BOOK OF THE WEEK: WEEK FIFTY-TWO, 2011

Sugata Bose, His Majesty's Opponent: Subhas Chandra Bose and India's Struggle Against Empire (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2011) (" 'In this mortal world, everything 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 confident that the idea for which one individual was prepared to die would incarnate itself in a thousand lives. That, he believed, was how the wheel of evolution 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 suffering and sacrifice.' It is his immense sacrifice--in the the sense of tyag as taught by Ramakrishna and Vivekananda, and kurbani as enshrined on the INA memorial--that has made him the heir to a life immortal." Id. at 327.).