Best Wishes!

I wanted to write a big post about the year and its highs and lows and even got the outline ready but then decided that I will share with you my mail that I had sent out today to all my business contacts.




Hi,

As we stand at the threshold of a New Year, we may have mixed feelings, some good some bad, but in a few hours we will start the New Year with the greatest gift of mankind – Hope!

I would like to share with you two poems from my list of favourites as a small New Year gift.

1) From the Gitanjali, written by Rabindranath Tagore, even 61 years after Independence, freedom is a distant dream for many. Battered, bruised, wounded, scarred be it in Orissa, Kashmir or Mumbai in the past year let our country awake into a new beginning….

Gitanjali 35


1 Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;

2 Where knowledge is free;

3 Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;

4 Where words come out from the depth of truth;

5 Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;

6 Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;

7 Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action --

8 Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.



2) The greatest question that faces us, the question that can be the source and the solution to many of the challenges we face everyday – What if…?

Rudyard Kipling answers a few questions… (yes, it is on my blog)

IF

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream--and not make dreams your master,
If you can think--and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings--nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And--which is more--you'll be a Man, my son!



Best wishes for a Happy, Prosperous, Grace-filled and Peaceful New Year.

Regards,