Change, thy Name is Existence

                                                     Change, thy Name is Existence

Seventeen months into office and there is a lot of talk about the BJP as being no different from the Congress. “No change at all” is the current lament of all those who had voted BJP to a resounding victory in pursuance of their desire for a change from the Congress. Arun Shourie, the veteran BJP intellectual has gone on record with a devastating blow calling BJP as Congress + cow with a still more hurting add-on  “ … looking at the way economy is being managed at present, people have started recalling the days of former prime minister Manmohan Singh”.  This is a perfect illustration of the desire for change that is in the DNA  of every human being.

This need for change has been emphasized by the ancient Greek philosopher, Heraclitus (535-475 B.C) who wrote: “The only thing that is constant is change”. This sounds trite now as his statement has been overused, nevertheless it is a truism, an obvious truth. From the womb to the tomb, we constantly experience change.  Samuel Beckett known for his wry humour caps it when one of his tramps in Waiting for Godot says “It's never the same pus from one second to the next.” We change just as Nature’s seasons change, its flowers and trees change. Nature seems to accept change as a fact of life while we humans are apprehensive about change even when we know that it is inevitable. Maybe Nature is wise to know that change in her case is cyclical, while we know in humans it is irreversible. Yesterday goes into the annals of human history and cannot be re-lived today. In much the same way, today disappears into the realm of memory when tomorrow takes centre stage. We cannot retrieve or undo yesterday and whether we accept it or not, today is definitely a changed day.

These reflections do not occur when we are young, when we are mentally and physically energetic, when we are at work, howsoever pedestrian that may be. This is because the cause and effect of what one does everyday link it to the next day demanding from the doer a change in the form of reversal of the previous day’s action or an improvement of it. No one cribs about the change that is necessitated by his/her actions at that busy period of his/her life.  Also many wish for a change from the daily humdrum of life, from the wearisome constancy of work such as staring into the computer screen or attending to the small chores of cleaning, washing, dusting, cooking, driving etc. One yearns for change for the betterment of one’s life style, for the augmentation of one’s income, for rise in one’s stature- in short for one’s upward mobility in all respects.  The politician is ready to change sides if that would assure him a lift up in the political space of the party he embraces. There is no ideology or principle involved in changing side; it is sheer desire for moving forward in one’s social and political circle. Robert Brault gives an apt analogy about change which he designates as ‘the other side’ : “A child on a farm sees a plane fly overhead and dreams of a faraway place. A traveler on the plane sees the farmhouse below and dreams of home.” It is the desire for change that makes voters vote out incumbent party and vote in, the opposition. In US it oscillates between Democrats and Republicans, in UK between Conservatives and Labour /Liberals, in India between NDA and UPA- between rightist and leftists, or between right of Centre and Left of Centre.

But when we grow old when our services are no longer needed on a quotidian routine, we begin to feel the change that we had accepted all along is no longer welcome. The world seems moving while we, the retirees have become supernumeraries. The change from an active life to a quiescent life heralds a change in our attitudes and approach to life. Looking at the next generation caught in the hurly burly of life , we forget our own past when we had enjoyed  being caught up in the whirling, tumultuous vortex of life and wonder where all these fretful fever and stir for ch,ange will land them! While in retirement we find a sudden urge towards prayers and meditations, visits to temples and gurudwaras, to holy places and lectures by men in red ochre or saffron robes to display our artificially induced sense of calmness as opposed to the state of agitation and movement that Gen next is in.  Why this frenzy for change to a new pursuit of yoga and religiosity, when all one needs is a cessation of all desire for change?  New fashions, new hairstyles, new gadgets, new music, new art forms, new dance are frowned upon by the older generation, as they sit and rock  in their easy chairs  for  they love to be rooted to the  changeless idiom of the times they grew up. “Crazy generation” is the epithet we bestow on the Gen next, saying it has no time to enjoy leisure, to cultivate taste for arts and aesthetics, where taste is limited to the savouring of the past.  “Don’t change” is the new mantra for the old who spends all the time in nostalgia about the great past. Oh! What a change has come over us in our old age when we desire changelessness.

