Leadership Quote by Morarji Desai

Desai’s line carries the clipped impatience of a leader who thinks the biggest tragedy isn’t moral failure but intellectual laziness. He reaches back to “the early ages” not to romanticize tradition, but to indict it: a time when people lived inside inherited roles without interrogating the design. The phrasing is tellingly repetitive - “what man is,” “real functions,” “real purpose” - as if he’s pushing against a fog of slogans and ritual. “Real” becomes a cudgel: not what society calls your duty, not what religion or caste assigns, but what withstands scrutiny.

Context matters. Desai came up through the freedom struggle and then governed in the messy afterlife of independence, when India had to convert moral victory into a workable state. For him, self-rule demanded self-examination. The subtext is Gandhian but sterner: freedom is not simply the removal of colonial power; it’s the cultivation of disciplined, purposeful citizens. In the decades after 1947 - and especially during the post-Emergency mood that helped bring Desai to office - “purpose” sounded like a rebuke to political opportunism, corruption, and the easy drift toward consumerist modernity.

The intent isn’t metaphysical noodling. It’s civic instruction. Desai is arguing that a society can’t modernize on borrowed ideas alone; it needs a coherent philosophy of the human being. Without that, politics becomes administration without a compass, and history becomes something that happens to you rather than something you shape.