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FRAGMENTS OF A PRISONER'S DIARY
posterous habit of imitating the sound while belching lustily after a huge meal ? All these and innumerable other questions of the kindred nature can be silenced by the tyranny of words. Don't think, but believe—that is the doctrinc for the propagation of which langunge was useful in the carlier stages of human development, and by far the grcater bulk of mankind is still languishing in those stages of mental slavery imposed by the development of articulated speech. India is still far awav from the freedom from the tyranny of “ Bakya Brahma".
Take, for example, your nationalist movement as represented by the Congress. It is dominated by a bunch of words and terms-swaraj, non-cooperation, non-violence, sacrifice, suffering. To this already rich quasi-moral political vocabulary, some terms of pure mctaphysics have been added, the most notable being truth. Every Congressinan swears to practise truth and non-violence in thought, word and deed. It is generally believed that these ethical terms and metaphysical concepts endow Indian nationalism with a spiritual halo. Everybody repeats these terms, but few stop to think what they really mean. The result is intellectual stagnation, and hopeless confusion regarding the socio-political object of the movement.
The tyranny of the word "truth” is the worst. No other word in the human vocabulary is
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