This is because we have forgotten what our wise sages from very ancient times had written about change, the recognition of its inevitable recurrence in our life and the need to confront it with courage and dignity. The Brahmanas ( the prose treatises on sacrifices and worship) and the Upanishads (the philosophical treatises) speak about change that comes as we grow in years with reference to our attitude to religion. The Upanishads recognize that religion of a man (here used in the generic sense) cannot be and ought not to be the same throughout one’s life. With the growth of mind, the childhood ideas change and so do the perspectives. This process continues as life progresses through various stages. The first characteristic that overlooks rituals and sacrifices signals freedom of thinking, free from all the orthodoxy that surrounds the sacrificial rituals connected with worship. It liberates thoughts from action and thus makes free thinking the highest form of divine worship. It is freedom of thought that leads to the unique feature of the Vedanta philosophy that the ideas of an old man are different from those of a child or a grown up adult. The first stage of growth from childhood to boyhood is marked by disciplined learning where the young learner is a passive recipient of knowledge from his teachers. The second is that of the householder who follows without questioning the duties prescribed by the Manusmriti and the religious law books. The third is when he goes grey and having finished his duties leaves the family and seeks to meditate with freedom, the problems of life and death. When the evening of his life comes, he gives up all non­essentials (most religious differences arise out of the non-essentials) and clings to solid eternal truths that, he expects, will carry him through to the end. This is when he reads the Upanishads or learns its doctrines from a learned teacher and develops free thinking to understand the true relationship between Brahman and Atman-the Oversoul and the living soul. The exoteric(the external rituals)  is given up and only the esoteric (the core inner truth)remains as the guiding light of his last moments. The Upanishads that form the last part of Vedanta do not mention the prayers or the Gods or the rituals enunciated in the Samhitas and the Brahmanas but traces back to the happy unconsciousness of a child’s faith in the Supreme One.

 The four stages – childhood, boyhood, youth and adult manhood –are a testimony to change that is at the core of existence.  

Right (Write) to Protest

                                                         Right (Write) to Protest.

The focus of the media during the last couple of weeks has been on the Sahitya Akademi award winners. Either it is an indictment of a few writers for returning their awards or am endorsement  of a few others choosing to keep their awards, though they both protest about the growing intolerance in the country since the ascent of the BJP as the ruling party with a thundering majority to  back it. The overzealous ministers of the government and the hawkish RSS members have questioned the integrity of the writers who have returned their awards in protest. The harshest criticism has come from the Finance Minister, taking on the role of the super spokesperson of the PM  and wondering quizzically whether the protest was a real or a manufactured one? For him the writers’ protest is a case of ideological intolerance. He follows this with his characteristic swipe: “Writers with Left or Nehruvian leanings who enjoyed the patronage of the previous establishment are not comfortable with the Modi dispensation.” One wonders if the Finance Minister was acting like the Big Brother, having personal information of all the protesting writers critical  of the right wing government and coming to the conclusion that all the awardees who have renounced the literary distinction that had been conferred on them were stooges of the opposition party and were craving for a return of the  previous establishment for a revival of their lost patronage.  Normally the FM is careful with his words, but he seems to have lost his balance by making such an allegation. He failed to understand how  inter alia, his statement means that his rightist government is acting in a partisan way to  withhold patronage  of those who have  the Nehruvian and leftist leanings. In a more searing and undiplomatic language Mahesh Sharma, the Minster for Culture  sought to enquire into the background of these writers  who were protesting about the decline of freedom of expression  saying "If they say they are unable to write, let them first stop writing. We will then see."  One of the awardees was interrogated by information bureau after he had returned the award, to find out if he was spreading disaffection  among  people. The resulting offshoot from the writer’s side was a counter jibe calling the culture Minister as visanskriti minister(minister without sanskriti or culture). The incensed members of the ruling party have attacked the dissenting writers by going back to the Emergency of 1975, the 1984 riots after the assassination of Mrs.Indira Gandhi, the pulling down of the Babri Masjid in 1992, the Mumbai massacre of 1993  (of course these government spokespersons have a convenient amnesia of Gujarat violence of 2002) and the 2008 Mumbai attacks  to question why the writers did not return their awards in those dark hours. The anchors on all the TV channels verbatim echo these questions while grilling the writers who appear on their screens. “Why not then? Why now? “is a refrain that booms through the media. One is reminded of the Aesop Fables about the wolf and the lamb where a wolf spotting a little lamb drinking water at a spring down below decided to make a meal out of it.  He thought if he could find some excuse to seize the lamb and he called out to the Lamb, "How dare you muddle the water from which I am drinking?"

"Nay, master, nay," said Lamb; "if the water be muddy up there, I cannot be the cause of it, for it runs down from you to me."

