REMINISCENCE OF INDEPENDENCE DAY CELEBRATION

As India my motherland celebrates 77^th Independence Day (freedom from the clutches of British rule (1947), I would like to share the my concept of True Freedom as depicted in a Poem from Gitanjali by the great Indian Poet Rabindranath Tagore who in 1913 became the first non-European and the first lyricist to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Rabindranath Tagore (7 May 1861 – 8 August 1941) was a Bengali poet, writer, playwright, composer, philosopher, social reformer and painter. He reshaped Bengali literature and music as well as Indian art with Contextual Modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Author of the "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful" poetry of Gitanjali, he became in 1913 the first non-European and the first lyricist to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Tagore's poetic songs were viewed as spiritual and mercurial; however, his "elegant prose and magical poetry" remain largely unknown outside Bengal. He was a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society. Referred to as "the Bard of Bengal. 

 

 

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;

Where knowledge is free;

Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;

Where words come out from the depth of truth;

Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;

Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action

Into that heaven of freedom, my Father,  

let my country awake.

Source: Rabindranath Tagore, "Gitanjali 35" from Gitanjali (Song Offerings): A Collection of Prose Translations Made by the Author from the Original Bengali, intro. by W. B. Yeats (London: MacMillan, 1913). Public domain. (MacMillan, 1913).