While burning itself......Walk Alone...

Darkness Overpowers the Truth
When The World Bows to the Fear
Be the fire that lights up the darkened world
While burning itself......Walk Alone.....

যদি সবাই ফিরে যায়, ও রে ও অভাগা,/যদি গহন পথে যাবার কালে কেউ ফিরে না চায়-তবে পথের কাঁটা/ও তুই রক্তমাখা চরণতলে একলা দ'লো রে ।।
যদি আলো না ধরে, ওরে ও অভাগা,/যদি ঝড়-বাদলে আঁধার রাতে দুয়ার দেয় ঘরে-
তবে বজ্রানলে/আমার বুকের পাঁজর জ্বালিয়ে নিয়ে একলা জ্বলোরে ।

While burning itself......Walk Alone...

Darkness Overpowers the Truth
When The World Bows to the Fear
Be the fire that lights up the darkened world
While burning itself......Walk Alone.....

যদি সবাই ফিরে যায়, ও রে ও অভাগা,/যদি গহন পথে যাবার কালে কেউ ফিরে না চায়-তবে পথের কাঁটা/ও তুই রক্তমাখা চরণতলে একলা দ'লো রে ।।
যদি আলো না ধরে, ওরে ও অভাগা,/যদি ঝড়-বাদলে আঁধার রাতে দুয়ার দেয় ঘরে-
তবে বজ্রানলে/আমার বুকের পাঁজর জ্বালিয়ে নিয়ে একলা জ্বলোরে ।

Bangladeshi avant-garde artist S M Sultan close to the soil

Sheikh Mohammed Sultan (10 August 1923 - 10 October 1994), better known as SM Sultan, was a Bangladeshi avant-garde artist who worked in painting and drawing. His fame rests on his striking depictions of exaggeratedly muscular Bangladeshi peasants engaged in the activities of their everyday lives.

For his achievement in fine arts he was honored with the Ekushey Padak in 1982; the Bangladesh Charu Shilpi Sangsad Award in 1986; and the Independence Day Award in 1993.^[2] His works are held in several major collections in Bangladesh, including the Bangladesh National Museum, the National Art Gallery (Bangladesh), the S.M. Sultan Memorial Museum, and the Bengal Foundation.
Sultan was born in Machimdia village, in what was then Jessore District, British India (now Narail District, Bangladesh) on 10 August 1923. After five years of primary education at Victoria Collegiate School in Narail, he went to work for his father, a mason. Even as a child he felt a strong artistic urge. He seized every opportunity to draw with charcoal, and developed his talent depicting the buildings his father worked on.^[3] Sultan wanted to study art in Calcutta (Kolkata), but his family did not have the means to send him. Eventually, he secured financial support from the local zamindar and went to Calcutta in 1938.^[4]
There poet and art critic Hasan Shahid Suhrawardy restyled him S. M. Sultan and offered him accommodation in his home and the use of his library.^[3] Sultan did not meet the admissions requirements of the Government School of Art, but in 1941 managed to get in with the help of Suhrawardy, who was on the school's governing body.^[4][5] Under Principal Mukul Chandra Dey the school deemphasized the copying of Old Masters and moved beyond Indian mythological, allegorical, and historical subjects. Students were encouraged to paint contemporary landscapes and portraits expressing original themes from their own life experience.

