase of Ranjit Singh’s career lasted something like two decades. The neatest description of what Ranjit Singh accomplished during that period has been given by a Bengali biographer of Ranjit Singh, N.K. Sinha. He has described Ranjit Singh as “the chastiser of unruly Pathans”. Throughout history, Pathans have been unruly without question. Everyone seeking to enter India, including Alexander the Great, had to come via Afghanistan. Unlike Iran which was able to establish a glittering civilisation more than 2,000 years ago, Afghanistan was never able to establish anything even remotely resembling what had happened to its north. Throughout history, Afghanistan has been the pathway for anyone seeking to enter India. This in turn created a certain kind of psychology in that country. When Ranjit Singh confronted the Pathans, they acted as usual and refused to accept him as their ruler. In his characteristically thorough style of functioning. Ranjit Singh saw to it that they did so. Indeed he asserted himself so effectively that, for almost a century after his rule had come to an end, the memory of how he had subdued them was still fresh in the minds of most people. To put it no more picturesquely, he did something in recent times, which none of the earlier Indian rulers had been able to do. But there is a second dimension to his achievement also. What is more, it has a contemporary echo as well. Ranjit Singh became the ruler of Punjab after seven centuries of unbroken Muslim rule. The Sikhs were barely a little over 5 per cent of the total population of the state. In fact, once Ranjit Singh had moved beyond central Punjab and captured areas like Multan, Kashmir, the Derajats and the Khyber, the proportion of the Sikhs went down even further. How was he to administer the country when he was looked upon as a Sikh ruler and the bulk of the population did not belong to the Sikh fold? It is this feat of winning the goodwill of his subjects that needs to be studied in detail. The truth of the matter is that even after he had been dead for several years, the most popular poet of that time, Shah Mohammad, wrote about him admiringly in the wake of the First Anglo Sikh war. In this poem which has been recently rendered into English and Hindi verse by N.K. Nijhawan, Shah Mohammad projected him as the Maharaja of Punjab and not of the Sikhs. How was this miracle accomplished? The answer is simple. He treated everyone alike. He did not impose any oppressive system of administration upon the people. Everyone followed his customary law and the administration was fair and just. Some of the small chieftains who had been defeated and replaced had a grudge against him. This is understandable. But this was not true of the average citizen. In his eyes, he was a hero and they admired him no end. Instead of the kind of the trifurcation of society into Hindu, Muslim and Sikh which characterised the late 19th century under the British, there was no such cleavage of perception at that time. This did not come about automatically. He followed a kind of statecraft which more or less ensured that every one felt that he was a citizen of the state. If one may use the modern idiom, he was a liberal in the sense it is understood today and evolved something like a secular notion of the state. Two incidents in this connection may be referred to here. In 1825, there was some controversy about the display of “tazias” in public. Ranjit Singh did not favour this practice but one of his senior officials argued that this practice had been followed for a number of years and a new, unwelcome restriction need not be imposed. Even though his principal adviser and foreign minister Fakir Azizuddin agreed with his way of thinking, the status quo ante was restored. The second story is perhaps more to the point. Lahore boasted of a mosque called the Sunehri Masjid— the Golden Mosque. On one occasion, it was captured by the Nihangs, a group of people who were a law unto themselves. Nobody was prepared to take them on and the Maharaja himself confronted them. He asked them pointedly: “What do you intend to do? Do you want to read the Holy Quran or do you want to instal your Holy book in that mosque?” Since they did not want to do either of those two things, the issue was how to resolve the problem. On further probing, one of them said, “You are supposed to be a Sikh ruler but it is the Muslims who have the Golden Mosque. How do you explain that?” Ranjit Singh immediately understood the point. He told them that the Golden Temple at Amritsar too would be given a golden covering. There are people who dispute this version. The fact remains that, till the beginning of the 19th century, the Golden Temple was known as the Hari Mandir (the Abode of the Lord). Since the day its dome was covered