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There is talent; there is plenty; there are financial, intellectual, emotional resources. There is also the call to go forth and embrace the beckoning future with open arms. But it has to be accompanied with the inventive and creative spirit. Something of one’s own has to emerge and put into it, into that future. Unfortunately, not much of that is happening. We are by and large still imitative. We are, even now after decades of Independence, working with the colonial mindset. Perhaps Macaulay did not imagine that the impact of his ‘education’ would be so far reaching. The most glaring lacunae we witness in our individual and national life are of discipline and perfection in work, lack of attention to details. We are great inventors of software, but our bank accounts come with faulty entries. Perhaps the story of Jonathan Livingston Seagull should give us a lesson or two—that there is no heaven but a better world is found through perfection which lies in quality that can be felt and cognized by some kind of a perception of the refined and subtle, bringing out a thing that it really is. There is a beyond to all we do; to strive for it is the ceaseless pursuit of perfection. The satisfaction of the bird is not in the sky in which it flies or with what speed it flies, but in the wonder of flight itself. The joy of a student is not in how many subjects he studies or what rank he gets in an examination; it is in the study itself. Therein the belief is also that he will get the reward in life in one way or the other, and there need not be any doubt about it. That is the ultimate for every kind of our occupation and the real satisfaction, the real feat, the triumph lies in realising it. Such could be the most idealistic approach and the chances are that the practical world will simply pooh-pooh it, if not call it naïve to dismiss it. But such are the few who can give character to a society, who help it in many direct and indirect ways to grow and prosper. If they are absent perhaps nothing might be availing to it.

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