From 50 Years Ago: The Last Thousand Feet.

Last year the Indian expedition to Mount Everest struggled valiantly to reach the diz-zy height of twenty-eight thousand feet and yet failed to conquer the last thousand feet. The Indian Hockey Team, at the Olympic Games, gave a magnificent performance but failed to win the final match. The political integration of India has been the prime ob-jective of our leaders since Independence and yet the happenings in Assam, Punjab and Uttar Pradesh are painful reminders of our failure to achieve that goal. The Second Five-Year Plan has scored many striking suc-cess but has failed to achieve the rate of growth it had aimed at. Is all this just a coincidence or is there something inherent in the Indian way of life or the Indian way of doing things that we so often fail to put in the last supreme effort which makes all the difference between suc-cess and failure? It is certainly not comfort-ing to be reminded that in the Third Battle of Panipat, the bicentenary anniversary of which falls this year, as in several other historic battles against invaders, we displayed great heroism only to fail ultimately. “It is not for man to command success but we shall do better, we shall deserve it”, is an admirable sentiment which may for those who are philosophically inclined, as we are well known to be, but it is one of the facts of life that ‘deserving success’ is no substitute for ‘winning success’ and the lesson of history is that success generally comes not to the ‘correct but cautious wooers’ but to those who make up their mind to ‘win at all costs’ – not to those who play to the gallery but to those who press on towards the goal single-minded. Single-mindedness is not, unfortunately, a characteristic of the average Indian.