Where the Mind is 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.

This timeless poem/prayer of Sri Rabindranath Tagore seems to be most relevant in today’s chaotic world torn by wars, murder and mayhem. The sublime depth of these words make me wonder if it is really geographical boundaries that are dividing nations, historical blunders that are causing on-going conflicts, social, political and economic decisions that are creating chaos OR is it just the petty shallowness of human minds that are drawing inerasable lines within communities, religions and civilisations.

As if we do not have enough natural calamities like earthquakes, volcanoes, floods and tsunamis to permanently debilitate human lives; do we need man-made disasters like wars too?

These days, I seem to be suffering from “News-phobia”; I dread reading the newspapers or watching the television channels in fear of seeing and hearing stories of “tiny little children being ripped apart in the pyjamas they slept in”. But then, how long can we let ourselves remain indifferent or mute spectators to wars that are silencing hundreds of lives forever and incapacitating a thousand others? Oh, so many precious lives built with care, sweat and toil are being rendered futile and becoming a mere statistic every hour due to the whims and fancies of a few super powers.

To quote a brilliant passage from the article “You cannot kill ideas with guns” by Jackie Ashley, “There is a battle of ideas in the world today. We cannot escape it or walk away. But you cannot kill ideas with guns – only with better ideas, expressed through confident, open societies.”

Wish we could let our children inherit a legacy of tolerance, kindness, concern and wisdom instead of the curse of wars, hatred, anger and greed.