Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 2

A stainless steel frame

CORRUPTION is the order of the day. In all walks of life, wherever we have to live and move, we come across the monster; we cannot pass him by, we have to accost him (even in the Shakespearean sense, that is) welcome him, woo him. It is like one of the demons of the Greek legends that come out of the unknown, the sea or the sky, to prey upon a help - a less land and its people until a deliverer comes.

Corruption appears today with a twofold face, Janus like: violence and falsehood. In private life, in the political field, in the business world, in social dealings, it is now an established practice, it has gained almost the force of a law of nature that success can be achieved only with these two comrades on your either side. A gentle, honest, peace-loving man is inevitably pushed back, he has to go to the wall; a straightforward truthful candid soul will get no hearing and make no living. From high diplomacy on the international level to village pettifoggery, from the blast of the atom bomb to the thrust of the dagger, we have all the degrees of the two cardinal virtues that make up the warp and woof of modern life.

In the old world -not so old however, for the landslide started in fact with the First World War - evil there was and abundantly in man and in man's society, but it was not accepted as virtue or even as an acceptable or inevitable thing. It was tolerated, suffered, and generally with a heavy heart. Indeed the heart was sound, it was the flesh only that was weak. There was an idealism, an aspiration and although one could not always live up to it, yet one did not deny it or spurn it; one endeavoured as best one could, even though in leisure hours, in the inner mind and consciousness at least, to obey and follow its dictates. It is the Nazi theory of life that broughtto the very forefront and installed in the consciousness of

man Evil as Good, Falsehood as Truth. That is pragmatism with a vengeance. Whatever leads to success, to worldly success, that is to say, brings you wealth, prosperity, power to rule over men and things, enriches you in your possession - vittena, as the Upanishad terms it -that is Good, that is Truth. All the rest are mental conceptions, notions, abstractions, day-dreams meant to delude you, take you away from the road to your fulfilment and achievement. That is how we have listened to the voice of Mephistopheles and sold away our soul.

The government of a country is, as we know, the steel frame that holds together the life of its people: it is that that gives the primary stability and security, scope and free play to all its activities. In India it was the pride of the British that they built up such a frame; and although that frame sometimes seemed almost to throttle the nation in its firm and rigid grip, still today we are constrained to recognise that it was indeed a great achievement: Pax Britannica was in fact a very efficient reality. The withdrawal of the power that was behind us has left the frame very shaky; and our national government is trying hard to set it up again, strengthening, reinforcing, riveting wherever and however necessary. But the misfortune is that the steel has got rusted and worn out from inside.

In other words, a diminution of public morality and collective honesty has set in, an ebbing of the individual consciousness too that made for rectitude and justice and equity and fair dealing. Men who are limbs of that frame, who by their position ensure the strength of that frame - the bolts and nuts, screws and hinges -have, on a large scale, allowed themselves. to be uncertain and loose in their moral make-up. Along with the outer check, the inner check too has given way: hence the colossal disintegration, the general debacle in the life of the body politic and the body social.

How to stop this rot that is gaining ground every day, how to react against the inexorable chain reaction that is leading to a final explosion? It is not merely the laymen but the members of the very supporting frame itself, as I have said, that have fallen and gone over to the enemy. And the fact is true not only of the political frame, but the social frame too made up of the elite, the intelligentsia. The remedy that easily

suggests itself and is being attempted and applied is something Catonian, that is to say, a greater stringency of external rules and regulations, enforcement of punishment, even of heavy punishment as a deterrent of crime.

The institution of punishment is no longer respected or appreciated in modern times to the same extent as in the past, even a century ago. When character goes awry, punishment is of no avail. Punishment does not cure or redeem the criminal; it often hardens, fixes the trait that is sought to be eradicated. Fear of punishment does not always prevent one from doing wrong things. Often danger has an irresistible fascination for a certain type of temperament, especially danger of the wrong kind -indeed the greater the wrong, the greater the danger and the greater the fascination. "To live dangerously" is the motto of the heroic soul, as well as of the lost soul. A strong penal system, a rigorous policing is of help no doubt to main­tain "peace and order" of some kind in a society; but that is an external pressure which cannot last very long or be effective in the end.

So the ideal proposed is that of moral regeneration. But what is the kind of moral regeneration and how is it to be effected? All depends upon that. If you issue some moral rules and regulations, inscribe them on pillars, print them in pamphlets, preach them from the platform and the pulpit, these things have been done in the past and for ages, the result is not assured and the world goes its way as ever. Something more than mental and moral rules has to be discovered: some dynamic and irresistible element in man has to be touched, evoked and brought out, something that challenges the whole world and maintains its truth and the fiat of its truth. That is the inmost soul in man, the real being behind all the apparent forms of his personality, the divine element, the very Divine in him. It is the outer man, the marginal man, man in his inferior nature that lives and moves in normal circumstances; instead, the central man, man in his higher and highest nature has to come out and take his place in the world.

What is needed then is an army of souls: individuals, either separately or in groups, who have contacted their inmost reality, their divinity, in some way or other-men with a new consciousness and aspiration, a new life and realisation.

Theywill live in the midst of the general degeneration and disintegration, not aloof and immured in their privacy of purity, but take part in the normal activities of everyday life, still acting from the height and depth of the pure consciousness prove by their very living that one can be in the world and yet not of it, doing what is necessary for the maintenance and enhancement of life and yet not stooping to the questionable ways that are supposed to be necessary and inevitable. In other words, they will disprove that safety and success and prosperity in life can be had only if one follows the lead of

Evil, if one sells one's soul. On the contrary, by living out one's divine essence one will have conquered the world - ihaiva tairjitam. At every moment, in all circumstances one follows the voice of the highest in oneself. If it is that and no other inferior echo, then one becomes fearless and immortal and all-conquering.

Such souls living and moving among men with little faith and in circumstances adverse and obscure will forge precisely the new steel frame, the stainless steel frame upon which the new society will be securely based.

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