"Well, then," said the Wolf, "why did you call me bad names this time last year?"

"That cannot be," said the Lamb; "I am only six months old."

"I don't care," snarled the Wolf; "if it was not you it was your father;" and with that he rushed upon the poor little Lamb and ate her all up. But before she died she gasped out: Any excuse is good enough for the strong and the mighty."  

The BJP, like the wolf, strong and mighty with a massive majority to rule –found in the silence of the writers on previous occasions a good excuse to beat them with. What it has failed to notice is that the question why now and why not then implies that the inhuman atrocities of
“then” are the same as the inhuman atrocities of the “now” and there is nothing to distinguish one act of ruthlessness and barbarity from the other.  In its reckless anger, the BJP has almost justified the outrage against all forms of assertive and collective inhumanity “then” and “now”. The bumbling Congress has been stupidly arguing back in defence of their not too illustrious past without understanding that the BJP is accepting the old adage:  What is good for the goose is good for the gander. If earlier events could well be legitimate causes for protests, the present protest is equally justifiable.

All the previous incidents cited by the ruling party members involving the killing of many innocents and the imposition of an authoritarian rule had taken place during the Congress rule. But then they happened at different times- once in a decade- 1984 murder of Sikhs was not one of communal hatred nor had it been pre-planned, pre- meditated  and executed. It was a mob capitulation to frenzy over the assassination of Mrs. Gandhi under the covert direction of a few Congress leaders. There had been no such brutality against the Sikhs in the past nor had there been one after that. The Hindus and Sikhs have never had any religious tension or communal divide at any time in the history of India. Even the clamour for Khalistan had very few takers within India. It had been one of the saddest and the most tragic happenings , but has remained just a one-off blot on Hindu-Sikh amity. The demolition of Babri Masjid eight years later, despite its  saffron colouring, had not fuelled Hindu-Muslim tension as was intended and even when the Congress government under  the soft and gentle Shri Narasimha Rao was hauled over the coals for failing to anticipate and prevent the diabolical scheme, there was no demolition of the Hindu-Muslin amity on religious lines. The Mumbai massacre was planned in  and by Pakistan with ground level operators in India  partly as a revenge against Babri demolition, partly to fuel the communal flame in the  country. This and the 2008 Mumbai attacks were provocative in intent, but despite the inept handling of the situation, the government of the day was able to prevent communal violence in the aftermath of those diabolical instances. Writers, social activists, media and the general public were angry with the government for not able to anticipate and prevent these attacks, but no one accused the government of perpetrating any communal disharmony.

In the last fifteen months, there has been a spate of incidents more catalytic in spreading intolerance and hatred between the two communities. Love Jihad, Ghar wapsi, the killing of rationalists and intellectuals who were quizzical about religious superstition and the Hindutva ideology were deliberately planned to bring about disaffection between the Hindus and the Muslims. It is not that the ruling party had a direct hand in these incidents, but its silence over the spectacle of these bizarre happenings by the fringe groups within the party was fomenting an atmosphere of hatred and intolerance in the nation. The Dadri lynching of a Muslim and his son on an alleged but false suspicion that the family ate beef and had kept beef in their refrigerator was the last straw in the writers’ back.

The protest of the writers was not pre-engineerd  one as there was no attempt to use the social media to bring the protesters together. It was a spontaneous anger at the rising intolerance in the society and the eerie silence of the Prime Minister and the members of his cabinet, backed by the ir parent organization RSS. All these happenings have come in waves –one after the other within a span of fifteen months. The periodic attempt to spread communal hatred and the murder of writers who were seen to be advocating a secular and pluralistic India made the writers rise in protest. Their number is too small to be counted on fingers, but the massive ruling party is up in arms against these miniscularly small pen wielders. What can this minority of forty odd literary scholars do against the might of the government? Then why this unseemly attack on the Akademi writers who have returned their awards in protest ad who have resigned from the Sahitya Akademi? Why is the government afraid of this small group and their impotent protest through renunciation of the awards given to them?  Why do all the PM’s men indulge in tongue lashing that is worse than whip lashing? 

But in the cacaphony of charges and counter charges, the reason for the protest has been sidelined (maybe that is what the ruling party desires). In a functioning democracy, protests play an important and positive role so that the government does not become dictatorial and insist on a single point of view without considering the other side of the argument. A protest cannot take place in a vacuum .There must be a cause- legitimate in the eyes of the protesters –to express dissent. By deflecting from the root cause and  to charge the protesters as having an political and ideological agenda may seem clever in the short run but will boomerang on the government sooner than later.

