one1india

15th August 1947: 00:00 IST, India was finally free from her British masters.

Hundreds of lives were lost in the struggle for freedom.
Hundreds of thousands of lives were lost
as the result of that freedom.

For India had been brutally ripped apart,
an unnecessary price to pay to be free.

Rabindranath Tagore wrote this poem, yearning for a free India.
Originally composed in Bengali, this is his own translation
and was included in his collection of poems “Gitanjali”
for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1912.

Rabindranath died 7th August 1941,
he never did see his free India, neither did he witness his country being divided.

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 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.

Will we ever wake up into such a world?

We would have been a truly great country
if only we had stayed as one,
one1india.