MY
PRAYER
A prayer is an address to God. It expresses gratitude to Him
but may also seek some thing of
importance.
Rabindranath Tagore ( 1861-1941) who became Nobel Laureate in
1913 published in 1910 a poem which is included in Gitanjali and is effectually
a prayer to God for his country.
It is an excellent prayer which can be every Indian’s prayer
at any time of his life. I reproduce it as my prayer with indebtedness to the
author.
“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.”
It is clear from the concluding line
of the poem that India was yet to become free from the British rule when it was
written and published.
India is now free but what the poet
desired from God, namely, “where the mind is led forward be thee into
ever-widening thought and action, into that heaven of freedom, my Father
(i.e.God) , let my country awake” has not fully happened. The mind is not without fear; the
head is not held high; knowledge is not free; the words do not come out from
the depth of truth; and the world is broken up into fragments by narrow
domestic walls. Hence, the need to repeat Tagore’s prayer.
******
G. R. Kanwal
20 January 2024
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