Freedom

August 15, 2014

On this very day in 1947, India became a free country. We wrote our own constitution and decided that we were able and willing to govern ourselves. We chose to be free.

And yet, as I look around today, a question, unbidden, surfaces in my mind; are we?

Almost all of us are enslaved, if not in action, in thought. We are controlled by society, by money, by power, by competition, by trends, and worst of all, by the weaknesses of our own minds, by greed, fear, hatred...

The words of a beautiful poem by Tagore drift into my mind...

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.