#008, Alasinga! WHO TOLD YOU THAT I WANT SOCIAL REFORM?

Swamiji wrote to Shri Alasinga Mudaliar in the second half of 1895 from New York, USA:
"Meddle not with social reform, for there cannot be any reform without spiritual reform first. Who told you that I want social reform?. Not I. ..."


BLOGGER'S VIEW
Do the Indian poor want spirit?

What India needed was not only a independence but social , economic and political reforms. The phrase 'spiritual reform' is vague. Spirits fed on ale, beef, chicken, fish, pizzas, pork, steak and turtles etc, cannot easily bend to reforms.

India of 1895 needed revolution. India of 2011 too needs it with equal desparation. This revolution need not be bloody. No wonder, the Vivekananda of 1895 didn't recognise the need for a social reform just as the crazy-converting missionaries of his time. The leaders of the Islam also do not recognise such need. It is because reforms hurt them.

Comments

Anonymous said…
now is spirit as you and i think..? what swamiji actually meant by spiritual reform is not the 'orthodox' spirituality but that of Advaita Vedanta - which would throw off all the superstition and other so called 'spiritual' burdens off the poor and make them self-reliant...


Theodore Roosvelt -"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."

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