| |
on my birthday" -- and it actually happened. The fifteenth of August is Sri Aurobindo's birthday, and he had declared it thirty years before. People had completely forgotten about his declaration, but India became free on the fifteenth of August.
Sri Aurobindo sent a message to Mahatma Gandhi, "Now that the country is free, you need a complete program for its progress, because it is one thing to fight for freedom and it is another thing after attaining the freedom to create a nation; tremendous responsibility falls on your shoulders."
And the reply that Mahatma Gandhi gave was again simply sarcastic: "You have left the world; you live in your ashram. You don't have to worry about what happens to freedom and what we are going to do; that is our business. You have left it, you don't have to interfere."
Now a man like Sri Aurobindo could have given insight, but that insight was not accepted -- and it shows. In those forty years that have passed since freedom, India has become worse every day. It has no program; its population has doubled, more than doubled. Its poverty has doubled -- the poverty grows according to the population. By the end of this century, India will be for the first time in the whole history of mankind, of millions of years, the most densely populated country. Up to now, China has been the first. So only one achievement seems to have come out of forty years of freedom: people have produced more and more children.
By the end of this century, just thirteen years away, India will have one billion people in the country. When it became free it had only four hundred million people. It seems that each year there is an increase of one million people -- but no technology is growing, no science is growing, no new methods are being used. And this population growth goes on making the country poorer and poorer. India is living on loans from the rich countries like America, and that is a new kind of slavery, economic slavery.
The days of political slavery are past, because it was unnecessary.... It is a similar case: the days of slaves are past, and the days of servants have come in because the slave was a great responsibility
|
|
|