with gold, it has come to be known as the Golden Temple. Whether this story is hundred per cent correct or not, what needs to be underlined is that Ranjit Singh knew how to manage things. Not only that, he designed a well thought out policy in this regard and followed it faithfully and comprehensively. Not only did he give lavish grants to all places of worship, in one case, when the attack on the Khyber was being mounted, he heard about a well stocked Muslim library in that area. He immediately issued instructions that the library should not be damaged or destroyed in any way. It goes without saying that what he managed to achieve has lessons which have a contemporary application to our policy. No society can discriminate against any section of its people and then function peacefully. Ranjit Singh understood this basic truth. If what Ranjit Singh managed to achieve during those difficult and anarchic day can be seen as a precedent, which is worthy of emulation, the situation around us would undergo a profound change. Today in Pakistan, three people from India are referred to in favourable terms. They are Ranjit Singh, Bhagat Singh and Guru Nanak. It should not be necessary to explain why. |
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Bahadur Shah Zafar’s “dastar khwan” The last Mogul emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, was the king of Delhi in name only. The real governance was in the hands of Britishers. Bahadur Shah received a pension of Rs 12 lakh per annum. Besides, an annual income of Rs 36,000 accrued from royal estates. Out of the pension Rs 5 lakh was his personal allowance and the rest seven lakh was for the heir-apparent and other princes. A major portion of the king’s income was spent on salaries of his servants, whose number was more than 400. Bahadur Shah was a gourmand. Kababs of venison and castrated fowl, fried partridges and quail, roasted duck, mutton and fish soaked in sour curds and cooked with condiments, potatoes, lamb’s chest cooked on low fire throughout the night, whole cauliflower cooked in goat soup, fried peas and brinjle, which are served with sauce, pulao of lamb, chicks, biryani, the queen of delicacies, each rice of which is stuffed with saffron from Kashmir, chapatis, parathas, naans, kulchas and the delicious royal baqar khani, which is made of milk, butter and walnuts, besides dozens of sweet dishes, custard, kheer cooked with rice, almond, pistachio, mango, carrot and gram, were served on the dining table of Bahadur Shah. He himself had invested several delicacies, as for instance, halwa of bitter gourd. Bahadur Shah was 83 and did not have his old digestion. Once the British Resident of Delhi sent a gift of 15 choicest mangoes to the King, which he ate in one go and was taken ill. When he recovered a bit he indulged in the luxury of food again and was confined to bed for four months. The Britishers were winning the war (mutiny) in Delhi. Bahadur Shah sent his favourite queen, Zeenat Mehal Begum, and Prince Jawan Bakht to his wife’s house called Zeenat Mehal situated in Lal Kuan. Bahadur Shah took out a small box, which had been in his custody for 20 years. He woke his servant, who was sleeping outside his bed chamber and ordered him to call the prince and asked for the horses to be readied. It was still dark when five shadows descended, groping the dimly lit stairs, toward the Jamuna river and came out of the secret exit. They mounted the horses which were already present there. In half an hour they reached the tomb of Hazrat Nizam-ud-Din Aulia. The foremost rider halted and signalled others to go ahead. Bahadur Shah awoke the mutwali of the mazar. Sobbing and with tears in his eyes, he placed the wooden box before the mutwali and said: “Here is the sacred relic, three sacred hair of the beard of Prophet Mohammed, which had been brought from Mecca five hundred years ago and had remained in the custody of Temoor’s royal dynasty. Now I am unable to take care of this sacred trust, therefore, I am entrusting this to your responsibility”. Seeing the bad shape of the king, Ghulam Hassan, with eyes dimmed with tears said: “Have courage Saraj-u-Din. Pray to Allah and abide by His will”. Then added: “You look tired. Lie down and rest”. Bahadur Shah raised his tear-smeared eyes towards the mutwali and said in low voice: “Give me something to eat. I have not eaten anything for the past two days”. Ghulam Hassan brought some thick loaves and a spoon of sauce of onion from a corner of the room and placed them before Bahadur Shah. He found it hard to swallow dry bread and bitter chutni. He took a few morsels and got up. |
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$ 5 billion a bomb shatters Pak
