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

tedium to the accompaniment of griping pain in the stomach, and of burning fever on the body. Even then I was doing all those things that I have described in the last chapter. Sometimes I thought that, due to my illness in the prison, I had come to regard prison-life as a hell on earth and that to be outside would have been better for me. But how? Do not people suffer from all these maladies outside, and is it wise to lay all the blame for them on the jail? People suffer from dysentery, malaria and consumption even in palaces. Epidemics like bubonic plague and influenza sweep over big cities adorned with theatres, and pleasure-haunts, and blazing with electric light, And groanings and cries of pain are heard in a thousand homes through them. The City of Bombay suffered from such epidemic, and every home in it had four beds of patients stricken with influenza. Why should I then bewail my lot in this prison because I am in its hospital down with malaria and dysentery? Pain and disease are rampant everywhere. There are a thousand villages and a thousand huts of poor families which, stricken down with similar ailments, do not find any medical aid near at hand to relieve them. You have in this hospital a medical officer, medicine and nursing of which these poor folk have not the slightest notion or expectation. Your lot in this dependent state is much better than theirs though they are free; their lot, in these circumstances, is, any day, harder to bear than yours. So be patient and put up with it calmly. Do not grumble because you have to pass through it as a prisoner. Do not add to your pain by this idle pining. It is right for you to think that freedom is better than imprisonment, but for other reasons. But now that you are in prison and are ill, you had better not think of it. For disease and death haunt the prison too often, no doubt; but not that they don't stalk the outside world as well. Life in this prison, intrinsically, is not more 'flat, weary, stale and unprofitable' than the usages of the world outside, for have we not all to pass our days in 'the vast prison that is this world', and is not this prison a part of it? That is as a part of philosophy. But is the reality so different after all? The struggles for national freedom and the individual struggle for existence are both hard and serious things. Is not life in prison equally hard and serious? It is worth while striving to live up to your noble ideal for which yourself with thousand others like you, and some of them your friends, have had to come in this prison. It is for that, that you had to pass through these trials, practise these austerities, and go through this kind of self-abnegation. And these will shine in the world by their reflected splendour, things great and small, like great and dazzling achievements of other men on the theatre of the world. People read with as much eagerness and interest the accounts of the prisoners transported to Seberia for the political crime of shooting Czar Alexander, as they may gloat over pages of a book describing the life of Czar Nicholas, or of the hypocritical priest, full of romance, mystery, lust and dupery, Rasputin. And they certainly cherish greater sympathy and reverence for the former than they pity or hate the latter. A people's eyes are fastened less upon the domes of luxurious palaces than they are rivetted upon the cottages of the exiled and on the Jails of people imprisoned for political crime. And even, were it not so, we, the worshippers of freedom, must count the hour and mark the day in this dark night for the arrival of the dawn for which we had dedicated our all. It is a solemn duty for it is a