Question after Gorakhpur: Is India at 70 too late to recover its own humanity?

August 16, 2017 11:01

Maithili Sharan Gupts immortal lines hum kaun thae, kya ho gaye hain, aur kya honge abhi, aao vichare aaj mil kar yeh samasyaen sabhi (Who were we? Who have we become? And what more shall we be?

Come, let us together meditate on all these conundrums), seem the right exhortation on Indias 70th Independence Day. It seems necessary since the virtues Gupt extolled in the imaginary universe of his poem knowledge, self-knowledge, independence, detachment, piety, free-spiritedness and, above all, compassion (by the suffering of others, we were with tenderness moved) seem all but eclipsed from our scale of values.

Read Pratap Bhanu Mehta's column for the Indian Express here.

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