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Advice to National College Students*
I HAVE been told that you wish me to speak a few words of advice to you. But in these days I feel that young men can very often give better advice than we older people can give. Nor must you ask me to express the feelings which your actions, the way in which you have shown your affection towards me, have given rise to in my breast. It is impossible to express them. You all know that I have resigned my post. In the meeting you held yesterday I see that you expressed sympathy with me in what you call my present troubles. I don't know whether I should call them troubles at all, for the experience that I am going to undergo was long foreseen as inevitable in the discharge of the mission that I have taken up from my childhood, and I am approaching it without regret. What I want to be assured of is not so much that you feel sympathy for me in my troubles but that you have sympathy for the cause, in serving which I have to undergo what you call my troubles. If I know that the rising generation has taken up this cause, that wherever I go, I go leaving behind others to carryon my work, I shall go without the least regret. I take it that whatever respect you have shown to me today was shown not to me, not merely even to the Principal, but to your country, to the Mother in me, because what little I have done has been done for her, and the slight suffering that I am going to endure will be endured for her sake. Taking your sympathy in that light I can feel that if I am incapacitated from carrying on my work, there will be so many others left behind me. One other cause of rejoicing for me is to find that practically all my countrymen have the same fellow-feeling for me and for the same reason as yourselves. The unanimity with which all classes have expressed their sympathy for me and even offered help at the moment of
* Sri Aurobindo delivered the above address on
Page-515 my trial, is a cause for rejoicing, and for the same reason. For I am nothing, what I have done is nothing. I have earned this fellow-feeling because of serving the cause which all my countrymen have at heart.
The only piece of advice that I can give you now is — carry on the work,
the mission, for which this college was created. I have no doubt that all of you
have realised by this time what this mission means. When we established this
college and left other occupations, other chances of life, to devote our lives
to this institution, we did so because we hoped to see in it the foundation, the
nucleus of a nation, of the new India which is to begin its career after this
night of sorrow and trouble, on that day of glory and greatness when India will
work for the world. What we want here is not merely to give you a little
information, not merely to open to you careers for earning a livelihood, but to
build up sons for the Motherland to work and to suffer for her. That is why we
started this college and that is the work to which I want you to devote
yourselves in future. What has been insufficiently and imperfectly begun by us,
it is for you to complete and lead to perfection. When I come back I wish to see
some of you becoming rich, rich not for yourselves but that you may enrich the
Mother with your riches. I wish to see some of you becoming great, great not for
your own sakes, not that you may satisfy your own vanity, but great for her, to
make India great, to enable her to stand up with head erect among the nations of
the earth, as she did in days of yore when the world looked up to her for light.
Even those who will remain poor and obscure, I want to see their very poverty
and obscurity devoted to the Motherland. There are times in a nation's history
when
Page-516 joice. All is contained in that one single advice. My last word to you is that if you have sympathy for me, I hope to see it not merely as a personal feeling, but as a sympathy with what I am working for. I want to see this sympathy translated into work so that when in future I shall look upon your career of glorious activity, I may have the pride of remembering that I did something to prepare and begin it.
Bande Mataram,
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