Typing Exercises
Lesson-9
PanditJawaherLal
Nehru on one occasion significantly remarked that England made a success of
democracy because the Industrial Revolution in England preceded full democracy
by almost a century or more. We in India started the democratic experiment
without an Industrial Revolution preceding it. What did he mean to say? The British
Industrial Revolution brought prosperity and economic security to ninety per
cent of the common population of Britain which helped to make British democracy
progressively a success. Our Indian democracy has remained bankrupt and poverty-stricken
with about ninety per cent of our people living under the subsistence-level.
Not only the peasantry and the labor class but our bureaucracy and the middle
classes, too, remain deprived of economic security of democracy in India. When
all is said and done the economic forces are the decisive forces.
Should we despair of the success of
democracy in India? There are sings of hope that India is becoming
change-conscious and change-impelled. Land to the Landless, work to the
workless, houses to the houseless, family planning, signs of leftism in Indian
Politics, general discontent and unrest cannot go all in vain. World forces and
not only country-bound forces are at work all over the globe. If, meanwhile,
chaos, confusion, almost total economic breakdown do not overtake us, we can,
not unreasonably, hope that India, before the 29th century is over, will have
turned the corner. Sidney Web Spoke of the inevitability of gradualness. Rome
was not built in a day nor can be so built a democratic India or a new Indian
democratic civilization. The Indian people today have shaken off the pathetic
contentment of which Montague, the Secretary of state for India, noticed in the
Indian people in the second decade of the twentieth century. India has changed
and India is changing. Our people have learnt and are learning the great art of
being unhappy and discontented; they have begun to feel and to think. This
augurs well for the phased success of democracy and for the gradual realization
of democratic aims and ideals. India is today at the turning of the ways.
Lesson-10
In his book Hind Swaraj written while
he was yet in his twenties, Mahatma Gandhi says that civilizations are not
Eastern or Western, but old and new, ancient and modern. But were all ancient
civilizations alike and are all modern civilizations similarly alike? The
answer can be both 'yes' and 'no'. Professor Toynbee, a world authority on
history, has tried to puzzle out the problem of the survival of the Chinese and
Indian civilizations when other famous civilization of Babylon and Assyria died
long ago. Benjamin Kidd, in his thoughtful and thought-provoking book, Social
Evolution, significantly suggests that Greek and Roman civilizations and
several other ancient civilizations, while they had many brilliant and
impressive qualities, could not survive because their ethical motive power
lacked depth and dimension. Pundit JawaharLal Nehru had acknowledged the impressive
greatness of Indian Civilization and culture, but, at the same time, had
pointed out the weakness of Hindu polity. This weakness was the omission of a
sense of human equality in the Hindu social structure.
What is the quality, then, or the
characteristic, which we can call modern in modern civilization? The birth and
growth of science and technology and the increasing use of power-driven
machinery is the most obvious answer. To this may be added the establishment of
democracy which is resulting in the increasing importance and the value of the
individual.
Edward Carpenter, in the concluding chapters
of his world famous book, Civilization: Its Cause and Cure, raises the question
why old Civilization die and whether we should fear a similar death for modern
civilization. His answer is No. his argument is that the death of ancient
civilizations was due to the fact that they were local and limited in their
domain, while modern civilization is rapidly becoming a global civilization.
Every civilization has behind it a
mental worked. We have to rediscover the mind of ancient India, which gave us
the Indian civilization. If we try to guess at this secret dimension of Indian
civilization. If we try to guess at this secret dimension of Indian
civilization we shall discover that the Indian mind had a world awareness and
world feeling and a secret language, which has enabled India to survive through
its trials an tribulations. One vital and life-infusing quality of this
awareness and feeling was a non-creedal, spiritual, refined and cultured
materialism with a universal human appeal.
This goes to explain that vitality
of Indian civilization which is embedded in the blood and bone and woven into
the texture of every Indian, the inalienable sense of oneness with nature, with
the animal kingdom and with all human beings, which is the richest gift of the
Indian Civilization and culture. This also explains the appeal of home life,
domestic relations, social relations, the poverty of childhood, the goddess
hood of womanhood and the god-like concept of manhood, which characterize the
best Hindu thought. The doctrine of truth and Ahimsa are not based on muddled
sentiments but on an objectivity beyond objectivity.
But a civilization, while it ought to
have a soul an while it has to do everything to keep alive that soul in all its
freshness, has to adjust and renovate its external social structure in the
context of world history.
Lesson-11
One of the
opening passages in Manu Smriti unmistakably declares that the laws of its code
must be changed from time to time reflecting changes inlife and society. This
adaptability has been one of the secrets of the survival of the Hindu
civilization which today is an amalgam of civilizations, Aryan, Dravidian,
Muslim, and European. To pick up again the thread of our reflections the thought
background of Hindu Civilization reached its highest Pont in the Upanishad age.
In one of his most illuminating and revealing papers, Tagore calls the message
of this age as the message of the forest. The Upanishads are also rightly
called the 'Aranyakas', which means 'the forests'. This message lost or nearly
lost its dynamism for Indians long centuries ago.
