Of courage, conviction and fortitude

Two of my favourite poems by Rabindranath Tagore. Lines which impart strength and courage. Here are the English translated versions of the originals in Bangla:

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 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.

Walk alone
If they answer not to thy call, walk alone
If they are afraid and cower mutely facing the wall
O thou of evil luck, open thy mind and speak out alone.
If they turn away, and desert you when crossing the wilderness
O thou of evil luck, trample the thorns under thy tread
And along the blood-lined track travel alone.
If they do not hold up the light when the night is troubled with storm
O thou of evil luck, with the thunder flame of pain ignite thy own heart and let it burn alone.

I am change. I am hope.

The Gate
- Imagine never having to lock me up.
The Door
- I do not know colour. I do not know creed. I am hinged on opening to knocks of understanding.
The Room
- My size is measured by the warmth of hearts. Sometimes I look much bigger in homes for the old.
The Roof
- Even today, for innumerable poor people in the world, I am just stars in the sky.
The Wall
- I am the bulwark of life, the canvas of joys.
The Window
-Many visions of empowerment await reality in my frame.
The Floor
-I like that part of me best, which resounds with the footfalls of healthy children.
The Kitchen
-I wish my fire could feed the last child on the street.
The Steps
-I believe that to reach up, we must put our foot down strongly at places.
The Courtyard
-Along with all the chit-chat, I hope I will always hear the chitter-chatter of birds too.
The Balcony
-I love the sights that I see from here, especially the little school beyond the pond.
The Fence
-I wish I had not grown. From a hedge against the elements to barbed wires dividing nations.

Words which I have read again and again. Wise, encouraging and hopeful. Simply put, a brilliant piece of work.

Where? On the 2009 calendar on my desk.

This is the work of a company called New Concept. Email:nc@newconceptinfo.com

Sailing to Byzantium

Lines for the Tuesday gone.
And the Wednesday which started.


"That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,...

....A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing...

..And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium."


My favourite lines from the W.B.Yeats poem. Other lines I choose to ignore.

The Epic of Gilgamesh

The joyful will stoop with sorrow, and when you have gone to the earth I will let my hair grow long for your sake, I will wander through the wilderness in the skin of a lion.

-The Epic of Gilgamesh
quoted (I)in The Skin of The Lion, by Michael Ondaatje

They are everywhere..

"...The man was shameless....
And the trouble with people who are shameless is that they are curiously invulnerable."

How, oh how true!

Sebastian Faulks, writing in Devil May Care.
(Penguin, 2008)

Tenets

"...attending surgeons say that whats more important to them is finding people who are conscientious, industrious and boneheaded enough to stick at practising this one difficult thing day and night for years on end...And in the end, that matters more.

Skill, surgeons believe, can be taught; tenacity cannot."

From, Complications by Atul Gawande.
(Penguin Books, 2002)

Of poets

"Thousands of poets wrote poetry
And were forgotten
Only one was remembered
I would rather be forgotten
With thousands of companions
Than be the lone immortal"


K. Satchidanandan, quoted in 'Life, Sweet and Sour', The Hindu, 27 Dec 2007

Averted disasters

"...life is made up of a million misfortunes that one avoids because they happen to other people."

See the original Three Beautiful Things post at this link.

Hoity toity

This is a whole passage and a half from the latest Bill Bryson I read. Never found BB to have outright guffaw factor but this is the best one from the selection I've read so far. Umpteen amusement. And pay special attention to the Dad's reaction...ha..

Under the sink, my mother kept an enormous selection of jars, including one known as the toity jar. 'Toity' in our house was the term for a pee, and throughout my early years the toity jar was called into service whenever a need to leave the house inconveniently coincided with a sudden need by someone - and when I say 'someone', I mean of course the youngest child: me - to pee...I suppose I guessed that the toity jar was routinely discarded and replaced with a fresh jar - we had hundreds after all.

So you can imagine my consternation, succeeded by varying degrees if dismay, when I went to the fridge one evening for a second helping of halved peaches and realized that we were all eating from a jar that had, only days before, held my urine. I recognized the jar at once because it had a Z-shaped strip of label adhering to it...Now here it was holding our dessert peaches. I couldn't have been more surprised...

'Mom', I said, coming to the dining room doorway and holding up my find, 'this is the toity jar'. 'No honey' she replied smoothily without looking up...'Whats the toity jar?' asked my father with an amused air, spooning peach into his mouth. 'Its the jar I toity in', I explained. 'And this is it'.

'Billy toities in a jar?' said my father, with very slight difficulty, as he was no longer eating the peach half he had just taken in, but resting it on his tongue pending receipt of further information concerning its recent history.

'Just occassionally', my mother said. My father's mystification was now nearly total, but his mouth was so full of unswallowed peach juice that he could not meaningfully speak. He asked, I believe, why I didn't just go upstairs to the bathroom like a normal person. It was a fair question under the circumstances.

'Well, sometimes we are in a hurry', my mother went on a touch uncomfortably. 'So I keep a jar under the sink - a special jar'.

I reappeared from the fridge, cradling more jars - as many as I could carry. 'I'm pretty sure I've used all these too', I announced.

'That can't be right', my mother said, but there was a kind of question mark hanging off the edge of it. Then she added, perhaps a touch self-destructively. 'Anyway, I always rinse all jars thoroughly before reuse'.

My father rose and walked to the kitchen, inclined over the waste bin and allowed the peach half to fall into it..'Perhaps a toity jar's not such a good idea', he suggested.

To read more about the book, reviews and ordering info see this: link