Who are the protesters today? Not the aam admi but the public intellectuals. In a forthright  interview with Seema Chishti of the Indian Express, the Emeritus Professor of history of JNU, Romilla Thapar speaks about the importance of the public intellectual to speak out and stand up for the survival of democracy.  “… a public individual has a vision of the kind of society he or she wants and is willing to debate it and be open to debate. A public intellectual is not expected to be dictatorial and insist on a single answer without seriously considering the argument of the others. Negating discussion is negating the fundamental right to freedom of speech; as also an Indian philosophical tradition, which was that a debate begins with presenting the opponent’s point of view, as correctly and as fully possible; this is then refuted, and out of the proposition and refutation, an accommodating point of view maybe found… without sounding arrogant, I would insist that a certain intellectual investment is needed for debating an issue.”

We need the public intellectual to be given the space so that people can think and debate about issues that are either today glossed over or a single point of view is thrust on unthinking minds. Today in major parts of the world the intellectual elites have been silenced or replaced by moneyed or power dominated elites. If we go back to the last century, in the second half of the 1980s, Eastern Europe Czechoslovakia ushered in the Velvet revolution under the leadership of Vaclav Havel that brought the curtains down for Soviet Union and Communism. Havel wrote: “I really do inhabit a system in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government, where words can prove mightier than ten military divisions.”

For the first time after the emergency, Indian writers have come forward- not as a rebel group to fight the duly elected government, but to follow the Indian philosophical tradition that encourages debates that revolve round thesis, anti-thesis and synthesis. It is said,  “language is the main instrument of man’s refusal to accept the world as it is… Without this refusal,…we would turn forever on the treadmill of the present.”(George Steiner) .

The issue today is not whether it is right to return or retain the award bestowed on a writer or an artist by Sahitya Akademi or Sangeet Natak Akademi. That is the democratic choice given to the individual writer. None of the awardees who have returned their awards have coerced others to do so. This is where the public intellectual stands up, seeking a debate on the core issue of intolerance that is slowly overtaking the country.

It is time for the political parties to affirm the Right(Write) to Protest for it is in this protest that democracy gets its sustenance and survival. Creative writers often bring a world that is not, as it is a fictitious world created in their imagination. But the world they create is a world that they either desire or reject as it is founded on reality as they see around them. A work of art thus becomes not a creative falsehood, but a creative truth as it holds to the society the mirror of a world that truly conforms to their refusal to accept the world as it is and to their effort to replace it with a new world of beauty, peace and harmony. May our intellectuals continue their effort and succeed as Havel succeeded in Czechoslavakia.  May the Right(Write) to Protest serve the Nation in line with our Best Philosophical traditions

The Fall and Rise of Icons

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Among the many promises Prime Minister Modi made during the run up to the last general elections in2014 one was to bring a Congress -mukht Bharat. This is one promise he has assiduously followed before and after the elections and has almost succeeded. In the elections, he reduced the Congress to just 44 seats in the lower house (Lok Sabha) of 543. Post elections, the Congress continues to meow with its yet to be depleted majority in the upper house (Rajya Sabha). Modi hopes that it will be just a matter of time before the end of his first term as PM  (and before he begins his second, as he envisions in 2019) to get a full majority in both the houses to enable him to have a freehand  in matters of governance. The PM has prioritized establishing Congress free States as the primary goal to be achieved to push through reforms so that the global economy can be made in India.  Whenever he is in India, he unflaggingly works towards winning State elections that would facilitate entry of his party in large numbers into Rajya Sabha. Either there is a vacuum in the BJP second rung( in fact, the sole occupier of the first rung is the PM)  to bring about the total annihilation of the Congress and other parties who dare to oppose him or it is PM’s no-trust in the capabilities of his ministers that the state elections have been reduced to a straight fight between Modi and the rest.

