TAGORE’S UNANSWERED PRAYER

 

          TAGORE’S  UNANSWERED PRAYER

India’s great poet, writer, social reformer and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was awarded Nobel Prize in literature in 1913. India was then under the British rule. The prayer which is given below and is included in his anthology of poems ‘Gitanjali’ states what type of free India he wanted to emerge after freedom. It is an excellent prayer addressed to God and since it is still unfulfilled deserves to be repeated on every appropriate occasion.

“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.”

                                    *******

G.R.Kanwal

1^st June 2024