Sambodhi 1989 Vol 16

Author(s): Ramesh S Betai, Yajneshwar S Shastri
Publisher: L D Indology Ahmedabad

Page 95

86
vast majority of the blacks to utter humiliation, torture, exploitation and economic degradation is today forced, may be, against its own will, to release a Nelson Mandela and also to agree to the independence of Namibia. The world often seems to be full of contradictions with apartheid, racial superiority of the white, the iron rule of the mullas and so on. In the modern days we do liave atheists at one extreme and blind followers of religion at the other. In the modern world Salman Rushdiea citizen of the United Kingdom can be given death penalty by the head of state of Iran and he can make it not only a national but religious issue. The truth of the picture of civilization and modern man drawn by Radhakrishnan is all the more pronounced to-day than it was fifty years' back.
The progress that man could not acquire in the last 500 years has become a reality of his life in the last fifty years. Man has realized all the more glaringly that:
"From China to Mexico there is increasing faith in the progress depending on the continued expansion of man's command over the resources and control of the powers of nature." (p. 8). And what Radhakrishnan stated 50 years back stands all the more true to-day that "The outer uniformity has not, however, resulted in an ioner unity of mind and spirit. The new Dearness into which we are drawn has not meant increasing lappiness and diminishing friction, since we are not mentally and spiritually prepared for the meeting." (p. 8). And the words of Maxim Gorky are all the more true to-day that :
"Yes, we are taught to fly in the air like birds, and to swim in the water like fishes, but how to live on the earth we do not know.” (p. 8).
It is all the more true to-day after half a century that:
"There is a quickened consciousness, a sense of something inadequate and unsatisfactory in the ideas and cenceptions we have held and a groping after new values. Dissolution is in the air. The old forms of faith are tottering." (p. 10).
Man continues to feel the inadequacy of the past and no new value seems to settle in man's life for more than five or ten years. It is true to-day that we talk and talk loudly of one world, unity of mankind, the developed countries lielping the developing, the results of all scientific and other inventions being made available to entire mankind, reducing military weaponry and atomic and nuclear weapons and so on. With all this even to-day the dream of Radhakrishnan, expressed in these words is yet only a dream :