But how much can one man do even if he has a 56” chest and a stentorian voice that he deftly employs to render in the lowest and the highest pitch  his clarion call to oust Congress at all his election rallies? Further State elections do not take place every second day. PM has to keep his anti-Congress, anti-opposition tirade well cultivated and nurtured even during the election-less days and months by a sustained attack on anything and everything that has even a remote C- connection. PM’s job is certainly unenviable as everyday he has to do a C-section to suck out Congress from Mother India. Hence systematically he attempts to bring down all the icons from the high pedestals they had till now occupied - icons which have been mounted by the Congress.  PM is sufficiently learned in the theory of physics that propounds that a vacuum cannot be artificially produced for if we pump the air from a receiver there still remains the luminiferous ether.  Hence the pulling down of icons will have to be simultaneously replaced by raising new icons so that the pedestals do not remain empty. But the problem is there have not been any icons among the saffronites who had contributed to the freedom struggle as Nehru and Patel had done.

Therefore PM started his first project of constructing the world’s tallest statue for Sardar Patel, lamenting that “Every Indian regrets Sardar Patel did not become the first prime minister. Had he been the first prime minister, the country’s fate and face would have been completely different”, though it is a mystery how he arrived at the statistics that showed every Indian nurses a regret that Patel was not made the first PM. He dexterously spoke about the alleged partisanship between Nehru and Patel as many of the post-independence generation has very little knowledge of these two eminent men and made them believe that the two were adversaries and that Nehru cleverly connived  and pipped Patel at the post. The fact is it was Gandhi who anointed Nehru as the leader to lead the nation.  As Ramchandra Guha, the historian writes: “Patel was himself a lifelong Congressman; indeed, as home minister, it fell to him to ban the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh after the Mahatma’s murder. Second, Nehru and Patel were in fact not rivals but comrades and co-workers. They worked closely together in the Congress from the 1920s to 1947; and even more closely together thereafter, as prime minister and deputy prime minister in the first government of free India.” But by pitting Patel against Nehru, PM laid the foundation for re-writing post-independent history of India and replacing the icon who had been revered all through the last 67 years prior to his  own elevation as the PM.

Pulling down an icon is not easy unless it is followed by pulling down all institutions established in its name and memory. Jawaharlal Nehru Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) has been replaced by AMRUT and Smart City. Nehru’s visionary idea of establishing a Planning Commission to formulate five year economic plans for the nation has now been renamed Niti Ayog, though PM wanted to scrap it altogether. This scrapping is not so much about introducing a new vision of Economics, but against all the social, economic and political legacy of Nehru. The real reason is pure anti-Nehruvianism. In a diatribe against Nehru, Subramanian Swamy,  (the present voice of the PM and one of the new entrants into the BJP)  said:  “Today, due to what I call as (sic) Nehruism, the nation is at the weakest. India’s adrenalin has almost been drained… Indians have been programmed by Nehruism to be bereft of patriotic feelings and Nehruism is capitulation for personal aggrandisement.”  The Nehru Memorial that was set up to spread Nehru’s ideas and keep alive the awareness of Freedom struggle and the history of Modern India has now been re-planned as a museum of governance, deflecting from the purpose for which it was set up- to house the personalia, memorabilia, mementos and other objects pertaining to Nehru’s life and the Indian freedom movement.

If Nehru got stripped of his iconic status, worse befell his successors who belonged to his dynasty. The new government decided to discontinue the stamps bearing Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi. The Congress had been guilty of over iconing the Nehru-Gandhi family and as its influence begun to pale, new icons found their way like the resustication of Balasaheb Ambedkar by Mayavati’s Bahujan Samaj Party, of Ram Manohar Lohia by Mulayam Singh Yadav’s Socialst party. But PM and his BJP have outdone them all- not by adding new icons , but by first dismantling the old ones and erecting new ones. There are no new icons in modern times unless it is a Tendulkar or an Amitabh Bachhan or an evergreen DevAnand to name a few non- political stars.  The new Government had to go back in time to idolize Netaji Bose whose fiery patriotism in favour of armed revolution (that did not yield much to the freedom struggle) was in opposition to Gandhiji’s non-violence that Nehru inherited, to elevate Ambedkar from being a Dalit idol to a national hero (though in typical BJP fashion, one part of BJP  follows Ambedkar and opposes reservation based on caste system while for the immediate purpose of winning  the Bihar elections, PM and his mentored ministers speak in favour of the continuance of reservations).It is also a great paradox that PM has appropriated both Gandhi and Ambedkar as the new icons though the two were as different as chalk and cheese. 

