-Salutations and many happier returns, my dear India.

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.
- Rabindranath Tagore.


How do people write these things that are valid for a lifetime?

Sometimes I wonder what our great leaders of the past would say if they saw the India of today.
1947 was a year when there were so many dreams ahead of India. So many milestones to achieve.
And while we have come a long way along many roads, there are glaring, unfilled potholes on some others. And I wish that India fulfils the dreams of her makers, in every way there is.

From the bottom of my heart, I wish for my India, that her citizens awake one day soon, to a morning where there are no families living below the poverty line. Above anything else. How glaring an inadequacy is it that in a country where so many prosper, there are still little stomachs crying for a morsel of food.

There are others- empowerment of women, reforms in social 'norms', a better life for India's children.... but most of all, I pray for an India where no one has that most dreadful of feelings- the gnawing of an empty stomach. Worse still, the prospect of an empty stomach for their little ones.

God bless. That India prospers. As a whole.
Happy Independence Day to you, my dear India.