One Becomes a Hero by Choice
Questioner: When I look at the youth, when I look at our generation, all I see is weakness of mind and body, and that is why they are pulled down by voices like chasing women, running after money, alcoholism, doing drugs, and all kinds of nonsense and things which are unspeakable.
And when I look at the lives of legends like Bhagat Singh, Chandra Shekhar Azad, even Subhas Chandra Bose, I feel like why can’t we become like them? How can we become like them? How do we live a life they lived? How can we live such a fulfilling life that, when we die, we will not regret the way we believed?
Acharya Prashant: It is obviously wonderful to aspire for greatness, but remember that one has to start from where one is. Man is a product, at least a function, of his upbringing, of his environment, his surroundings. A hundred years back, situations were different. I am not saying better, not saying worse — different. Today you live in a particular complex of situations, and that is where you get your habits, your attitudes, your worldview, your opinions, your entire mental setup from. So that is where we all stand today; that is where the youth stands today.
It does not therefore offer much benefit to compare them with legends of a bygone era. This day is this day; that day was that day. That day had its own situations, opportunities, challenges. This day has its own environment and its own challenges. So you have to figure out how today’s youth have to aspire for greatness.
Even in that time, it was only a very minuscule fraction of the youth population that dared to rise in rebellion. Others were looking for a nice, comfortable, secure life, as people always in every era do. Even at that time the charm of the good life, let's say with a government job under the British, was very much there.
When Bhagat Singh was hanged, his body was not straightaway handed over to his family or to the demonstrating public. It was chopped into pieces by an employee of the British and put into a cloth bag and carried away to the riverbank and hastily cremated there. The man who did the chopping was probably a young man, an employee of the British. So do you want to say that that era was necessarily an era of youthful blossoming? Do you really want to insist that in that time the youth of the country were all idealistic and wise and courageous and honest? Not really.
When Chandra Shekhar Azad was being shot at in Allahabad, who were the people shooting at him? Those policemen would mostly have been quite young, we may presume. So do you want to call that any less vicious than the behavior exhibited by today’s youth? Do you want to?
Today we venerate Bismil, Rajguru, Bhagat Singh and Azad, but remember that many of them were let down by their own youthful compatriots. Many young men let the British in on their own revolutionary allies. That comes not from a particular age or a particular era but from man’s fundamental biological disposition. Be it any era, be it any set of situations, most people are governed mostly by their biological mandate. Man, and that includes both men and women. Man is not made biologically for greatness.
I was just saying, we all come from the jungle, and the jungle remains very dense within us. It possesses us, it controls us, it wants us to take care of our pleasures and security, the first thing. It has no respect for high life, high ideals, wisdom, or liberation. All that the jungle wants is pleasure and procreation — good food, good amenities, luxuries, good sex.
It’s not that suddenly young people of this century, the Gen X, Y, Z, or millennials have turned corrupt. No, that’s not the case. We were always like this. It’s just that when an era is behind us, we remember only the legends and conveniently forget the vast majority of ordinary mortals, who anyway duly deserve to be forgotten. We forget all the commoners and remember only the legends. But the legends are so few and far between.
The legends, as we said, are one in a million. The remaining ones yesterday were just the same as they are today. It’s not that the 1920s were a golden period of human or Indian consciousness. No, not at all. Not even the 1820s, not even the 1620s. The ordinary man on the street, young or old, rich or poor, was always debauched. It’s just that there are certain exceptions in every era, and those exceptions are not a product of that era. Those exceptions are a product of their own conscious choice. So that’s what you need today.
You cannot say Bhagat Singh was the product of his era. The men who murdered Bhagat Singh were a product of their era, not Bhagat Singh.
Exceptions are never factory products; they are not results of an assembly line. They are not outputs of a certain formula. Even today, if you want to have Bhagat Singh, there can be no formula.
There is filth all around. You talked of alcoholism, womanizing, and weakness among youth. Now, all that prevails all around us. In the middle of this, a miracle has to happen. And as we said, that miracle cannot be formula-based. Somebody has to rise on his own, with very little support from the environment, with very little around to validate what he is doing. Then, in the next century, people will remember you and say, “Oh well, the last century was such a golden one, and somebody like, let’s say you, our friend on the screen, emerged in this century. And why is our particular century so debauched?” This is going to continue like this.
We always have a choice. The choice is to either follow your biological compulsions, the social norms, or go by the whisperings of your free mind, the aspirations of your yearning consciousness, the beckoning of what Vedanta calls the Ātman. You have to decide that. Don’t blame the times. The times were always like this, and we were always like this. You could travel back as you want in history, and you will find human composition and disposition remain the same.
For every hero, you’ll always find 200 villains. The villains are not to be blamed; they are just normal. It is the hero who is abnormal. It is the hero who is not a product of a factory or a formula.
It is the hero who suddenly, abruptly emerges from nowhere, against all expectations, against the flow, against the norm.
This age obviously desperately needs a few heroes. Let’s see whether we will have them. Not all ages have their heroes. Let’s wait and see how lucky our particular age is.
Questioner: Thank you, Sir.