After the Upanishad Age the movement of
Indian history was in reverse gear. It was really not progression but retrogression.
We began to lapse back into a mindless and thoughtless primitivism. Indian lost
the secret of healthy growth and healthy evolution. Indian began to shrink and
wither away though it had still immense reserves of strength and richness.
Marx, writing in 1854, called the British in India 'unconscious tools of
history'. In other words, the British , all unknown to themselves, challenged
India to become true India, to realize the promise, the possibilities and the potentialities
of the Upanishad thought.
But the history of the West has itself
fallen short of its own promises. Modern European civilization has mischanged
its healthy dynamism for an restlessness, born of the pseudoenergism of the
blind forces of capitalism, colonialism and imperialism. Unplanned expansion
and overloaded industrialism have resulted in making the machine, the master of
man, who has become a slave of the machine, the master and controller. The
roles have been reversed, with the resulted that modern Western civilization has
begun to suffer from high blood pressure. A century ago Ruskin had sounded his
warning against such a state of affairs. Tolstoy and Gandhi spoke in the same
vein. Modern civilization was born out of the womb of ancient civilization, but
it seems to have failed itself because it did not control and harness its own
chain reactions which have turned modern civilization into a Frankenstein. Our
ancient civilization sorely needs the rejuvenating disciplines of the mind
created by modern civilization. But it also needs, while its becomes
modern-minded, to recapture its ancient-souled vision of life.
Indian thought and Indian civilization
emphasize not so much the particularism of things, as their universalism.
Diversity is only a mode of unity. Modern civilization today faces the menace
of its own modernity. Let the West give us the mind and the discipline of the modern
civilization and let India in turn give to the West the ancient-souled vision
and wisdom of its thought. This two-ways traffic between ancient and modern
civilizations alone can restore the equilibrium of the world, which is being
shaken to its roots by the blind forces of soulless modernity.
Lesson-12
Mankind, ever since there have been
civilized communities, have been confronted with problems of two different
kinds. On the one hand there has been the problem of mastering natural forces,
of acquiring the knowledge and the skill required to produce tools and weapons
and to encourage Nature in the production of useful animals and plants. This
problem, in the modern world, is dealt with by science and the scientific
technique, and experience has shown that in order to deal with it adequately it
is necessary to train a large number of rather narrow specialists.
But there is a second problem, less
precise, and by some mistakenly regarded as unimportant. I mean the problem of
how best to utilize our command over the forces of nature. This includes such
burning issues as democracy versus dictatorship, capitalism versus socialism,
international government versus authoritarian dogma. On such issues the
laboratory can give no decisive guidance. The kind of knowledge that gives most
help in solving such problems is a wide survey of human life, in the past as
well as in the present, and an appreciation of the sources of misery or
contentment as they appear in history. It will be found that increases of skill
has not, of itself, insured any increase of human happiness or well-being. When
men first learnt to cultivate the soil, they used their knowledge to establish
a cruel cult of human sacrifice. The men who first tamed the horse employed him
to pillage and enslave peaceable populations. When, in the infancy of the
industrial revolution, men discovered how to make cotton goods by machinery,
the result were horrible; Jefferson's movement for the emancipation of slaves
in America, which had been on the point of success, was killed dead; child labor
in England was developed to a point of appalling cruelty; and ruthless
imperialism in Africa was stimulated in the hope that black men could be
induced to cloth themselves in cotton goods. In our own day a combination of
scientific genius and technical skill has produced the atomic bomb, but having
produced it we are all terrified, and do not know what to do with it. These
instances, from widely different periods of history, show that something more
than skill is required, something which may perhaps be called 'wisdom'. This is
something that must be learnt, if it can be learnt, by means of other studies
than those required for scientific technique. And it is something more needed
now than ever before, because the rapid growth of technique has made ancient
habits of thought and action more inadequate than in any earlier time.
'Philosophy' means 'love of wisdom',
and philosophy in this sense is what men must acquire if the new powers
invented by technicians, and handed over by them to be wielded by ordinary men
and women, are not to plunge mankind into an appalling cataclysm. But the philosophy
that should be a part of general education is not the same thing as the
philosophy of specialists. Not only in the philosophy, but in all branches of
academic study, thee is distinction between what has cultural value and what is
only of professional interest. Historians may debate what happened to
Sennacherib's unsuccessful expedition of 698 B.C, but those who are not
historians need not know the difference between it and his successful
expedition three years earlier. Professional Grecians may usefully discuss a
disputed reading in a play of Aeschylus, but such matters are not for the man
who wishes, in spite of a busy life, to acquire some knowledge of what the
Greeks achieved Similarly the men who devote their lives to philosophy must
consider questions that the general educated public does right to ignore, such
as the differences between the theory of universals in Aquinas and in Duns Scouts,
or the characteristics that a language must have if it is to be able, without
falling into nonsenses, to say things about itself. Such questions belong to
the technical aspects of philosophy, and their discussion cannot form part of
its contribution to general culture.
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