At the invitation of the President and the committee of the Faridpore
Industrial Exhibition, Dr. J. C. Bose gave a lecture on the life of his
father, the late Babu Bhugwan Chunder Bose, who founded the Exhibition
at Faridpore, where he was the sub-divisional officer, 50 years ago. It
was published in the Modern Review for February 1917--volume xxi, p.
221. In course of his address, said Dr. Bose:--
It is the obvious, the insistent, the blatant that often blinds us to
the essential. And in solving the mystery that underlies life, the
enlightenment will come not by the study of the complex man, but through
the simpler plant. It is the unsuspected forces, hidden to the eyes of
men,--the forces imprisoned in the soil and the stimuli of alternating
flash of light and the gloomings of darkness these and many others will
be found to maintain the ceaseless activity which we know as the fulness
of throbbing life.
This is likewise true of the congeries of life which we call a society
or a nation. The energy which moves this great mass in ceaseless effort
to realise some common aspiration, often has its origin in the unknown
solitudes of a village life. And thus the history of some efforts, not
forgotten, which emanated from Faridpore, may be found not unconnected
with which India is now meeting her problems to-day. How did these
problems first dawn in the minds of some men who forecast themselves by
half a century? How fared their hopes, how did their dreams become
buried in oblivion? Where lies the secret of that potency which makes
certain efforts apparently doomed to failure, rise renewed from beneath
the smouldering ashes? Are these dead failures, so utterly unrelated to
some great success that we may acclaim to day? When we look deeper we
shall find that this is not so, that as inevitable as in the sequence of
cause and effect, so unrelenting must be the sequence of failure and
success. We shall find that the failure must be the antecedent power to
lie dormant for the long subsequent dynamic expression in what we call
success. It is then and then only that we shall begin to question
ourselves which is the greater of the two, a noble failure or a vulgar
success.
As a concrete example, I shall relate the history of a noble failure
which had its setting in this little corner of the earth. And if some of
the audience thought that the speaker has been blessed with life that
has been unusually fruitful, they will soon realise that the power and
strength that nerved me to meet the shocks of life were in reality
derived at this very place, where I witnessed the struggle which
overpowered a far greater life.