economy It is not yet official. But Pakistan’s declared intent of signing the CTBT should be taken on its face value. It has been endorsed by the top corps commanders — the apex repository of power in Pakistan’s military dispensation. The important point is that Islamabad has given an undertaking on the CTBT to Japan and the western powers. It is a three-point undertaking: one, that Pakistan will adhere to the CTBT, two, that it will curb its nuclear weapon operations to the minimum, and three, that there will be no sensitive nuclear exports to third countries. These are the conditions for large-scale aid which Japan and the West have agreed to provide to Pakistan, in order to bail out its economy from the present critical state. There can be no dodging about on these stiff conditions for massive aid from the west without which Pakistan’s economy cannot survive. It is clear that Islamabad’s military dispensation has undertaken a comprehensive review of Pakistan’s nuclear weapon operations and their economic, financial fall-out. Whatever the pompous declarations, the reality that has emerged of Pakistan’s nuclear weapon operations in stark. The report from the Pakistan treasury — Finance Ministry as well as the Pakistan State Bank — on this score is alarming. The Pakistani nuclear weapon operations are bleeding the country white. In the present state of near bankruptcy, the Pakistan government can no longer sustain the present level of nuclear weapon operations: It will lead to a total burst up of the economy which even restoration of aid from the West will not be able to stave off, reports say. It is worth having a closer look as to what this means. According to the US Nuclear Cost Study project, the “average cost per atomic bomb (for Pakistan) is $ 5 billion”, and so the bare cost of the six explosions that Pakistan conducted in May 1998 is $ 30 billion. Other data put together by the Brookings Institution, the IAEA and the Institute for Science and International Security suggests that Pakistan must have committed over $ 50 billion to operate, maintain and sustain its 22 known nuclear related sites over the past two decades. The cost of construction (including smuggling operations) of plants such as the Kahuta uranium enrichment and related uranium hexaflouride plant, is several billions of dollars over and above the recurring costs — well over $ 100 billion. Backbreaking indeed, for an economy that’s on way to bankruptcy. With just $ 5 billion as foreign exchange reserves in Pakistan’s kitty, can it sustain nuclear weapon operations at the present level? One has only to have a cursory look at the dire straits in which Pakistan’s economy finds itself to get the answer. How hard the going is for the economy is revealed by a Pakistan government circular to all its diplomatic missions abroad. Says the circular: examine possibilities of sale of Pakistan Embassy buildings and landed property in world capitals, ban use of luxury cars earlier considered as status symbols, and apply drastic cuts to strength of diplomatic staff. What does it all boil down to? Pakistan’s generals have been given with the injunction of applying stiff curbs on the country’s military-related spending in order to give a good chance to the economy to get going with the upcoming aid packet from the West and Japan. They have been faced with the choice: bring down the nuclear deterrent to the bare minimum or cut down drastically the conventional military budget which itself is consuming the bulk of the Pakistani cake. Rather than drastically cut into their own pockets, the generals have accepted curbing nuclear weapon operations to the minimum, just in order to maintain the existing nuclear deterrent to two score bombs. Based on the available 730 kg enriched uranium weapon grade pool. These decisions have already become operative. The much-boosted Dr Qadir Khan, maker of the Pakistan a-bomb, who headed the Kahuta uranium enrichment project, has been relieved of his charge and is now the chief scientific adviser of the Pakistan government. His main rival, the Chairman of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, has also been replaced by a lesser known nuclear scientist, to head the civilian nuclear operations, which in future are to be tailored according to available long-term loans. Once the CTBT is signed, Pakistan hopes to get such loans from France and the United States for turn-key nuclear power plants. A happy by-product of this development is the end of the oft-repeated Western phrase — nuclear weapon arms race on the sub-continent. There are no parallels with the Indian indigenous nuclear programme which dispenses with the nuclear white elephant, the uranium enrichment route to weapon making, and is the cheapest weapon programme anywhere in the world. Here, there is no stealing of blue-prints of Western enrichment plants, nor expensive smuggling operations for the Kahuta project or the related uranium hexaflouride plant, smuggled part by part and bit by bit from Germany. Rather, the unique Indian plutonium-based nuclear deterrent, available from reprocessing spent fuel from research reactors, has been possible because of technology advancement of Indian scientists — the reprocessing technology having been acquired as early as 1965. |