Sultan left art school after three years, in 1944, and traveled around India. He earned his living by drawing portraits of Allied soldiers encamped along his route. His first exhibition was a solo one in Shimla, India, in 1946. Next, after Partition, came two individual exhibitions in Pakistan: Lahore in 1948 and Karachi in 1949. None of his artworks from this period survive, mainly due to Sultan's own indifference towards preserving his work.
The Institute of International Education (IIE) in New York ran an International Arts Program that brought exceptionally promising foreign artists between the ages of 25 and 35, selected jointly by their country's ministry of education and the IEE, to the United States for a stay of several weeks. The institute provided round-trip transportation and grants for living expenses. The program included visits to museums, a period of creative work or study at a school, consultations with leading American artists, and exhibition of the visitors' work.
Sultan's official selection by the government in Karachi made it possible for him to visit the United States in the early 1950s, and exhibit his work at the IEE in New York; at the YMCA in Washington, D.C.; in Boston; at the International House of the University of Chicago; and at Michigan University, Ann Arbor. Later he traveled to England, where he participated in the annual open-air group exhibition at Victoria Embankment Gardens, Hampstead, London.
The following year, while teaching art at a school in Karachi, he came into contact with leading Pakistani artists Abdur Rahman Chughtai and Shakir Ali, with whom he developed a lasting friendship. After a period living and painting in Kashmir, Sultan returned to his native Narail in 1953. He settled down in an abandoned building overlooking the Chitra River, where he lived with an eclectic collection of pets.^[4][11] He lived close to the land and far from the outside art world for the next twenty-three years, developing a reputation as a whimsical recluse and a Bohemian.^[3][12]
Sultan's drawings, such as his self-portrait, are characterized by their economy and compactness. The lines are powerful and fully developed. His early paintings were influenced by the Impressionists. In his oils he employed Van Gogh's impasto technique. His watercolors, predominantly landscapes, are bright and lively.^[4][13]
The themes of his paintings are nature and rural life.^[4] S Amjad Ali, writing in 1952 for Pakistan Quarterly, described Sultan as a "landscape artist." Any human figures in his scenes were secondary. In Ali's view Sultan painted from memory in a style that had no definite identity or origins.
Between Sultan's 1969 individual exhibition at the Khulna Club, Khulna, and the first National Art Exhibition (a group exhibition), in Dhaka, in 1975,^[14] a transformation took place in his work.^[6][13]
Agricultural laborers engaged in everyday activities such as ploughing, planting, threshing, and fishing took center stage on his canvases. The landscape - farmland, rivers, villages - was still present, but as a backdrop. What was distinctive about his figures, such as those in Char Dakhal (1976), was their exaggeratedly muscular physique. In this way he made obvious the inner strength of the sturdy, hard working peasants, the backbone of Bangladesh, something that would have remained hidden in a more realistic depiction.^{[1][6][10][12]}
Sultan did some of his best work in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1976 the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy put on an individual exhibition of his work. It was his first major exhibition and his first in Dhaka.^[1][11] The Museum of Fine Arts in Fukuoka, Japan, held an exhibition of his work in 1980. The next year he was selected as a member of the panel of judges for the Asian Art Biennale in Dhaka.^[10] The catalog of his solo exhibition at the German Cultural Center, Dhaka, in 1987, described how he saw his subjects:

"These people who lived close to the soil, who bore on their shoulders the burden of civilization did not appear to Sultan to be weak, debilitated, starving creatures who deserved pity and sympathy. Quite the contrary, he saw their bulging muscles, their vigorous torso, their overpowering vitality, their well-rounded buttocks and swelling breasts ready to come to grip with life."^[3]

The peasants were heroes to him. He described their place in his art:

"The matter of my paintings is about the symbol of energy. The muscle is being used for struggling, struggling with the soil. Power of those arms drives the plough into the soil and grows crops. Labor is the basis and because of that labor of our farmers this land has been surviving over thousand of years."^[14]

Sultan's paintings never included urban elements or anything produced by modern technology, which he considered imported. They are modern art in the sense that he broke with the artistic conventions of the past, but they remained figurative art with a narrative. He had little interest in abstract art.
Professor Lala Rukh Selim, Chairman of the Department of Sculpture, University of Dhaka, described Sultan as one of the four pioneers of Bangladeshi modernism, along with Zainul Abedin, Safiuddin Ahmed, and Quamrul Hassan.^[1]
Sultan received the Ekushey Padak, Bangladesh's highest civilian award for contribution in the field of arts, in 1982; the Bangladesh Charu Shilpi Sangsad Award in 1986; and the Independence Day Award, the highest state award given by the government of Bangladesh, in 1993 for his contribution to fine arts.^[2][5]
Harvesting (1986) is listed by the Bangladesh National Museum as one of its 100 renowned objects.^[15]
Sultan established the Kurigram Fine Arts Institute at Narail in 1969 and another art school, now named Charupeeth, in Jessore in 1973.^[3][5]
In 1989, Tareque Masud directed a 54 minute documentary film on Sultan's life, called Adam Surat (The Inner Strength). Masud started filming it in 1982 with the help of the painter, and traveled with him all around Bangladesh. According to Masud, Sultan agreed to cooperate only on the condition that "... rather than being the film's subject, he would act as a catalyst to reveal the film's true protagonist, the Bengali peasant."
In 2005, photographer Nasir Ali Mamun published a book Guru with 68 photographs of Sultan. These were selected from thousands of photographs taken by Mamun in the period from 1978, when he first met with Sultan, until his death.

