10 The Good Old Days

There are people in the world, mostly business men, who work at the office for long hours, visit the Stock Exchange, buy and sell shares and watch intently the barometer of the money market; to such men there is nothing beyond the present. The present is, in fact, the be-all and end-all of their existence. Again, there are men with a well-marked idealistic bent who always look forward to a Golden Age of eternal happiness and joy; to such minds and temperaments, the future is an escape from the ills of the present. The English poet, Shelley, was a believer in millennium. In the last chorus of his beautiful lyrical drama, Hellas, he dreams of a Golden Age when there will be an end of strife and men will live in plenty,

ruled by the religion of Universal Love; in trfat age yet to be, new songs of harmony, nobler and more inspiring than any hitherto heard, will be sung. Such are usually condemned as dreamers and idealists. But most men, after the days labour, sit round the hearth on a November night or out in the open on a summer evening and throw themselves into a historical mood. The morning newspaper tells every day of the worlds endless worries. The painful, harrowing tales of woe from the war-battered lands of the East and the West evoke the sympathy and, with it, a sense of utter helplessness. Again, the political unrest in our country and the abnormal economic conditions due to high prices, price-controls and black-markets - fill his mind with disgust at life; and he marks back to the good old days, when the present problems of life did not at all exist. Longing for the past is innate in most men. But the urges for this longing are different in different people. Some people are driven to look back to the past by the hard economic condition of life such as the shortage of food and cloth and other commodities of life; others, in their deep disgust at the power-politics of the modern world - secret alliances and treatises between different states for the sake of aggrandisement - take themselves in fancy to the days of Asoka or of Akbar when men and women lived in peace and plenty. Political dreamers and idealists are disappointed in the professions and ideals of the United Nations Organisation. The old League used to talk of mandates; mandates were nothing but a cloak behind which the greater powers such as England, America and France concealed their designs to extend their political and economic influence in foreign lands and so establish what were known as spheres of influence. The present Organisation speaks of trusteeship; this is also a big political hoax equally designed to conceal the big powers aspirations for further possession and aggrandisement. The present state of world-affairs drives the idealists to look back to the good old days of Haroon-al-Rashid. For forms of Government let fools contend Whateer is best administered is best. [Pope] There are, again amongst us, moral and spiritual idealists who look backward instead of forward in their divine discontent with the present. When such men make a survey of the present state of society and examine the motives of mens conduct, they are filled with disgust. In spite of the loudest professions of morality, individuals as well as nations stoop to the meanest of methods. Dishonesty and treachery, double-faced ness and hypocrisy, corruption and selfishness are rampant in society; even those who are supposed to be more civilised than us are notfr>e from moraj vices. For instance in England and America, in-Ch(ria 3r)d japan as elsewhere, men in position and power have by the meanest Of methods exploited the poor. In the world of today, men )je wjthout a pang, heat their neighbours and quote scriptures to justjfy themselves, indulge in black-marketing and Profiteer ancj explained such acts as clever transactions in business. In urope; the private family has broken up so that fathers and S0ns. mothers and daughters, when the latter grow in years, behave rr| 0re Qf |ess as separate units; sons.and daughters forget their fi|ja| Ot,|jgatj0ns just as fathers and mothers are unmindful of th$jr parental responsibilities. A similar disruption of the family has Already begun in many Pakistani homes, though the process is not so complete and devastating as in Europe. Moral and spiritual idealists, when they pass in review this aspect of post-war society, love fc furn back t) the state of society as depicted in the old epics.