Truely Inspiring

Just watched the movie Invictus, *ing Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela and Matt Damon as the captain of the then national Rugby team Francois Pienaar. The movie is based on how Nelson Mandela used Rugby as a unifying bond to bring the people of the Rainbow Nation together post the apartheid. The movie is directed and produced by one of my favourite Actor and Director, Clint Eastwood.

Invictus means the unconquerable and the movie gets its name from the poem by a famous 19th century English poet named William Ernest Henley. Just before the start of the World Cup, Nelson Mandela gives the captain the poem to inspire him, just as it did to the president during his prison days. I heard and read about 'Invictus' for the first time thanks largely to the movie. As i was reading the poem, i found its uncanny resemblance to another great poem by one of India's greatest, 'Where the mind is without fear' by Rabindranath Tagore. Before the day ends, I hope to get a double dose of inspiration which we all need, as i read the poems once more all over again.

Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

William Ernest Henley

Where The Mind is Without Fear

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