Prayer for 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

Mirage of sanctity

There is a web of lies we spin to delude ourselves of the good in our lives, of the possibilities, maybe to ensure some moments of peace and serenity amid the storms threatening outside. But often, the hurricane winds of our inner demons tear apart the fragile threads we labored to build in a heartbeat. We spin on like the itsy bitsy spider, again and again...