From "The Discovery of India"

Nehru Mama's "The Discovery of India" is one of the books I consider as a treasure...This book is given to me by my cousins(Vidya and Vasanth) as a gift.Thanks to them as it made me know our glorious past. I started loving the past reading books like "Ponniyin Selvan", "Sivagaamiyin Sabadham", "Parthiban Kanavu", "Essays of Charles Lamb"(known as a lover of the sense of past), and "The Discovery of India"..Language is considered as the dress of thought.The great persons like Kalki, Lamb, and Nehru had proved it umpteen times through their ever-living creations. Lionel Trilling and T.S.Eloit considered "Sense of the Past" needful to everyone as it carries in it full of life.Without this sense of past, there is no proper present and future. I like to quote here Nehru's lines to throw more light upon the past and the Individual's soul. He describes how the sense of past and self-respect, connected with each to each proportion. He hates the blind adherence to the past. He Insists everyone to be free from imitation as it creates a negation of creativity in an Individual. His lines follow, "The rage for traveling is a symptom of a deeper unsoundness affecting the whole intellectual action...We imitate...Our houses are built with foreign taste; Our shelves are garnished with foreign ornaments; Our opinions, our tastes, our faculties, lean on and follow the past and the distant. The soul created the arts wherever they have flourished. It was in his own mind that the artist sought his model. It was an application of his own thought to the thing to be done and the conditions to be observed...Insist on Yourself; Never Imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half possession".