WELCOME
2025
Today (December 31) is the last day of the year 2024. The new
year 2025 starts from tomorrow. Let us welcome it with great hopes and
expectations in favour of not only humanity but also all living beings and flora
and fauna.
May the earth become more beautiful, the sun, the moon and
the stars more brilliant and the seasons more fruitful and pleasant.
The population of the world is rising and so is the
requirement of goods and chattels. Good health for all is the foremost
expectation because health, not wealth,is the basis of happy life. May there be
no pandemic like Covid-19.
There are other undesirable factors with which the world
becomes ugly and uncomfortable year in year out. May those factors find no
place in the new year.
The English poet Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) wrote a
poem ‘Ring Out, Wild Bells’ which uses the metaphor of ringing bells to “ring
out” negatives of the old year like grief, injustice, and war, and “ring in “ideals
for the new year like love, truth and peace. Some stanzas of this poem are quoted below each one of which “lists another aspect
of society or human condition that the poet wants to remove or improve upon as
the new year begins.”
Ring out, wild bells, to the wild
sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out wild bells, and let him die.
…
Ring out the grief that saps the mind
For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.
Ring out false pride in place and
blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.
Ring out old shapes of foul disease,
Ring out the growing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.
---
Finally,
this short quote : Year’s end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on,
with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us.
*****
G.R.Kanwal
31 December 2024
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