VKP CONTENTS PAGE - Vivekananda Kendra Prakashan

VIVEKANANDA KENDRA PATRIKA FEB.-JULY’05 8EditorialTHE VISION OFSWAMI VIVEKANANDASwami Vivekananda believed thatIndia lives on the strength of herspirituality. He defined Indiannationalism as “Bringing together anduniting the scattered spiritual forces of thecountry”. It was one of his fundamentalarticles of faith that every nation has a specialcharacter of its own and the nation wouldlive only so long as that character – thenational ideal - is cherished, protected andpreserved. For India, that idea wasspiritualism. He unhesitatingly called ours aspiritual nation and defined it as Hindunation. He was one of the first renaissancethinkers who popularized the term HinduNation – a legacy which was carried forwardby seers and statesmen like Shri Aurobindo,Lok Manya Tilak, Savarkar, Dr. Hedgewarand others. As a matter of fact, SwamiVivekananda was the “Manthra Drushta” ofHindu Nation. Vivekananda Kendra is tryingto propagate and bring to life this seed ideathrough its multifarious activities, like YogaVarga, Samskara Varga etc..Today the very concept of Nation is beingviewed with suspicion. There are many socalled modern historians who studiouslypropagate that nationhood in India is a post-British phenomenon, imported from Europe.This is totally unacceptable to SwamiVivekananda. According to him India as anation existed even before history as weknow it, was not known. History in fact isthe recorded or unrecorded memory of theNation about its past. Origin of Hindu Nationgoes beyond the realm of recorded history.Swamiji insisted that a proper study ofhistory alone will instill a sense of pride andself respect in the new generation. One ofSwamiji’s serious criticisms about the Britisheducation system was that it gave a muchdistorted picture of the history of ourcountry and filled the student with a senseof shame and inferiority complex. ThereforeSwamiji wanted a thorough overhauling ofthe system of education. To quote “Theeducation that you are getting now has somegood points, but it has a tremendousdisadvantage which is so great that the goodthings are all weighed down. In the first placeit is not a man making education, it is merelyand entirely a negative education. A negativeeducation or any training that is based onnegation is worse than death. The child istaken to school and the first thing he learnsis that his father is a fool, the second thingthat his grandfather is a lunatic, the thirdthing that all his teachers are hypocrites, thefourth that all the sacred books are lies! Bythe time he is sixteen he is a mass of negation,lifeless and boneless..... Education is not theamount of information that is put into yourbrain and runs riot there, undigested all yourlife. We must have life building, man –making, character – making assimilation ofideas. If you have assimilated five ideas andmade them your life and character, you havemore education than any man who has gotby heart a whole library. If education isidentical with information, the libraries arethe greatest sages in the world, andencyclopedias are the Rishis. The ideal,therefore, is that we must have the whole