Welcome to Sri Aurobindo College Evening! Youth from all over the country aspire to get an opportunity to study in University of Delhi. A very small percentage of the Indian youth enters higher education. You are that group of the privileged few. The Nation has invested heavily into you. And it becomes your duty to act responsibly and contribute towards Nation building. Yours is a generation on which high hopes are pinned. You have with you the strength of technology. You have Truth at your fingertips. Explore the Truth. Read extensively. Be inquisitive. Do not accept as it is all that people around you or social media or even your course books may have served you on your platter. The account may be one sided, twisted and selective.
First of all, know yourself. Know about your family. Connect to your roots. Learn about the history, culture, traditions and strengths of the Indian society. Learn about the struggles and sacrifices of the unsung heroes. Sustained attack on our sense of faith in the strength our culture, sustained attack on our sense of national pride has made us to look down upon and neglect our own rich cultural heritage and adopt a borrowed system.
Do not become victims of an agenda under which you feel ashamed of your identity and use a foreign language even for putting down your signatures which is the basic and foremost identifier of who you are! You are still in your formative years when habits can be developed or changed. Your name is your prized possession and you must write it down in your mother tongue. Language is the carrier of culture and tradition. Language is the repository of knowledge accumulated over an immeasurable period of time. Mother tongue is the gateway to the most valuable and the most easily accessible resources of knowledge. Aggregation of knowledge is handed over from generation to generation as wisdom.
Love and respect towards one’s mother, mother tongue and motherland are the natural traits of being human. Our identity rests on the earth of our birth, on the soil of our toil, on the land in which is mixed our forefathers’ sand. We owe our existence to the air and water and soil of our motherland. To be patriotic, to be duty bound towards one’s native land is a pre-condition and not an option to be its citizens.
Jai Hind!