मेरा आजीवन कारावास / माझी जन्मठेप (स्वातंत्र्यवीर सावरकर - काले पानी का ऐतिहासिक संस्मरण)

when we heard the news. But I assured them all with a pride in my heart that you will never go down under it. Why, then, do I find you taking it so much to heart? Do not think of it.” This well-meant exhortation produced quite a different effect upon my mind. It brought to my mind very clearly the fact that some heavy blow had fallen upon me. And a pang went through my heart. Fully recovering myself I asked the Officer what that bundle was. With a smile, that was forced, he replied,” It is nothing. As a mere matter of prison regulations, I am giving you this piece of work to do. Do it or not do it, or do as much as you can. It does not matter at all.” He, then, took down the coiled rope, he cut it into pieces, and asked the prisoner to show me how I was to break it, spin it and again make threads out of it. It was as they say ‘picking oakum’. “this is rigorous imprisonment, then”, I concluded, “not simple imprisonment for life!” The Weary Round “ O, face it, you are condemned to pick oakum, that is all! How foolish you are, O, my mind? What is degrading in it? You think that your life is going to be a waste. But is not life itself the same process-a weary round, spinning and unspinning, doing and undoing, evolving and dissolving, a tremendous pis-aller? The strand of life is woven out of the fusion of five elements. Piecing together the same threads it is lengthened out, and when the threads and the strand suffer decay, death, with its wooden hammer, pounds it into pulp, to restore it back to the elements from which it was drawn. ‘Dust thou art and to dust thou shalt return.’ “ The morn is followed by the evening and the day follows the night-again a weary round. We live by feeding on the herbs, and then we die. Death consigns our flesh and bones to the earth, to be consumed again by the herbs-the same process over again. The solar system- an array of effulgent stars, and burning nebulae; the earth, an offspring of that system; a stray comet dashes into the body of the earth, and the earth consumes itself into fire and returns to be a nebulae!-again a weary round. We are a part of this earth and subject to the same fate, the same law, the same process. I have only to break up this coiled rope, spin out the threads and roll them up again! If the larger process going on in the Universe is worth it, if the life of the Universe is no waste, though it is involved in that procession of time, then why within it, should I regard this task as in vain? For is not this the inescapable part of the grander process? It has happened and I must take it as such.”