All that is old or ancient is not necessarily outdated and all that is new may not be good, even if it is fashionable. In this simple advice, lies the key to understanding young India’s predicament.
The young Indian wears a peculiar brand of tinted glasses on his eyes. When he looks to the West, he sees only milk and honey. ‘Look at how disciplined and civic conscious they are, look at their clean cities and orderly queues,’ he says. When he looks at India with his tinted glasses, he sees only dirt and squalor here. ‘Our politicians and bureaucrats are corrupt, the situation is hopeless. India is doomed unless we change and become like the West.’
If the West is truly so progressive and faultless, why is there such seething discontent and turmoil within? This discontent found expression in the ‘Occupy’ movement recently which is seeking answers to the economic inequality and exploitation created by a world controlled by large corporations which disproportionately benefit a minority. Just a hundred years of this western economic and technological advance has the brought much of the earth’s natural resources to the brink of an irreversible collapse.
And is there no corruption or social evil then in Europe or USA today? If so, why is that the leading intellectuals of the West are predicting their own eventual implosion owing to social degeneration:
“Taking recent rioting in Greece as my starting point… I argue that Western nations are in terminal decline unless they can rediscover the true meaning and value of marriage and of the blessing of children as a gift to married couples and to society in general.”i
Let us listen to the sane voice of Swami Vivekananda who diagnosed this disease of the young Indian long ago and warned us against it:
“On one side, new India is saying, "If we only adopt Western ideas, Western language, Western food, Western dress, and Western manners, we shall be as strong and powerful as the Western nations"; on the other, old India is saying, "Fools! By imitation, other's ideas never become one's own; nothing, unless earned, is your own. Does the ass in the lion's skin become the lion?" On one side, new India is saving, "What the Western nations do is surely good, otherwise how did they become so great?" On the other side, old India is saying, "The flash of lightning is intensely bright, but only for a moment; look out, boys, it is dazzling your eyes