Hunger, Piety, Work, Gandhi

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"True to his poetical instinct, the poet [referring to Tagore] lives for the morrow and would have us do likewise. He presents to our admiring gaze to the beautiful picture of the birds early in the morning singing hymns of praise as they soar into the sky. These birds have had their day's food and soared with rested wings, in whose veins new blood had flown during the previous night. But I have had the pain of watching birds who for want of strength could not be coaxed even into a flutter of their wings. The human bird under the Indian sky gets up weaker than when he pretended to retire. For millions it is an eternal vigil or an eternal trance. It is an indescribably painful state which has got to be experienced to be realized. I have found it impossible to soothe suffering patients with a song from Kabir.

"The hungry millions ask for one poem -- invigorating food. They cannot be given it. They must earn it. And they can earn only by the sweat of their brow. . . . Imagine, therefore, what a calamity it must be to have 300 millions unemployed, several millions becoming degraded every day for want of employment, devoid of self-respect, devoid of faith in God.

"I may as well place before the dog over there the message of God as before those hungry millions who have no lustre in their eyes and whose only God is their bread. I can take before them a message of God only by taking the message of sacred work before them. . . . To them God can only appear as bread and butter. ... My ahimsa would not tolerate the idea of giving a free meal to a healthy person who has not worked for it in some honest way and, if I had the power, I would stop every Sadavrata where free meals are given. It has degraded the nation and it has encouraged laziness, idleness, hypocrisy and even crime .... Do not say you will maintain the poor on charity"

- Mahatma Gandhi
(Excerpts from Nirmal Kumar Bose, Selections from Gandhi ,  Navijan Publishing House, 1957)

"I look upon an increase in the power of the State with the greatest fear because, although while apparently doing good by minimizing exploitation, it does the greatest harm to mankind by destroying individuality which lies at the root of all progress ...The State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form.

"The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence. . . . It is my firm conviction that if the State suppressed  capitalism by violence, it will be caught in the coils of violence itself and fail to develop nonviolence at any time. . . . What I would personally prefer, would be not a centralization of power in the hands of the State but an extension of the sense of trusteeship; as in my opinion, the violence of private ownership is less injurious than the violence of the State. However, if it is unavoidable, I would support a minimum of State-ownership"

- Mahatma Gandhi (Excerpts from Nirmal Kumar Bose, Selections from Gandhi ,  Navijan Publishing House, 1957)