Collated by Tusar Nath Mohapatra
Our democratic dividend, I submit, is not an abstract ideal. It is the lived reality of a nation that has sustained the world’s largest democracy for nearly eight decades, navigated extraordinary linguistic, religious, and regional diversity, and drawn upon a civilisational memory stretching back millennia. Unlike authoritarian monocultures, India’s democracy allows for contestation, correction, and innovation from below. It aligns with the classical Indian emphasis on sabha and samiti from times immemorial. These deliberative assemblies offered a natural counter to the centralised command models that have repeatedly faltered in history.
Yet today, we seem strangely reluctant to harness these democratic traditions. Despite claiming to be the ‘Mother of Democracy’. Our ambition to become a global power, I would argue, is obstructed by our inability or unwillingness to enhance and encash our democratic dividend. Moreover, without systemic transformation, there is a serious risk that our aspirations will not be nourished by our realities. Instead of leveraging our demographic dividend, the strengths of open debate, federal pluralism, and accountable governance rooted in our dharmic continuum, what do we do? - Makarand R Paranjape
Though the dark ages of mankind saw them being relegated to a secondary and subordinate position, either as someone who had to obey the man, fulfil his wishes and demands, or worse, as commodities of pleasure and marketing, the cycle of Time is turning and we are approaching a New Age when the eternal feminine is rising and dawning upon the horizons like the goddess Usha, who the rishis first aspired for.
Though her glory has been sung in the Vedas and the Tantras, our more modern interpretations of Vedanta as otherworldly scriptures that regard life as an illusion gave too much prominence to the masculine principle of creation, the Iswara, the Deva, the Purusha. But the Deva without Devi is powerless, the Purusha without Prakriti is helpless, the Iswara without His Shakti is a silent witness who can neither intervene nor help our evolutionary journey.
This rejection of the Shakti, the Eternal Feminine, was the main reason for India’s downfall, a subtle truth pointed out by Sri Aurobindo, to whom it was given to revive this forgotten Shakti. He did this in a threefold manner:
First, he invoked the Shakti of Mother India through his Bande Mataram, an English-language newspaper and Durga Stotra (Hymn to Durga), thereby awakening the very soul of India, one day to lead us to independence and the heights of future glory.
Second, as an Avatara of the New Age, he placed the Divine Mother at the forefront of yoga, stepping behind to watch over the larger lines while the Mother would see to the finer details of the New Creation. What is meant by this expression is that the old creation based itself upon the mind and hence has division as its governing principle whereas the New Creation bases itself on an all-comprehensive Divine Truth beyond the mind and hence, has unity in diversity as its governing principle.
Finally, while he withdrew from the range and limits of earthly sight, he placed his epic mantric poem Savitri, a legend and a symbol from the Vedic times, in the hands of humanity. By doing so, he not only indicated that it is the feminine power that will hold the key to the New Age, he also corrected the imbalance of an exclusively male-centric approach in life as well as in philosophy. Most importantly, he linked the ancient dawn of the Vedic age to the aspirations of today, opening doors into the future...
Politics has a lot to do with intrigues, scheming and planning, not all of which is visible on the surface. Even the closest of friends may not disclose their secret intent to another, in the course of politics where close kin become sworn enemies unless there is some way to identify with the inner beings of persons involved and know by a secret identity the inner events and the forces moving us that shaped circumstances.
It is this fundamental inability that makes all history, whether by an interested or even disinterested party, to some extent questionable. It is not about who wrote it or for whom, it is simply the fact that human consciousness is essentially limited in knowing what goes on in creating any event. It records only the surface details and keeps multiplying it as primary and secondary source materials but through all this painstaking collection of information it keeps circling around the Light of Truth that it can neither see nor touch. The Eternal Feminine - Dr Alok Pandey
https://auromaa.org/the-eternal-feminine/
The universe and the individual are constant and inseparable companions on the journey, complementary associates in the endeavour. "Always indeed they exist for each other and profit by each other. Universe is a diffusion of the divine All in infinite Space and Time, the individual its concentration within limits of Space and Time. Universe seeks in infinite extension the divine totality it feels itself to be but cannot entirely realise; for in extension existence drives at a pluralistic sum of itself which can neither be the primal nor the final unit, but only a recurring decimal without end or beginning. Therefore it creates in itself a self-conscious concentration of the All through which it can aspire. In the conscious individual Prakriti turns back to perceive Purusha, World seeks after Self; God having entirely become Nature, Nature seeks to become progressively God."[2] If the individual is the self-conscious concentration of the Universal and spearheads the unfoldment, the universal is the foundation and the very stuff and the field of the divine unfoldment. The individual is required to universalise and impersonalise himself if he has to fully and perfectly manifest the divine All which truly is his reality. Nonetheless, he should not lose sight of his unique personality which is a luminous representative of the Transcendent and which holds the key to the secret of his truth.
The individual, indeed, has a special role to play in the universe. He is not here simply to repeat the animal on a new and higher scale of mentality but to seek control and eventually gain mastery over the chaos of cosmic energies, and to realise and establish a greater harmony among them. "The animal is satisfied with a modicum of necessity; the gods are content with their splendours. But man cannot rest permanently until he reaches some highest good. He is the greatest of living beings because he is the most discontented, because he feels most the pressure of limitations. He alone, perhaps, is capable of being seized by the divine frenzy for a remote ideal.... It is the Son of Man who is supremely capable of incarnating God. This Man is the Manu, the thinker, the Manomaya Purusha, mental person or soul in mind of the ancient sages. No mere superior mammal is he, but a conceptive soul basing itself on the animal body in Matter. He is conscious Name or Numen accepting and utilising form as a medium through which Person can deal with substance."[3] Animal life is only an inferior term of man's existence; the mental life by which he seizes upon the physical universe and organises and controls it is the middle term. Yet there is a secret nexus in his mind that points to and seeks something essentially superior to his present self. And this will be the basis of a divine life on earth.
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