Is The Mind 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 in fragments By narrow domestic walls."

- PROF PK SHARMA

Dr. Rabindra Nath Tagore, the Nobel Laureate, prior to the independence of India in his masterpiece "Gitanjali" composed a poem dreaming of a free India and ultimately a world order entitled "Where The Mind Is Without Fear." The opening lines of the poem always haunt us, quite relevant even now too:

"Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high Where knowledge is free Where the world has not been broken in fragments By narrow domestic walls."

In light of the afore-quoted lines created in the year 1910, these questions ironically and quite spontaneously spring up: is the mind these days sans fear in the world, Is head really held high, is knowledge free and is the world at present not fragmented? The same questions too are worth introspecting so far as the spectre of fear psychosis in India is concerned?

The answers are a big NO, the looming scare and panic dimensions not only in India but in all the four directions of the globe abound.

The reasons for uncertainty, pell-mell, confusion and restlessness, evidently are the power-centric and megalomaniac tendencies. Once one tastes power, one yearns for it blindly till one's last breath is the bare truth. There are examples of Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, Xi Jinping, President of China manipulating to be in the hot seat till they breathe their last and now two fast friends-US President Donald Trump and third-time Prime Minister Narendra Modi also do not like to lag behind nourishing this dream.