CULTIVATING NATIONAL TREASURES
Prerequisite Qualities
INDIA, officially the Republic of India, is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country (with 1.39 billion people), and the most populous democracy in the world. It is bounded by the Indian Ocean on the south, the Arabian Sea on the southwest, and the Bay of Bengal on the southeast. It shares land borders with Pakistan to the west; China, Nepal, and Bhutan to the northeast; and Myanmar (Burma) and Bangladesh to the east. In the Indian Ocean, India is in the vicinity of Sri Lanka and the Maldives. India’s Andaman and Nicobar Islands share a maritime border with Thailand and Indonesia.
An effort of gigantic scale requires selfless devotion, utter dedication and unbounded patience. One must keep on working tirelessly knowing quite well that he will not be able to see the fruit of his hard work.
India celebrates its Independence Day on August 15. On the same day in the year 1947, India got freedom from the British Colonialism. Since then, every Independence Day celebration is marked by resolutions to build a strong and prosperous India. To develop a strong and thriving India, a national character is needed.
What is national character? It is, to put it simply, the capacity and the will to hold the interests of the nation supreme in every sphere. If there is a clash between individual and national interests, individual concerns must be subordinated to the greater good of the nation. Whenever a nation has made any progress, it has been due to this spirit of nationalism. Without such a spirit, no nation can advance either internally or externally.
This character is presented through a historical example here. The Dictionary of National Biography (DNB) is a work of reference on noteworthy figures from British history. It was first published in London in January 1985. When the idea to supply “full, accurate and concise biographies of all noteworthy inhabitants of the British Islands and colonies from the earliest period to the present time”, was first conceived by publisher George Smith (1824-1901), he was treading ground on which all who had gone before him had failed. It was a gargantuan task which called for a very high level of perseverance and hard work over a long period of time.
Smith chose as his editor Leslie Stephen (1832-1904) to do this work. But Leslie Stephen was not fated to see the completion of the work which he had so painstakingly started. It had taken everything out of him. He suffered a severe nervous breakdown and it was the assistant editor Sidney Lee (1859-1926) who saw the work through. The effort that the DNB had taken out of Leslie Stephen is expressed in his own heart-rending words:
“That damned thing goes on like a diabolical piece of machinery, always gaping for more copy.” (The Guardian, February 3, 1985) Commemorating the centenary of the DNB, The Guardian wrote: “It was one of those massive undertakings that only the Victorians could be megalomaniac enough to conceive, and only the Victorians could have had the energy and industriousness to carry out.”
In truth, any great undertaking requires energy and industriousness of this nature. If one is not ready to give one’s all, no worthwhile task can be achieved. An effort of such gigantic scale requires selfless devotion, utter dedication and unbounded patience. Here, one must be willing to remain obscure. One must keep on working tirelessly knowing quite well that he will not be able to see the fruit of his hard work.