A Life Immortal 327
mind since the late 1970s. Every January 23, they now garland his stat-
ues and express remorse for the blunder they made in their assessment
of this great pa tri ot.^46
“When he is seen, in statue or portrait,” an acute contemporary
observer has noted, “a thirst is slaked but not satiated; a promise is
seen, but not saturated; a hope is seen, but not with the regret that
shadows most hopes.” Netaji serves in a sense as “an alter- ego to the
nation’s power structure.”^47 Whenever justice is threatened, wherever
freedom is menaced, he continues to be invoked. His life’s adventures
followed itineraries far beyond the nation’s frontiers. He played a dra-
matic role—a heroic one, against tremendous odds—on a global stage.
It is by the magnitude of his conception of a world free from imperial-
ist domination and from the corrosive degradation of colonial rule that
his place in his tory must be assigned.
“In this mortal world, ev ery thing perishes and will perish,” Subhas
Chandra Bose had written in 1940, “but ideas, ideals and dreams do
not.” As he prepared for a fast unto death, he was con fi dent that the
idea for which one individual was prepared to die would incarnate it-
self in a thousand lives. That, he believed, was how the wheels of evolu-
tion turned and how the ideas, ideals, and dreams of one generation
were “bequeathed to the next.” “No idea has ever fulfilled itself in this
world,” he asserted, “except through an ordeal of suf fering and sac ri-
fice.”^48 It is his immense sac ri fice—in the sense of tyag as taught by Ra-
makrishna and Vivekananda, and kurbani as enshrined on the INA
memorial—that has made him the heir to a life immortal.