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FULLER PORTRAITS
51
According to the author, Subhas Chandra learnt, in the school of frustration, a lesson that one should not compare oneself with avatars like Vivekananda who are exceptional and so, should not be egoistic. Subhas Chandra, during his conversation with Roy one evening after his release in 1937, confessed that his agonies in the jail proved to be very fruitful as he learnt many things about himself when he lived in the seclusion of the jail. He said:
"I realised from day to day as never before why humility and charity had been counted by the Ancients as among our chief pathfinders in life. For these two helpmates of mine showed me, as none else could, why we should not judge others too harshly since at bottom we are all blind... and weak. I'd stress we are weak. And the marvel of it is that it's only when we realise how essentially weak we are that real strength comes to us from depths we know nothing of. But every realisation brings in its wake a change. The change in me was this that I decided
to be honest."82 Then, with melancholic smile on his face, he asked:
"But then Dilip ..... when you look at life don't you find a warning writ large, here there and everywhere, that there is no royal road to any realisation worth having? No, there never gleamed for me a path leading anywhere that was strewn with
roses."83
Dilip Roy also describes how Subhas Chandra was arrested for having started the Forward Bloc. Subhas Chandra found imprisonment unbearable this time and in 1940 he started hunger-strike. He was released for a while to be arrested again on January 26, 1941. He fled to Kabul so that he could go to his Russian friends in Moscow, but they were not eager to call him there. Disappointed Subhas Chandra went to Berlin and later on sought the help of Japan to realize Indian independence by any means. Now it was impossible for him to rescue himself from the British authorities. Roy comments:
"Subhash was a victim of a conspiracy of forces which, by exploiting his heart-sickness, induced him to seek a kind of
catharsis through adventure."84
Dilip Roy felt that Subhas Chandra failed in his mission because he was not a born politician. Roy knew that politics was not an appropriate area of work for noble, honest and conscientious men like Subhas Chandra. Subhas Chandra was a misfit for it because he was not a seasoned and diplomatic politician. In fact, Dilip Roy was attracted towards Subhas Chandra "not because he was a patriot on the surface, but because he was a mystic deep within."*5 Whenever
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