Can anybody give me the explanation of the poem Where The Mind Is Without Fear by RabindraNath Tagore?
The original Bengali version of this poem was entitled “Prayer” and this is basically what it is. It is often interpreted as a plea for India’s independence from Britain, but I think the political overtones are just a metaphor for ideas that are really more fundamental. The human mind tend to enslave itself through fear, habit, dogma, and basically just narrow-mindedness of various sorts. The mind/knowledge is not free so long as it flees from itself – the truth of its Being. In this case, “fleeing” takes the form of building walls to protect itself from what it perceives to be an invading enemy, but which in fact is the truth of its own Being. We hide behind walls that we think are protecting us from an enemy, but these walls are actually a sort of prison that we have built for ourselves. The truth of our Being is a Unity, and it is the implications of this Unity that the mind tends to fear. Thus we shatter the Unity into fragments by building the “narrow domestic walls” referred to i
