The spirit of youth is untamed and ungovernable. It throws caution and prudence to the winds. It jumps headlong into dangers. Raging seas and terrific winds instead of daunting this spirit goad it all the more to action. It defies the devil itself. When Napoleon asked his old generals to scale the Alps they, all very much experienced and prudent, submitted that it was impossible. Napoleon, rather provoked, retorted, “The word ‘impossible’ was written in the Dictionary of Fools” (and old men, he might have added). Napoleon the youthful hero led the van and the Alps was scaled.

Old age is too careful and cautious. It calculates the risks and counts the cost. Like the old bachelor it looks before it leaps and then never leaps. No great achievement, in the sky or in the seas was ever made by shunning risks. The Everest could never have been conquered, the Poles could never have been reached, deserts and forests could never have been explored if the spirit of youth had not impelled men and women.

Death stared them in the face every now and then, starvation dogged them, bodily discomforts and diseases invaded them, but this spirit led them on to victory. Old age sat on the shore, considering and magnifying the risks involved and this paralyzed their will. They took pride in their prudence and sanity little realizing that sanity is very often synonymous with senility.

The world has heretofore been ruled by old men. And what a mess they have made of it. There is hunger, poverty, disease and suffering. Life is a hell for more than half of mankind. Every twenty years or so, terrible and devastating wars are let loose on earth creating more problems and complicating old ones. The grey-haired sign treaties and pacts which contain within themselves the seeds of future wars.

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Even while the devil- dance of war was going on and thousands of young men duped by the slogans and promises of the scheming politicians were sacrificing their lives, the armament-magnates who were the masters of the show, were counting the dollars they had amassed and devising ways and means how to prolong the devil-dance.

The youth of the world have seen through the designs of the chicanes us politicians who are in collusion with the dollar-barons. The spirit of youth revolts at all this and all over the world there is a keen desire to “grasp this sorry scheme of things and shatter it to bits”. Anew civilization is sought to be erected on the ashes of the old. In this new order man will be linked to man by the silken cords of love and not by bonds of paper.

All over the world the spirit of youth is straining at the leash. Only in India the deadweight of the past is acting as a hurdle. The words of Swami Vivekananda, a true Hindu who understood and preached what is best in our past, are relevant even today: “My hope of the future is in the youths of this country, youths of character and intelligence, renouncing everything for the service of others; who can sacrifice their lives in working out my ideas and doing good to themselves and to the country at large.”

Youth is the time to go flashing from one end of the world to the other, both in mind and body.