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You may be aware that after IT now India is moving towards biotechnology. According to one research India will merge as a super power in IT and medical research by 2025. Q. Who is the co-founder of Sun Microsystems? (The company which is sweeping the internet with its brainchild Java). A. Vinod Khosla. Q. Who is the creator of Pentium chip ? (Needs no introduction. 90% of the today’s computers run on it). A. Vinod Dahm. Q. Who is the third richest person in the world? A. Aziz Premji, CEO, Wipro, according to the latest report in Fortune magazine. The Sultan of Brunie is at 6th position now. Q. Who is the current president of AT & T Bell Labs? (This company is the creator of Unix, to name only a few). A. Arun Netravalli. Q. Who is the founder and creator of Hotmail? (Hotmail is world’s No. web-based e-mail programme). A. Sabeer Bhatia. Q. Who is the GM of Hewlett Packard ? A. Rajiv Gupta. Q. Who is the Testing Director of Windows 2000? A. Sanjay Tejwrika. Q. Who are the Chief Executives of CitiBank, Mckensey, Stanchart? A. Victor Menezes, Rajat Gupta, Rana Talwar. Q. Who are the CEOs of the following wellknown companies? AppNet, America Online (The largest ISP in the world), Lucent Technologies (pioneer in Fibre optics), Proxicom, Network Solutions (The sole web domain assigner), General Dynamics Corporation, Lazard Freres, Litton PRC, Columbia Capital, Primus Communications, Discovery Communications, Bell Atlantic, Cable & Wireless, The Motley Food, Hughes Network Systems, Cybercash, MCI Worldcom, PSINet, Motorola, MicroStratey, Equalfooting.com, Tiligent, Inc., MindBank, U.S.Airways, CIENA Crop., Bionetrix, Net 2000 Communications, Computer Associates, SAICK, Startec, INOVA Health System, Cvent.com, Intelsat, Draper Atlantic, Freddie Mac, Raytheon Systems Corporation, Spacevest, HSBC, United Airlines? A. They are all Indians known as the Indian Mafia (Internet Mafia). They are the wealthiest among all ethnic groups in American. There are 3.22 million Indians in America. 38% of doctors in America are Indians. 12% of scientists in America are Indians. 36% of NASA employees are Indians. 34% of Microsoft employees are Indians. 28% of IBM employees are Indians, 17% of INTEL employees are Indians, 13% of XEROX employees are Indians. |
A Kolhapur message recently stated that the local Government had nominated two ladies as members of the city municipality, one of them being the wife of the Punjabi Principal of the Rajaram College and another a graduate of the Women’s University, Poona. In Madras and Bombay women, as a rule, are either nominated or elected to municipalities and some of them have even been appointed as Magistrates. The Punjab is not lacking in women who have had decent education and possess public spirit, but no opportunity is yet given them for service. If the wife of Punjabee living in Kolhapur is found fit to help municipal administration, there must be some who are nearer home. Consistently with the recent grant of the right to vote to Punjab women, the Government may appoint some as members of local municipalities. |
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Discovering the divine in
man Way back in 1953, when I scribbled an inadequate critique of the poetry of Sant Bur Singh Bir (1905-1995) entitled, The Celestial Singer, my adolescent pride was flattered by its reception, reviewed as it was by a British teacher of the Department of English of Panjab University. The evaluator liked the 'gentle Bir'. I now realise that it was not the merit of the book but the virtue of that simple man of God I had described therein. Bir had been singing songs of love and duty, of peace and oneness of humanity tempered with Dharma for more than half a century. Visualising the element of unity behind the seeming multiplicity of entities, he preached sympathy, understanding and compassion that lie hidden in the inner dimensions of man and need to be brought to the surface. In more than 400 verse tracts covering about 5000 pages, there is a good deal of sweetness and depth, which we usually associate with sant bani. Commitment to mankind and discovering the divine in man constitute his unflagging and resolute creed. This wonderous pedlar of ecstatic songs, during his service in a government department and later during his