Swami Vivekananda Chicago Speech 1893 Why we disagree

Swami Vivekananda Chicago Speech 1893 Why we disagree

128th Birth Anniversary of Rash Behari Bose- A Veteran Revolutionary

Rash Behari Bose was one of the key organizers of the plan to assassinate Lord Charles Hardinge. Rash Behari Bose played a crucial role in the Ghadar Revolution, a plan to attack British army from the inside. Rash Behari Bose was the founding father of Indian National Army (Azad Hind Fauz) that Subhash Chandra Bose capitalized on later. Early Life of Rash Behari Bose.

        Rash Behari Bose was born on May 25, 1886, in Palara-Bighati (Hoogly) village. His mother passed away in 1889 when Rash Behari was still a baby. He was brought up thereafter by his maternal aunt Vama Sundari.

        Rash Behari Bose was initially educated at Subaldaha under the supervision of his grandfather, Kalicharan, and later in Dupleix College at Chandernagore. At the time Chandernagore was under French rule thus, Rash Behari was influenced by both British and French culture. The French Revolution of 1789 had a deep impact on Rash Behari. Rash Behari Bose was not a very attentive student. He was a day-dreamer, his mind preoccupied with revolutionary ideas. He was more interested in his physical prowess than his studies.

Roots of the Patriotism in Rash Behari Bose

        Rash Behari Bose got hold of a well-known revolutionary novel called "Ananda Math (Abbey of Bliss)" written by noted Bengali novelist, poet and thinker, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee. Rash Behari also read the famous Bengali poet, Navin Sen's, Plasir Yudha, a collection of patriotic poems. In course of time he read other revolutionary books. He read nationalistic speeches by orator and revolutionary, Surendranath Banerjea, and Swami Vivekananda. In Chandernagore, his teacher Charu Chand, a man of radical ideas, inspired Rash Behari along revolutionary lines.

        Rash Behari Bose did not get a chance to complete college because his uncle got him a job at Fort William. From there he transferred to the Government press in Shimla on his father's wish. He was appointed the copy-holder in the press and was able to master English and typewriting. After some time he moved to the Pasteur Institute in Kasauli. Rash Behari was not happy with these jobs.

        On a colleague's advice,Rash Behari Bose went to Dehra Dun as a guardian tutor in the house of Pramantha Nath Tagore. He got a clerical post at the Dehra Dun Forest Research Institute where through hard work, Rash Behari became a head-clerk.

Beginning of Rash Behari Bose's life as a Revolutionary

        The partition of Bengal in 1905 and the events that followed in its wake drew Rash Behari Bose headlong into revolutionary activities. Rash Behari concluded that the Government would not yield without revolutionary action on the part of the patriots. He started gearing up his revolutionary activities under the guidance of Jatin Banerjee, an eminent revolutionary leader.

The famous Bomb attack on Lord Hardinge by Rash Behari Bose

        Rash Behari Bose suddenly came in to prominence after 23rd December 1912 when bombs were thrown at Lord Hardinge, the then Viceroy of India. The planning for it was ingenious. At a conclave in Chandan Nagar, the suggestion for an attack on Hardinge emanated from Shreesh Ghosh, a dare-devil friend of Rash Behari. But some present thought that it was unpractical. Rash Behari Bose was reflecting and spoke only that he was ready and resolute but laid two conditions - that he should be supplied with powerful bombs and that he should have a young man of unimpeachable revolutionary character. Both were obtained and the first rehearsal was made on Diwali of 1911, amidst sound of crackers all round. The bombs burst to Rash Behari's satisfaction. But he had to wait for more than one year, which, however, was fully utilised in rehearsing for the outstanding action on 23rd December.

