Dialogue between the Father of the Nation and the Teacher of the Nation

[Early 20th c. nationalism in India well understood this fact and sought for the social forms of such alternates in new life-affirming formulations of an ashram ideal. We thus have Rabindranath's Shantiniketan, Sri Aurobindo's ashram and Gandhi's or Vinobha Bhave's ashrams or social experiments as beginnings towards such radical rethinkings of habitus and ideology in engagement with the world dominating drive of Modernity. But to bear effect, such efforts must be sustained, on-going and diversified. This has not happened. Nehru was only too eager to make India a player in the global market and the Soviet five year planning proccess to maximize structures of economic modernization. The original experiments of Tagore, Sri Aurobindo, Gandhi and others, after the departures of their founders, have slipped to an inconsequence, where either something is preserved at the cost of anachronism and refusal to enagage with contemporary forces or some kind of uneasy alliance or compromise between pre-modern and contemporary social forms is being practiced. Re: Technology in a Global World by Andrew Feenberg Debashish Tue 11 Aug 2009 08:40 PM PDT]

[Gandhiji leads fast, boycotts I-Day Express Buzz - Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India
Sriram Karri 16 Aug 2009
HEAVEN: Mahatma Gandhi led a host of freedom fighters, who after much deliberation, decided not to celebrate Independence Day, instead marking it with prayers and a hunger sit-in and passing a special resolution to write to Parliament on changes they want in the way India is run... The petition, ‘Security for Common Indians First, Politicians Last’, was signed by all major revolutionaries of the freedom struggle, including Rash Behari Bose, Barin Ghosh, Jugantar party revolutionaries like Raja Subodh Mallik and Bagha Jatin... Social reformers, spiritual leaders and intellectuals, including Swami Dayanand Saraswati, Ramakrishna Paramshamsa, Swami Vivekananda, Subramania Bharathi, Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Syed Ahmed Khan and Sri Aurobindo asked Indians to include social reform, spiritual upliftment and building a fair and just society as part of their agendas for material betterment and national progress. The earliest Parliamentarians including Dadabhai Naoroji, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Lala Lajpat Rai appealed to the oppressed to not wait for instruments of justice to reach them, and instead stand up for their rights and declare swaraj within their own individual spheres of existence.]

[Governor Gopalkrishna Gandhi visited ‘Gandhi Ghat’ in Barackpore in North 24 Parganas district. He also went to Haidar-e-Manzil, the house on the city’s eastern side, where Gandhiji sat in a 73-hour-fast to stop communal riots in August 1947. The Governor placed wreaths at the statue of the Father of the Nation in central Kolkata. At the Aurobindo Bhavan, he placed a wreath at Sri Aurobindo’s statue to mark the birth anniversary of the revolutionary.
'Maoists hamper development' The Hindu News » States » Other States KOLKATA, August 16, 2009]

The erudite Governor can initiate a dialogue between the intellectual legacy of the Father of the Nation and the Teacher of the Nation. [TNM]