But it is not enough to pull down Nehru from his iconic status, but to show him out to be a sly, mean trickster, a con-man, a charlatan –name what you will. The big announcement of declassifying Netaji files was enough to show Nehru as an idol with clay feet, but worse it was meant to show him as a person without character. Gandhi for whom the BJP has suddenly found a new surge of veneration ( after a member of its parent organization RSS had assassinated him)had written about the petty attempts of men to invent new icons by humiliating the old ones: “It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honoured by the humiliation of their fellow beings.”  The revival of interest in Lal Bahadur Shastri’s sudden death is a veiled innuendo about the dynasty’s(read Nehru’s) attempt to perpetuate his dynasty’s hold on the PM’s chair. Whether Nehru a true liberal and democrat ever thought of dynastic rule or not, the drift of the indirect and malicious insinuation could not go unnoticed.

Every day new icons are suddenly brought to focus to fill the empty space after the fall of the earlier icons. There is a frenetic search to unearth new icons from its cadre though none can  match the likes of Gandhi, Patel and Nehru  who worked for the development and welfare of the country together despite differences in their thinking and attitude. It is in their nobility and generosity to accommodate and unify diverse views that they succeeded in their single minded objective to free India from the British rule. They were true democrats venerated for their liberality of spirit and temperament, of their magnanimity and large-heartedness. Our generation is slowly veering towards intolerance and bigotry. The values of liberality, open-mindedness and acceptance of the ‘other’ who differs from one’s views have become values of the past.

This raises a pertinent question as to why we need icons? This question gains greater relevance as the modern age neither values  the heroes of the past nor are there any heroes  in the present  of the stature of  Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, Rajaji, -to name a few of our freedom fighters.  We do not have a Tagore or an Aurobindo who were our literary and spiritual icons.  Congress was fortunate to have discovered genuine heroes of those days who had contributed to the freedom struggle. While Gandhi towered over every other Indian as an icon of equality, freedom and love- the values we need all the time forever, Nehru was an iconic politician, statesman and idealist, who was the architect of Modern India  and who propelled India towards the advancement of science and technology by setting up IITs and institutes of Science for research. It is a fallacy to suggest that Congress made an icon out of Nehru; he was an icon in the eyes of his people because he had contributed not only to the freedom struggle but subsequently to the concretization of a secular, pluralistic, modern India. But the foolish and partisan overplaying of the Nehru-Gandhi family by Congress in the post-Nehru era, to the total neglect of anyone who was outside the dynasty (that includes Patel) has its backlash today in the uprooting of the great icons of the past and planting of fresh icons in an age when hero worship is limited to an orchestrated euphoria over individual excellence in the fields of sports, fashion, pop music, cinema or the small screen.  Will the fresh icons stand the test of time and will they have the sustaining power to match the temporary adulation of a few celebrities of the present times?

 The question once more veers round the relevance of icons in the present century. This hinges on the basic question- who is an icon? The term has been overused to refer to anyone who displays virtuosity in any field that is lacking in the vast majority of common people. Unlike in the past where an icon represented a lasting and enduring symbol of qualities of the mind and the heart,  of a person whose sphere of influence and inspiration raised every ordinary man and woman  to a higher plane of thought and action,  of path breakers and torch bearers who left their indelible footprints on the sands of time, the present day icons have a limited shelf life. A Dhoni stays as a cricketting icon till the time he lofts the World cup and he is forgotten the moment the cup is lofted by another. Barring an Amitabh Bachchan or a Lata Mangeshkar or a Rehman or a Tendulkar  who have straddled time with their virtuosity in their respective fields of cinema, music and cricket, the others cannot claim to the status of an icon , to be venerated by people of all times and ages. The sphere of influence of these icons is certainly unlimited and it gives momentary excitement to millions of people who lead a pedestrian life, satiating their hunger for excellence that is denied to them. But these modern day icons may inspire a few, but not the whole society to raise themselves from their mediocrity to a loftier plane of existence. When bracketted with the earlier icons, we find that the values they preached and practiced made millions of people follow in their footsteps. History teaches the value of such icons who inspired a large number of people to make the world a better place to live.  When we forget these icons, when we try to pull them down, when we substitute them with new icons –some of whom would have limited influence –then we let go of the history of Man and his civilization. We need icons now more than at any other time but this cannot be done by disbanding the old and replacing them with new ones. A simultaneous assimilation of old and new icons that inspire a large number of people can reverse the listlessness and apathy  of the modern generation that feels a sense of barrenness in the absence  of enduring and life inspiring heroes in its midst..