Nivedita, continued...

The masses of India occupied the centre of Nivedita’s being. Her objective was not to patronize them from a distance, with acts of charity.  She wanted to be amidst them and she opened every corner of her mind in order to try and know them. She wanted to know about their ways of life, their legends and their fables, their religious rituals, and their Art. She wanted to enter every nook and cranny of their lives. Nivedita wished to learn not from the standpoint of intellect alone, but from a sense of deep identification and love. She reached out to whatever was good,   beautiful and timeless in all these traditions, with utmost sincerity and earnestness. Her innate respect for other human beings, her natural instinct towards motherliness, made her confident that value could be found in these traditions, and she tried to discover it.  Sometimes carried away by over enthusiasm she made mistakes in judgment. However, her capacity to see good in everything far outweighs her mistakes. Those who are good educationists know that each child has a natural instinct for learning. The restlessness of children, their endless curiosity, their playfulness, are all manifestations of this natural instinct. The largely ignorant collectivity that one calls the masses is also childlike in its nature. That is why it has evolved its own simple methods of educating and healing itself.