Ministers Discretion

perhaps be persuaded to tumble out of one's tongue, and, suddenly, there could be, who knows, a return, if not to passion, at least to a temporary revocation of the state of non-passion: "Tis like the lightning, which doth cease to be/Ere one can say 'it lightens'."Twenty years ago, it would be the product of effortlessness though, young people down the intricacies of the lanes and by-lanes of Calcutta would roll in their tongue these long, taut passages about how to arm the revolutionary masses, how to intensify the processes which bring to fruition the law of revolutionary violence, and what is the essence and content of the art and science of mobilising an entire people in the cause of a war of liberation. The man who wrote these passages was a living legend, Ho Chi Minh's fighting comrade-general, the one who had planned and executed the miracle of Dien Bien Phu. A mystique, like a halo, would float about his name. He was, as any urchin randomly queried in Calcutta's decrepit lanes and by-lanes could have told you twenty years ago, Vo Nguyen Giap, that genius of a strategist who obliterated the dividing line between guerilla warfare and conventional warfare. That urchin would have an amused contempt for you; the absurdity that you could not immediately recognise the identity of these passages, and the identity of their author, would puzzle him for a moment, but, then, understanding would dawn on him, for had not he been told of the law of uneven development of mass consciousness?