Have you heard of the Favorite Poem Project? One of it's sponsors is the Library of Congress. I was looking for one of the songs in the Gitanjali - poems written in prose by Rabindranath Tagore, India's Nobel Laureate (Literature/Poetry) and found it along with a video of a Librarian in New Jersey reading it (click on the picture to watch the video - you must have RealPlayer installed on your computer). She discusses the poem in the context of her life; the reference to a place "where knowledge is free" is particularly apt. Here is the poem - it was one of my favorite poems as a child too except I learned it in English and not the original Bengali:
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 lead forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action— Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali, 1913
10:38:01 AM
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