Without Fear

“Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high.” is one of the poems by Gurudev Ravindra Nath Tagore, which I admired since childhood. One of the reasons, I knew this poem since childhood is that, this was one amongst the verses we used to read during our school assembly. Those days I did not understood much about the context and meaning of this poem. My principal often tried to explain its meaning, but the primary message that reached us was that we should do everything fearlessly. As I was hearing various TV debates regarding the returning of awards by writers for citing reasons of fear, I was immediately reminded of this poem. Actually I also wanted to write about various issues that are hitting the values I believed in, but I also felt that expressing few things in an upfront way is slightly difficult for me as an upcoming writer. So the head is not held high at the moment and I am truly ashamed of few deeds of some of my fellow countrymen to achieve either some vested interest, or may be just out of habit of doing something to attract undue attention. So, how do I come out of this feeling of constriction of feelings itself. I decided to express something at least. 

Let us take example of feeling of safety by a group of people belonging to a particular community. Feeling of safety is a matter of perception. Unfortunately, perception is something which is easily dented by some people by creating artificially cooked circumstances. Action against these people can be strict, only when action takers have a neat record. Action taker with a neat record is a rare commodity these days. So how do we get out of this deadlock. The solution is tough, but it has been practically demonstrated by people like Gandhi and Bose in their own styles. So we do have options. Are we ready to exercise them. By the way please do read the poem by Tagore in totality. Without making much further effort, please continue reading it here itself, as I reproduce it with full respect to one of my mentors, my school principal. “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.

Dr. Sunil Ji Garg