A nation is an entity that is built by its people with the aim to serve their overall wellbeing. People are the essential bricks that build a nation and are its benefactors and eventual beneficiaries. It is the quality of people we have in a nation which by and large constitute the characteristics of the nation. The leaders of a nation surely know where the strength of a nation lies. They also have a duty to retain that strength and develop other strengths. This reinforcing of complementary strengths builds a strong nation. Unfortunately, that disciplined approach has been missing in India, largely due to the lack of morality and discipline in our leadership.
Western education has taught us to work as a team. It has also taught us that materialistic well-being is important. This new knowledge must be blended with that of our traditional knowledge of spiritual well-being. Only then we will have balanced people in our society. As a nation, we are still not aware of this balanced approach. As a result, the spread of literacy has not achieved the purpose of building up the strong character which our society direly needs. Just as people of strong character build a strong society, similarly a strong society gives rise to a stable, unified, and powerful nation. Today this lack of morality and character has put us in a grave crisis on all fronts. We must introspect if we have done justice to our collective wisdom. Have we done for our masses what they needed on a priority basis from the time that India first flew on its free wings? Can India emerge as a strong nation if we have 75% of our people earning below $1 a day? If not, where have we failed? Why have we failed?
This responsibility cannot be just left to the leaders themselves in a democratic nation. In a democratic republic, every citizen bears the responsibility of contributing positively to make the collective