        The young man who came from Chandan Nagar was one Basant Biswas, a handsome boy of 16 years. He could easily be dressed up as a girl and get mixed up with other women sitting on the spacious terrace of a building in Chandni Chowk. All were eagerly waiting for the Viceregal procession. The bombs had to be hurled by Basant on the target. He had actually practised it for months in the garden of Raja PN Tagore at Dehradun. Rash Behari was serving with the Forest Research Institute there, and Basant was supposed to be his servant. Cigarette tins were filled with stone pieces and were hurled at the imaginary height of Hardinge, seated on a Howdah. On the previous day Rash Behari took his young 'girl friend' in a Tonga and had a ride through the roads of Chandni Chowk, which was to be the venue the next day.

        It was the 23rd December 1912. The Viceroy and the Vicerene were on the elephant back. Ladies were excitedly waiting for the procession to arrive. Basant (dressed as a girl) was one amongst them. The point chosen was the Clock-tower in Chandni Chowk, near the Punjab National Bank. The bomb was to be thrown when the elephant would be just in front. Rash Behari would be at a nearby point and Awadh Bihari would be just opposite, to throw the bombs if Basant somehow failed. 

        The atmosphere was electrifying, when it just occurred to Rash Behari that the practice of bomb throwing in cigarette tins at Dehrudun would be of no avail. It was from the ground to the imaginary height of the target on an elephant back. He just rushed in and asked Basant to enter the bathroom and quickly change his Sari to male clothes which he was carrying. There came out a handsome boy in place of a beautiful girl. In the all round excitement of the moment, none noticed the 'sartorial change of sex' of the boy from Bengal. He came down and got mixed up with the crowd on the foot path. But the bombs were not thrown by him but probably by Awadh Bihari. The Viceroy was seriously injured and was taken to a famous doctor, A.C. Sen, nearby. Awadh Bihari was later hanged but Rash Behari could not be touched. 

        Rash Behari Bose returned to Dehradun by the night train and joined the office the next day as though nothing had happened. Further, he organised a meeting of loyal citizens of Dehradun to condemn the dastardly attack on the Viceroy. Who on earth could imagine that he was the same person who had masterminded and executed the most outstanding revolutionary action. Lord Hardinge in his My Indian Years had described the whole incident in an interesting way.

The Ghadar Revolution by Rash Behari Bose

        Though Hardinge escaped death, Rash Behari's efforts continued unabated. Actually, it was a larger area of operations, a sort of an all India revolution concentrating mainly on the various contonments. As a god-send the leadership for it came from unexpected quarters. By 1914, many 'explosive elements' came to India from America, Canada and the Far East. They were, broadly speaking Ghadar elements. About four thousand of them were already in India. They had brought some arms and money. But all that they lacked was a proper leader. After the attempt on Hardinge, their eyes fell on Rash Behari.

        At this juncture came Vishnu Ganesh Pingle, an American trained Ghadr, who met Bose at Benares and requested him to take up the leadership of the coming revolution. But before accepting the responsibility, he sent Sachin Sanyal to the Punjab to assess the situation. Sachin returned very optimistic.

        In mid January 1915, Rash Behari first announced the news of the impending revolution at a private meeting at Benares. The war in Europe had already started. Most of the Indian army was shifted to other theatres of war. Of the thirty thousand men left at home, most were Indians whose loyalty could be won over easily. In this context Rash Behari was considered the only leader, particularly after the heroic Hardinge episode. Various persons were placed on duty at various places. Men were sent far and wide to propagate the message at the forthcoming revolution. Trusted and tried Ghadrites were sent to some contonments to infiltrate into the army.

