Freedom and Creativity

Views and Words - Dr K S Radhakrishnan 

If you want to actualize the potentialities present in an individual, you must ­­­necessarily make him free and if a teacher can make a student free from fear of a subject, quite sure that such a student must be able to produce the maximum in the subject as well as in the society. Because of the fact that there is an element of fear in our students, usually they are not creative in their activities; they are afraid of language, they are afraid of mathematics, they are afraid of science and they are afraid of almost every subject. The duty of an ideal teacher is to remove fear of a subject from the mindset of the students and removal of fear is exactly the work of a teacher. A person who is able to remove fear from the minds of the people is a real leader. But, on the contrary what happens now is that here in the political organizations the supreme leaders are creating more of it. Because of this fear any follower always imitates the leader, and imitation cannot bring out anything creative. So, especially in the case of India, we have to free our youth, free our students free our management and our employees from that fear which has already been created by the so called superiors. The removal of fear is an essential precondition in exploring the potentialities in a human individual. Advaita aims at removal of fear and the moment we admit that ‘I and you’ is identical, we also indirectly admit that there is no difference between ‘I and you. If there are identical elements in ‘I and you’ there is no question of lack of communication. Lack of communication always ends up in creation of fear. 

No society can be progressive without expression of freedom by every member. A developed and progressive society means a society which actualizes the potentialities in every individual. All such actualizations should have the ability to exercise freedom of each person. Freedom is something that is not given; it has to be taken by the person concerned. The one who exercises freedom has to remember that a free person has to regulate himself too. The self-regulated exercise of freedom by every member of a society alone ensures progress and development. The present day market economy believes in unfettered freedom. An unfettered freedom is dangerous to a healthy society.  A society needs regulation and that regulation must be self-regulation. This aspect has been forgotten by the Western philosophical systems of thought. Now-a-days the world moves towards polarization of power, wealth etc. This is highly dangerous. Freedom is dangerous but self-regulated freedom is not.

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