The second Daya Krishna Memorial Lecture was organized under the auspices of The Raza Foundation on the evening of July 31st , 2014 in the India International Centre, New Delhi. Dr. Ashok Vajpeyi, IAS(Retd.) presided. Dr. Pratap Bhanu Mehta, President, Centre for Policy Research was there to give his talk on the subject, “Indian Intellectual History: Between Tradition and Truth”. In the small gathering of the elite thinkers and literateurs were included Shri T.N. Chaturvedi, former Governor of Puducherry and Smt. Mrinal Pandey, famous electronic media journalist and a known Hindi writer. Sulabh was represented by S/Shri Bageshwar Jha and Debu Chatterjee.
Dr. Vajpeyi informed the gathering about the multi-faceted activities being carrird out by The Raza Foundation including series of annual memorial lectures pertaining to several celebrities of different fields of creativity. He also briefly apprised the gathering about some important programmes of the Foundation in coming months of the running year. Dr. Vajpaye also threw light on the towering and scholarly personality of late Daya Krishna. He recalled how as an aspirant poet in his student life he would go to Dayaji for guidance. He touched upon the brilliant academic career and a number of standard publications of Dr. Mehta also.
Dr. Mehta, in his given theme based talk also highlighted the scholarship of Daya Krishna. He expressed that in his idea he had a picture of an ideal teacher and Daya Krishna fitted in it so well that he had not seen a better teacher in all respects anywhere in the world. Dr Mehta said that in the West, Indian philosophy was being criticized for not going beyond spirituality. They wondered how Indian philosophers just ignored the material aspect which is a reality. Daya Krishna was the first person who seriously thought over this state of affairs and tried to give a new interpretation so that one would like to take interest in this discipline. He agreed that most of our heritage books including the Rigveda had hardly anything useful for the common man. He referred to different schools of Indian philosophy and its doyens like Shankar, Ramanuj,Charwak, Kabir, Aurvindo so on and so forth and a number of Western thinkers to explain the need of bringing lofty philosophical Indian ideas to the door of the common man like other branches of humanities.
The programme concluded with a lively question-answer session in which half a dozen participants including me participated. I felt honoured when in appreciation of my question, Sh. T.N. Chaturvedi, in the row in front of me took a 90 degree turn and gave a charming smile to me.
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