 

        Rash Behari Bose was both the brain and brawn of the coming revolution. Not only was he capable of cool and clear thinking, he also had indefatigable energy to organise a revolution of such a magnitude, moving from place to place, always alert to evade the ever alert police in his pursuit. He even organised a few rehearsals at Khairon, Firozpur and Lahore. 

        February 21, 1915, was the date on which the signal of revolution would be given. At the very out-break, British officers would be rounded up and police outposts occupied. When it would spread to the Frontier Province, the tribals would come to the cities and capture the govt. establishments. Rash Behari personally would move from one contonment to another in the dress of an army officer.

        But on February 15, Kripal Singh, a soldier, and also a new recruit to the revolutionary party, was seen suspiciously moving about the Lahore station, contrary to instructions. He was to have been at Mian Mir with a message from Rash Behari to the troops. The revolution planned for the 21st was fizzled out.

Continuing struggle for Indian Freedom by Rash Behari Bose from Japan

        Rash Behari Bose left Calcutta on May 12, 1915. He went to Japan as Raja P.N.T. Tagore, a distant relative of Rabindranath Tagore. Some historians say that Rabindranath Tagore was aware of this impersonation. Rash Behari reached Singapore on May 22, 1915 and Tokyo in June. Between 1915 and 1918, Rash Behari lived almost like a fugitive, changing his residence 17 times. During this period he met Herambalal Gupta and Bhagwan Singh of the Ghadar Party. Japan was an ally of Britain's in the First World War and tried to extradite Rash Behari and Herambalal from Japan. Herambalal escaped to U.S.A. and Rash Behari ended his hide and seek by becoming a Japanese citizen. He married Tosiko, daughter of the Soma family who were sympathetic toward Rash Behari's efforts. The couple had two children, a boy, Masahide, and a girl, Tetaku. Tosiko died in March 1928 at the age of 28.

        Rash Behari Bose learned Japanese and became a journalist and writer. He took part in many cultural activities and wrote many books in Japanese, explaining India's viewpoints. It was due to Rash Behari's efforts that a conference was help in Tokyo from March 28 to 30, 1942, for discussion on political issues.

Formation of Azad Hind Fauj by Rash Behari Bose

        Following a conference held in Tokyo on 28th March 1942, it was decided to establish the Indian Independence League. After a few days it was decided to make Subhash Chandra Bose as its president. The Indian prisoners that were captured by the Japanese in Malaya and Burma were encouraged to join the Indian Independence League and the Indian National Army. It was the efforts of Rash Behari, along with Captain Mohan Singh and Sardar Pritam Singh, due to which Indian National Army came into existence on September 1, 1942. It was also known as Azad Hind Fauz.

Death of Rash Behari Bose and honour by the Japanese Government

        It was on 21st January 1945 that Rash Bihari Bose died in Tokyo before the end of World War II. The Japanese government honoured him with the highest title given to a foreigner - The Second Order of Merit of the Rising Sun. But the honour done by the Emperor of Japan on his demise is more touching. The Imperial coach was sent to carry the dead body of the Indian veteran revolutionary. But  independent India  have failed even to get the ashes of the great patriot back to his motherland. What a shame !

Dare to be the best you can – Steve Maraboli

“Dare to Be

When a new day begins, dare to smile gratefully.

When there is darkness, dare to be the first to shine a light.

When there is injustice, dare to be the first to condemn it.

When something seems difficult, dare to do it anyway.

When life seems to beat you down, dare to fight back.

When there seems to be no hope, dare to find some.

When you’re feeling tired, dare to keep going.

When times are tough, dare to be tougher.

When love hurts you, dare to love again.

When someone is hurting, dare to help them heal.

When another is lost, dare to help them find the way.

When a friend falls, dare to be the first to extend a hand.

When you cross paths with another, dare to make them smile.

When you feel great, dare to help someone else feel great too.

When the day has ended, dare to feel as you’ve done your best.

Dare to be the best you can –

At all times, Dare to be!” 
― Steve Maraboli,  Life, the Truth, and Being Free