First make laws and institutions that remain undiminished in their power through scores of centuries. You come up like bubbles and burst like bubbles too. You cannot hold on to one idea for two days, you quarrel and fail you are born like moths in the spring and die like them in five minutes. Tell these wiseacres: 'I will hear you when you have made a society yourselves. Much of the advice that is coming to us from different countries is similar to this. A child of but yesterday, destined to die the day after tomorrow, comes to me and asks me to change all my plans and if I hear the advice of that baby and change all my surroundings according to his ideas, I myself should be a fool, and no one else. There was a time when I used to think that many of them were useless and worthless but the older I grew, the more I seem to feel a diffidence in cursing any one of them, for each one of them is the embodiment of the experience of centuries. But the older I grow, the better I seem to think of these time-honored institutions of India.

These institutions have been necessary to protect us as a nation, and when this necessity for self-preservation will no more exist, they will die a natural death. “Though our castes and institutions are apparently linked with our religion, they are not so. The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, Volume 3 It is a sure sign of softening of the brain when the mind cannot grasp the higher problems of life all originality is lost, the mind has lost all its strength, its activity, and its power of thought, and just tries to go round and round the smallest curve it can find.” If this goes on for another century, every one of us will be in a lunatic asylum. Our God is the cooking-pot, and our religion is, 'Don't touch me, I am holy'. We are neither Vedantists, most of us now, nor Pauranics, nor Tantrics. What can you expect from men who pass their lives in discussing such momentous questions as these and writing most learned philosophies on them! There is a danger of our religion getting into the kitchen. Think of the last six hundred or seven hundred years of degradation when grown-up men by hundreds have been discussing for years whether we should drink a glass of water with the right hand or the left, whether the hand should be washed three times or four times, whether we should gargle five or six times.

Give up all those old discussions, old fights about things which are meaningless, which are nonsensical in their very nature. “But there is yet time to change our ways.

Born to Rebel by Mary Allsebrook