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A Message to the Youth of India 3

Vedic injunctions. Hence, the foreign rulers further
accelerated India’s decline by deliberately attacking
and undermining Indian thought and civilization.
“Everything Indian is inferior. Everything Western is
best,” they taught.
Although the British are now gone from India,
their legacy yet remains. They de-Indianized India so well
that their disciples—educated Indians—have become
the new gurus of Westernization. Hence, Indians have
largely lost their glorious heritage of thousands of years.
Hardly anyone is serious about preserving the unique
legacy of transcendental knowledge and enlightened
tradition that characterized Indian civilization. It is
highly regrettable that Indians are largely ignorant of
and uninterested in the incomparable civilization of
their forefathers. While maintaining some sentiment
for their spiritual and cultural roots, they are firmly
committed to pursuing the materialistic paradigm
dictated by the West, and thus they accept—practically
as a new dharma—Western ways of dress, thought, and
behavior. Consequently, a few decades of independence
have degraded India more than a thousand years of
foreign rule. Although politically free, India has become
a slave of foreign ideas. *

* For a summary of the British attitude, see: Satsvarüpa däsa
Goswami “The First Indologists,” in the appendix of Readings
in Vedic Literature (Los Angeles: Bhaktivedanta Book Trust,
1990).