Wednesday 2 March 2016

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I hope these two excerpts will suffice. The first, an analysis; the second, a vain hope.

For I say that those who do not feel motivated to serve their country when they think of their nation as nothing but their nation and respect people as nothing but people, who need to be hypnotised with shrieking invocations to a mother or a deity, do not love their country so much as they love passion. The attempt to maintain a stronger infatuation with something over and above the truth is a symptom of our instilled sense of slavery

Excerpt from "Home and World", Rabindranath Tagore (Tagore for the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arunava Sinha).


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.

"Where the Mind is Without Fear" by Rabindranath Tagore.

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