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.
- from Rabindranath Tagore’s ‘ Gitanjali ‘
I sit here in the middle of my exams, watching my country and my fellow citizens look like they have been jolted awake from a long, stagnant slumber. I watch my Facebook friends feed feverishly fill with recycled messages urging me to sign a petition/ go out into the streets / wear a Gandhi cap to an IPL match. I listen to attention-grabbing VJ’s and failed Bollywood ‘heroes’ tweet about pledging their support to ‘ANNA HAJARE’.
I wish I knew how genuine these efforts of ‘spreading the message’ are. I am not for a moment questioning Hazare’s intentions, I am just afraid that my media-savvy, technologically adept generation has become so used to rushing into the middle of something and moving on to the next with such speed that I, at 21, find it hard to keep pace with. I hope this isn’t one of those things that becomes ‘something we did last week, what shall we do this week?’ affairs.
We, well, have commitment-phobia.
