LETTERS FROM ABROAD
which cannot give, but can only reject, is dead. The cry which has been raised to-day of rejecting western culture only means the paralysing of our own power to give anything to the West. For, in the human world, as I have said, giving is exchanging. It is not one sided. Our education will not attain its perfection by refusing to accept all lessons from the West, but by realising its own inheritance. This will give us the means to pay for such lessons. Our true wealth, intellectual as well as material, lies not in the acquisition itself, but in our own independent means of acquisition.
So tong as our intellectual attainments were solely dependent on an alien giver, wo have been accepting and not acquiring. Therefore these attainmerfts have mostly been barren of production, as I have discussed in my pamphlet on Education. But it would be wrong to blame the western culture itself for such futility. The blame lies using our own receptacle for this culture. Intellectual parasitism causes degencracy in the intel- lectual organs of one’s mind. It is not the food, but the parasitism that has to be avoided.
At the same time, IT strongly protest against Mahatma Guandhi’s trying to cry down such great personalities of Modern India as Ram Mohan Roy in his blind zeal for declaiming against our modern education. It shows that he is growing enamoured of his own doctrines—a dangerous form of egotism, that even great people suffer from at times.
