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Mind Without Fear
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.
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This is an excrept from the famous ’Gitanjali’ translated in English. I am talking about the great Rabindranath Tagore’s work on his Noble Prize winning collection of poems Gitanjali.
Rabindranath Tagore’s stories and poems have always fascinated me since my early teens. We had a subject in our school since standard 6th called ’Rapid Reader’. This was my first encounter with great literature works. I can never forget those days, when I used to sit in a corner of my house reading the ’The tales of Shakespeare’, ’The Scarlet Pimpernal’, ’Adventures of Peter Pan’, ’Adventures of Tom Sawyer’ and who can forget ’The short stories by Rabindranath Tagore’. The moment I used to take this book in my hand, I used to go for a long journey in the lanes of Calcutta and the banks of the Ganges.
Then the other day at the Liabrary, my eyes fall on the English translation of Gitanjali. How could I miss this oppurtunity. I quickly rushed for this immortal book and borrowed it.
As I sat in a corner of my house reading the ’Gitanjali’, I went on a long journey through human emotions ranging from life to joy to hope to struggle to victory to loss to death to mourning and the whole world in between these. Some of these poems take a deep leap in our mind. A leap so deep that one strives hard but never hits the bottom. Gitanjali was originally written in Bengali. W.B. Yeats on one of his visits to India discovered women in tea fields singing the songs and poems of Rabindranath Tagore. He translated these poems in English. And this is how Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913. He was offered the knighthood in 1915 but in 1919 after the Amritsar massacre of 400 Indian demonstrators by British troops, he gave up his knighthood.
Gitanjali was first published in paperback in the year 1971. And no wonder, it has been a perennial bestseller since then. How much I hope that one day I will learn Bengali and read the original Gitanjali. I cannot resist the sweetness when one of my Bong friends calls me Samir babu...
Two of Rabindranath Tagore’s poems were adopted by India(1947) and Bangladesh(1971) for their National Anthems.
Speaking of Gitanjali, it is one of those treasured works in literature, which the whole of India is proud of. Each poem takes hold of one of the human emotions and goes deep in that particular emotion to the depth I have already mentioned. As I read each of these poems over n’ over again, the magic of words is something which holds one spellbound in it’s own arc. As the ink flows freely, so do the thoughts of the legend. The heights are to be reached and so the depths. Reading Gitanjali makes us walk on this very line. We are in a dillema to either touch the heights of his thoughts or search their depths of each poem. Both ways we reach the middle.
Gitanjali is a precious gift of literature to mankind. Here goes one of the poetries from the thought provoking collection of poems.
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Early in the day it was whispered that we should sail in a boat, only thou and I, and never a soul in the world would know of this our pilgrimage to no country and to no end.
In that shoreless ocean, at thy silently listening smile my songs would swell in melodies, free as waves, free from all bondage of words.
Is the time not come yet? Are there works still to do? Lo, the evening has come down upon the shore and in the fading light the seabirds come flying to their nests.
Who knows when the chains will be off, and the boat, like the last glimmer of sunset, vanish into the night?
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