Long before Shashi Tharoor made us proud with his speech claiming India to be the rightful owner of the Kohinoor, and TED Talks became the new bastion for discussing and spreading radical new ideas, there was a man who did us proud on a world platform. Swami Vivekananda’s speech at the first Parliament of the World’s Religions, held in Chicago, is considered among his most significant contributions to the world — so much so that a three-day world conference was organised to commemorate his 150th birthday in 2012. It was an impressive breakdown of the ancient philosophy of Hinduism — delivered with crisp logic and scientific insight. The speech made him a hero in the US. His opening lines “Sisters and brothers of America!” earned him a 2-minute long standing ovation. Just imagine what effect the rest of his speech would’ve had. Here are a few excerpts from his speech that will convince you why celebrating the National Youth Day on his birth anniversary is so apt.
His patriotism
“I am proud to belong to a nation which has sheltered the persecuted and the refugees of all religions and all nations of the earth. I am proud to tell you that we have gathered in our bosom the purest remnant of the Israelites, who came to Southern India and took refuge with us in the very year in which their holy temple was shattered to pieces by Roman tyranny. I am proud to belong to the religion which has sheltered — and is still fostering — the remnant of the grand Zoroastrian nation.”
His assessment of major religions
“I am a Hindu. I am sitting in my own little well and thinking that the whole world is my little well. The Christians sit in their little well and think the whole world is their well. The Muslims sit in their little well and think that is the whole world.”
His interpretation of the ancient scriptures
“The Hindus have received their religion through revelation — the Vedas. They hold that the Vedas are without beginning and without end. It may sound ludicrous to this audience, how a book can be without beginning or end. But by the Vedas no books are meant. They mean the accumulated treasury of spiritual laws discovered by different persons in different times. Just as the law of gravitation existed before its discovery — and would exist if all humanity forgot it — so is it with the laws that govern the spiritual relations between soul and soul and between individual spirits.”
His knowledge of science
“The Vedas teach us that creation is without beginning or end. Science is said to have proved that the sum total of cosmic energy is always the same. Then, if there was a time when nothing existed, where was all this manifested energy? Some say it was in a potential form in God. In that case God is sometimes potential and sometimes kinetic, which would make Him mutable. Everything mutable is a compound and everything compound must undergo that change which is called destruction. So God would die — which is absurd. Therefore, there never was a time when there was no creation.”
He sums up the existential crisis of the youth very well
“Is man a tiny boat in a tempest, raised one moment on the foamy crest of a billow and dashed down into a yawning chasm the next, rolling to and from at the mercy of good and bad actions — a powerless, helpless wreck in an ever-raging, ever-rushing, uncompromising current of cause and effect — a little moth placed under the wheel of causation, which rolls on crushing everything in its way and waits not for the widow’s tears or the orphan’s cry?”