A nation is born only when people come to live in a given area on the globe. Therefore, population must become a people, and all efforts at social, political and economic progress have been, and shall ever be, a constant dedicated attempt to raise a people out of the available population.
-Swami Chinmayananda

In all periods of history, great thinkers had contemplated and conceived plans for the progress of man, and the sum total of it all is the civilization or culture is our inheritance.
Into this common pool of knowledge and progress, political pundits, economic rishis, social thinkers, and religious prophets have continuously poured all their invaluable efforts and visions.
As students of history, when we analyse them all and reach beneath the subtle differences and the apparent contradictions--in the subject matter or in their mode of expression or in the very nature of their emphasis--we shall see that all of them but preach the glory of togetherness in Life: all social - patterns are catering to it; all ethics are contained in it; all religions are constantly preaching it, and all economic plans have this togetherness as their very goal.
In a healthy community, individuality must be respected and there must be freedom for individuals to grow and to develop. This freedom should never be allowed to sink so low as to touch the depths of licentiousness. No doubt, every individual should have all the freedom but when this individual freedom destroys the harmonious development of the society as a whole, it is condemned as sin by the saints, as crime by economists, as treachery by politicians.
This rectitude in freedom is the secret demand in all civilization, progress, and culture. In the sad stories of any nation’s fall, in the recorded reports of any decadent culture or in the history of any destroyed civilization, we find the individual freedom has been misused and consequently the communal life ended in a tragic disaster.

(Contd...)