at one point or other in their life, christians will memorise the 23rd chapter of the book of psalms - a book devoted to songs and prayers. even i had a shot at memorising it, not for the sake of the 'divine' purpose but to have verses/words in my armour when i would sit for some competition at the church. down the lane, i completely forgot it, maybe because poetry was never my forte. i loved sentences not five words on a single line. but, gitanjali changed that.
gitanjali was a collection of 103 poems by the bengali poet rabindranath tagore which, after translation, became sensational throughout the world and tagore became the first non-european to win a nobel prize, for literature in 1913. 'git' means song and 'anjoli' means a prayer offering.
the lines in 'gitanjali' that will always have a special place, somewhere in me:
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.
