Light Beyond Darkness

Prakash N. Shah

All of us, especially the rising and pulsating generation, will remain grateful to Chunikaka for setting forth, in a dialogue form, some of the fundamental ideas, in a climate in which the cult of killing appears to be the order of the day as it were.

Our struggle for freedom and its leadership of Gandhi constitute an epic of our times, spanning over the earlier half of the twentieth century, the way Ramayana and Mahabharata present the living images of our cultural transitions and tensions involved in the social change of earlier times.

Of late, there has been going on a sort of continual symposium at the rate of three sessions a day on misinformation and disinformation about Gandhi, who attained the bliss of death while leading an epic life as Socrates and Jesus did, rather more so as Lincoln did. And there seems to have been generated an environment in which the elements and forces indulging in the inhuman politics of the cult of killing masquerade as the authorities on our national life. In this context, the controversy centering round the play, "Mee Nathuram Godse Boltoy" furnishes an opportunity for the crystallization of ideas in the new era. Chunikaka has drawn very well its constructive quintessence which throws light on the personality and action of one with whose help and support we have to move into the twenty-first century as well as understand what to give up for going forward.