UN General Assembly
2005

The vision which we have for a better world is best described in the words of a great son of India, the great poet Rabindranath Tagore, who was the first Asian to be awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. I shall end my statement by quoting a very famous text of his: “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.”