Print.in has an
extract from Raja Rao's book 'The Meaning of India' which was published in 1996. It is embarrassingly bad. In the following he describes his meeting with Nehru who, for some reason, he pictured as some sort of Boddhisattva. Since Nehru had come out as a Socialist by then, Rao was displaying cretinism of a high order. But then the fool had been educated in France.
‘Romain Rolland spoke to me about you,’ he said after a long silence as we were walking back to the pension. I still remember the sun was completely unaware of himself and the trees stood inordinately still. They seemed aching for a breath, a touch, an efflorescence of the noncontingential. Everything seeks its own death and discovery, for suchness alone is meaning.
Did Nehru push Roa to the ground and brusquely sodomize him? Nothing less could have accorded with Nature's importunity at that sublime moment. Sadly, no such consummation devoutly to be wished actually occurred and Rao's anal cherry remained a stranger to the efflorescence of Nehru's noncontinent gentials. Pity, but there it is.
‘You certainly believe in something, Panditji? In some form of Deity, in philosophy?’
‘Deity, what Deity?’ He twitched angrily.
‘Why Siva and Parvati, Sri Krishna!’
‘Three thousand years of that and where’s that got us— slavery, poverty.’
‘And incomparable splendour, even today.’
‘What, with twenty-two-and-a-half years of life expectancy and five pice per person per day of national income? We’ve had enough of Rama and Krishna. Not that I do not admire these great figures of our traditions, but there’s work to be done. And not to clasp hands before idols while misery and slavery beleaguer us
The irony here is that Gandhi and Nehru turned into deities of an utterly stupid 'Secular Socialism' which did it best to perpetuate poverty. Yet, for Raja Rao's spiritual heirs- people like Shashi Tharoor- worship of Nehru remains obligatory as does slavish sycophancy towards the Dynasty.
‘Yes, and after that?’ I asked, as if to myself, somewhat timidly.
He seemed angry, ‘Now, now, don’t make me say this matter is matter,’ he said, touching the table. He was trying very hard to cut meat. Obviously the knife was in need of care or Panditji was not overdextrous with his hands.
‘No, Panditji, I know you won’t.’ I was winning the battle.
‘I am not such a fool. I won’t. I also have my private philosophy.’
He was silent for a while. And I did not say anything. ‘Of course,’ he continued, leaving the meat to its fate, ‘of course there’s something else. All this sun and moon and earth and galaxies, they don’t hang about in some chaotic universe. You probably do not know, I studied the natural sciences at Cambridge.’
‘No, I did not,’ I said. But he did not hear me.
‘There’s an intelligence about the world. There’s harmony. I am convinced we’re linked to that harmony. Individually linked,’ he added with deliberation, and merged into such sorrowfulness that the earth seemed lighter with his pain.
‘So God is mathematical.’
‘Well, perhaps. Why worry? And man is not just a . . .’
‘Just what? . . .’
‘A biological phenomenon.’
‘A creature of the “eighteen aggregates”.’
‘Yes, Buddhism comes quite near it; that is, there is something which must be, and which connects and sustains.’ ‘But that’s Vedanta,’ I interrupted. ‘The Buddha was a phenomenologist. Beyond manifestation, the void.’
The meat by now had become cold. So had my spinach. ‘Go where you will,’ he said slowly, and with a deep wealth of rising sensibility, ‘man is not a creature of accident. Nor are his apprehensions gratuitous. Man is a whole and he belongs to . . . to, well let’s say a universal harmony.’
He lit a cigarette. The coffee had come.
We may think that Nehru was as stupid as shit. What we must remember is that he was
less stupid than many other Western educated Brahmins of the period.
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