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        An intellectual is fundamentally concerned about validly exact knowledge and freedom. Yet these acquire meaning not as abstractions - as in the rather banal statement - You must get a good education so that you can enjoy a good life - but as experiences actually lived through.

        Edward W Said in his Representations of the Intellectual has exactly demarcated and defined the role of an intellectual: An intellectual is like a shipwrecked person who learns how to live in a certain sense with the land, not on it, not like Robinson Crusoe whose goal is to colonise his little island, but more like Marco Polo (1254-1324), whose sense of the marvelous never fails him, and who is always a traveler, a provisional guest, not a freeloader, conqueror or raider.

        A true intellectual's public performances cannot be predicted or compelled to fit into some slogan, orthodox party line or fixed dogma. He appeals to as wide as possible a public, who is his or her natural constituency. He is aware of the fact that insiders, experts, coteries and professionals mould public opinion into rigid grooves, making it conformist and encouraging an arrogant attitude of all knowing omniscience of men in power. While these insiders promote sectional or special interest, a fearless intellectual should raise relevant questions about larger national issues affecting the nation as a whole. When an average citizen feels powerless in the face of an overwhelmingly powerful network of social authorities - the Media, the Government and Public Corporations etc, as an informed outsider an intellectual should go to his rescue by wielding a language that tries to speak the truth effectively to power. His spirit is a spirit in opposition, rather than in accommodation. The real challenge of intellectual life is to be found in the dissent against an inequitable system founded on discrimination, completely violative of all the known canons of equity, fair play and natural justice.

        The Hindus of India today are being treated like second class citizens by government interested only in minority votebank politics. Hindu society, Hindu religion and Hindu culture require fearless and knowledgeable intellectuals to espouse the cause of the Hindus to the men in authority. In these dark days for Hindus and Hinduism in India, bold intellectuals and individuals have to speak out for and testify to the sufferings of the Hindu community as a whole.

        In this context I have to cite the example of Eliezer Wiesel. Born on 30 September 1928, he led a life representative of many Jewish children. Growing up in a small village in Romania, his world revolved around family, religious study, community and God. Yet his family, community and his innocent faith were uprooted and destroyed by the Nazis upon the deportation of his village in 1944. In his first book NIGHT, we are moved by the most powerful and renowned passage in Holocaust literature in which Eliezer Wiesel recorded the inclusive experience of the Jews:

        'Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky. Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.' And Wiesel has since dedicated his life to ensuring that none of us forget what happened to the Jews.

        Through his writings and leadership, Eliezer Wiesel has aided in the recognition and remembrance of Jews killed in the holocaust, the establishment of Israel and has dedicated the latter part of his life to the witness of the second-generation and the vital requirement that memory and action be carried on after the survivors have all left us. Wiesel's own words are the best explanation: 'Let us remember, let us remember the heroes of Warsaw, the martyrs of Treblinka, the children of Auschwitz. They fought alone, they suffered alone, they lived alone, but they did not die alone, for something in all of us died with them'.

        Discriminated and crushed Hindus of India are badly in need of the intellectual services of powerful writers like Eliezer Wiesel to highlight their problems and grievances.

        Talking about great intellectuals and their place in any society, Edward Shils (1911-1995) has rightly observed: 'In every society there are some persons with an unusual sensitivity to the sacred, and uncommon reflectiveness about the nature of their universe, and the rules which govern their society. There is in every society a minority of persons who, more than the ordinary run of their fellow men, are enquiring, and desirous of being in frequent communication with symbols which are more general than the immediate concrete situations of everyday life, and remote in their reference in both time and space. In this minority, there is a need to externalise the quest in oral and written discourse, in poetic or plastic expression, in historical reminiscence or writing, in ritual performance and acts of worship. This interior need to penetrate beyond the screen of immediate concrete experience marks the existence of the intellectuals in every society'.

        I fully endorse the view of Bertrand Russell that those who have the ability to think and the imagination to think in accordance with men's needs, are likely to achieve the good they aim at sooner or later, though probably not while they are still alive. To give one concrete example. The movement against the subjection of women which later became irresistible in the first half of the 20th century and is still quite far from complete triumph began in a small way with a few impracticable idealists like Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797), P B Shelley (1792-1822) and John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) in the 18th and 19th centuries. Those intellectuals who wish to gain the world by thought must be content to lose it as a support in the present. Most men go through life without much ardent questioning, accepting the beliefs and practices which they find current and popular (also secular in the Indian context!!) , confidently feeling that the world will be their ally only if they do not put themselves in opposition to it. New and radical thought about the world is often incompatible with this cosy comfortable acquiescence. It requires a certain intellectual detachment, a certain irrepressible solitary energy, a power of inwardly dominating the world and the outlook that the world endangers. Without some enthusiastic willingness to be lonely, new thought can neither be achieved nor sustained over time.

        To quote Bertrand Russell here 'It will not be achieved to any purpose if the loneliness is accompanied by aloofness, so that the wish for union with others dies, or if intellectual detachment leads to contempt'. Responsible intellectual detachment is subtle and difficult to achieve. It is difficult because it is hard to be intellectually detached and yet not aloof. Such fruitful thought on human affairs is not common and most theorists tend to be either conventional or sterile.

        As an intellectual and as a journalist, I would like to walk around, asserting my right to have a space for myself in which I can stand and talk back to authority with unshakeable inner strength and dignity, since unquestioning subservience to authority in today's India is one of the greatest threats to an active, creative and moral intellectual life.

        To be able to work in the service of Sanathana Dharma, Hinduism and the Hindus, to be able to commit every nerve, every muscle, and every drop of sweat towards that great, sacred and noble cause, to grow with that never-ending and exciting work, is to become greater oneself in this struggle against great odds and then to be able to say at the end: I die, but there remains something that is more important than my life and will last longer than my body: my work. That is my hope, which is worthy of tremendous efforts, that is my goal, for which it is worth living and, if need be, dying.