With the world becoming a global village and technology virtually controlling our lives, will the individual lose his identity in the new millennium?
This world of beauty, goodness and truth has other qualities besides those of matter. I am inclined to call this the world of personality. For it is the personal man who is conscious of truth, beauty and goodness. Not only is he conscious of them, but his personality is strengthened and enriched through a realisation of all that is true, good and beautiful. Mistakes in science, or in our code of conduct, arise from our inability to comprehend the wholeness of truth.
Will the material more than the spiritual dominate human pursuits?
Material possessions create the worst divisions in human society when they are disproportionately big and naturally unmindful of moral responsibility....(the) immoderately rich suffer from a sense of class distinction...money, which is a dead thing, acts as an impenetrable wall around their self-imprisonment. This process is going on not only with individuals but with prosperous nations. Such nations are doomed and they carry the curse of God in their money bags. They will die in the very enclosures they have built for themselves - enclosures of wealth, of high walls of national distinction impenetrable for others.
There's a religious revival of sorts in India. Will this lead to any spiritual upliftment in this hi-tech age?
All through the course of human history it has become tragically evident that religions, whose mission is liberation of soul, have in some form or the other been instrumental in shackling freedom of mind and even moral rights. Thus we find that religious perversity is causing more blindness of reason and deadness of moral sensibility than any other deficiency in our education.
Be it the movies or computer technology, we seem to be aping the West. The American way of living seems to have caught our fancy. Are we on the right path?
Why do you emphasise upon American modes of life and how can you isolate and specify a particular country when you want the healthy contact of science, which is neither American nor Western but universal in its truth?
How important will art be in a world dominated by science and technology?
The world of science is not a world of reality, it is an abstract world of force. We can use it by the help of our intellect but cannot realise it by the help of our personality.... But there is another world which is real to us. We see it, feel it; and deal with it with all our emotions.... This is the world from which science turns away, and in which art takes its place.
Is the rise of Hindu nationalism and a growing antipathy towards minority communities a healthy trend?
The concrete fact of inequalities between individuals and races cannot be ignored, but to accept it as absolute and utilise it to deprive men of their human rights and comradeship is a social crime...Where numerous divisions have been made among the people by dark gaps of dishonour balance is upset and social structure is ever in danger of toppling over.
What should we as a nation guard against as we enter a new millennium?
Commercialism...is a terrible menace to all humanity. Because it is setting up the ideal of of power over perfection.... Therefore when the callous rudeness of power runs amuck in the broad-way of humanity it scares away by its grossness the ideals we have cherished with the martyrdom of centuries.... From what I have said you will know that I am not an economist. I am willing to acknowledge that there is a law of demand and supply and an infatuation of man for more things than are good for him. And yet I persist in believing that there is such a thing as the harmony of completeness in humanity, where poverty does not take away from riches, where defeat may lead to victory.
We must know for certain that there is a future before us and that future is waiting for those who are rich in moral ideals and not in mere things. And it is the privilege of man to work for fruits that are beyond his immediate reach, and to adjust his life not in slavish conformity to the examples of some present success or even to his own prudent past, limited in aspiration, but to an infinite bearing in its heart the ideals of our highest expectations.
(Excerpted from The Collected English Writings Of Rabindranath Tagore published from the Sahitya Akademi.)
