मेरा आजीवन कारावास / माझी जन्मठेप (स्वातंत्र्यवीर सावरकर - काले पानी का ऐतिहासिक संस्मरण)

when we heard the news. But I assured them all with a pride in my heart that you will
never go down under it. Why, then, do I find you taking it so much to heart? Do not think
of it.”
This well-meant exhortation produced quite a different effect upon my mind. It
brought to my mind very clearly the fact that some heavy blow had fallen upon me. And
a pang went through my heart. Fully recovering myself I asked the Officer what that
bundle was. With a smile, that was forced, he replied,” It is nothing. As a mere matter of
prison regulations, I am giving you this piece of work to do. Do it or not do it, or do as
much as you can. It does not matter at all.” He, then, took down the coiled rope, he cut it
into pieces, and asked the prisoner to show me how I was to break it, spin it and again
make threads out of it. It was as they say ‘picking oakum’.
“this is rigorous imprisonment, then”, I concluded, “not simple imprisonment for life!”
The Weary Round
“ O, face it, you are condemned to pick oakum, that is all! How foolish you are,
O, my mind? What is degrading in it? You think that your life is going to be a waste. But
is not life itself the same process-a weary round, spinning and unspinning, doing and
undoing, evolving and dissolving, a tremendous pis-aller? The strand of life is woven out
of the fusion of five elements. Piecing together the same threads it is lengthened out, and
when the threads and the strand suffer decay, death, with its wooden hammer, pounds it
into pulp, to restore it back to the elements from which it was drawn. ‘Dust thou art and
to dust thou shalt return.’
“ The morn is followed by the evening and the day follows the night-again a
weary round. We live by feeding on the herbs, and then we die. Death consigns our flesh
and bones to the earth, to be consumed again by the herbs-the same process over again.
The solar system- an array of effulgent stars, and burning nebulae; the earth, an offspring
of that system; a stray comet dashes into the body of the earth, and the earth consumes
itself into fire and returns to be a nebulae!-again a weary round. We are a part of this
earth and subject to the same fate, the same law, the same process. I have only to break
up this coiled rope, spin out the threads and roll them up again! If the larger process
going on in the Universe is worth it, if the life of the Universe is no waste, though it is
involved in that procession of time, then why within it, should I regard this task as in
vain? For is not this the inescapable part of the grander process? It has happened and I
must take it as such.”