Reflections on India

By Gopalakrishna Gandhi.

26 Pages | First edition 2001 | Softcover | Theosophical Publishing House, Adyar | ISBN: 8170594324.

'Where does the real India reside?'' asks the author, for India is a land of enormous disparities and contradictions. In 1916, his grandfather Mahatma Gandhi denounced before an august assembly at Varanasi the existence of pomp and wealth amidst degrading penury, filfth around holy places, and the domination of a foreign language over native tongues. He also pronounced other unpalatable truths.

This lecture contains and eloquent description of the same contradictions, existing even today all over India, because the same attitudes of callousness and cruelty continue. But there is also an aquifer of goodness that is essentially Indian, which must be tapped and never allowed to run dry.

'What we are, the world is'. Here is a compelling call to every Indian to tap that goodness and be what is needed for the redemption of the nation.

From page 10:

" Where does India, the real India, reside? Not in cities, surely, where money grows but humanity shrinks; where you have, for example, this hush so wonderful, this air so pure, but just beyond, a steaming slum which bravely, hopefully (perhaps sarcastically?) is called 'Jasmine Town' (mallippoo nagar). Soweto in Johannesburg, the world's most famous informal settlement, is an eldorado compared to the slums in India's cities, slums that are home to what Valentine Chirol in his essay on Kalighat described as 'tangled knots of perspiring humanity'. Is this, the Theosophical Society, which affords divine knowledge (brahmajñana), the real thing, or is it mallippoo nagar? "