retirement, promoted love and understanding among people of all creeds, irrespective of their religious and political beliefs. The basic tenets which he initiated, were love, honest performance of one's duty, temperance, moderation and worship of the all-pervading Almighty. After his retirement, Bir devoted himself fully to the task of organising the society to its logical attainments. The Samaj now owns a network of congregation halls, libraries, schools and dispensaries at a number of places. Thousands of families in India and abroad have felt a perceptible change in the mode of their living wrought by the message of love and the feeling of oneness. There is an epic depth and immensity in the message of 'Bir' — something inspiring, something exhilarating, away from the pale cast of alienated thought rising out of any socio-political milieu. He strongly feels that physical, intellectual and psychical developments do not always carry with them the ethical sense. With a well-built body a strong will and a highly developed intellect, a man can still be a rascal. It is through love for all creations that man can evolve a high sense of human morality — for love is the cord that binds man with man and consequently with God. Bir's utterances are a sensitive response to whatever is significant in modern life. The richness, the profusion, and the variety of Indian classical lore build the texture of his poetic creations and in that tradition he has discovered a firm foundation of individuality. In the age of explosion of knowledge, reduced as it were, to "extraction of one incomprehensible from another incomprehensible", he holds that neither heredity nor environment can fully explain the mystery of man. Neither this mystery needs to be investigated. The common man only needs a peaceful living, harmonious environs and healthy social contacts. This can be attained only through love. In an effort to establish a distinct identity, man has become so selfish that to justify his claim he has almost become coercive, whereas he needs to make his life as pleasant as it could be in the given situation. The alienation is a disease and its cure is the constant administration of love. Bir's prayer does not talk about individual salvation. It does not seek personal pleasure. It embraces the universe and calls for goodwill for all. "Blessed be all, O Lord and cleanse the hearts of all, O Lord", thus his prayer begins and ends with "Broaden our vision, O Lord and extend peace to all, O Lord. His men are not the children of darkness. They are the denizens of eternity. Bir was not the bard of dark despair. He did not preach escapist views not did he promise an elusive Mukti. In the service of fellow beings, he maintained, lay the real solution to the misery of the lacerated world. I heard him speak for hours together without having a drop of water or a sip of coffee to declare" "Work is my master, love is my food and humanity is the field of my operation." Cutting across the barriers of coded religions, without indulging in mystical theological formulations, he endeavoured to establish the religion of man. A practical philosopher living in the crowded streets of an industrial town and struggling smilingly he had been piercing the veil of mystery that lay so heavily on the human soul through the mantra of synthesis of trinity of love, dharma and God. Like St Francis of Assisi, he preached while he walked. |
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The body is a town, In the town God dwells; By the true Guru’s direction He is seen. The body is a tank; God’s Word takes possession of it; And makes it a temple. Men who search for Him in the forest they are ignorant fools. Like the deluded deer that runs knowing not of the musk hidden in its navel. **** Nourish thy body, so that it may serve God. Without God’s Name, In search of God outside the body, man suffers useless pain. **** The body is made of the five elements This is the wise know. It dissolves into that from which it took life. —Sri Guru Granth Sahib, Malar M.i; Parbhati M.4; Majh M.5; Shalok M.9 ***** He by whom the world is not afflicted and whom the world cannot afflict, he who is free from joy, anger, fear and anxiety — he is dear to me. **** He who has no wants, who is pure and prompt, unconcerned and untroubled, and who is selfless in all his undertakings, he who is thus devoted to me, is dear to me. **** He who is the same to foe and friend and also in honour and dishonour, who is the same in cold and heat, in pleasure and pain, who is free from attachment; to whom censure and praise are equal, who is silent, content with anything, homeless, steady-minded, full of devotion — that man is dear to Me. — The Bhagvad Gita, XII, 15-19 |
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