Wednesday, November 29, 2006

My Old School Prayer

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up by narrow 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 in 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.
(For some reason this has been making rounds on the internet with the wrong words...)

13 comments:

  1. This was our Thursday prayer.. we had a different one for every day.

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  2. We had a different one too for each day... but this was the special one for the special occasions, maybe it was the one the our headmaster liked... We also had this entire booklet of songs that we had to learn in 6th and 7th grade. I still remember all the songs...

    bfedwodv - Norwegian curse word.

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  3. I used to like this song/hymn. I remember a kid a couple of years senior to me sang it in the choir really well.

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  4. Anonymous3:55 AM

    Yeah, this was the Republic Day song... for some odd reason we skipped Independence Day altogether. Our daily one was the Our Father. Five days a week, age five to age eighteen- it really isn't possible to forget it.

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  5. Our father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name... that one?

    uiicyk - Usuck's brother.

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  6. Yep. More properly, The Lord's Prayer, or the Paternoster.

    We used to have this thing where each class would take turns handling assembly (on the PA), so we tried finding new (and interesting?) prayers for each morning...not that easy a task.

    We also used to read out the newpaper headlines. When I was in 8th I once read "W.H.O" (World Health Org) as "Who"...so it was "Who issues new vaccine" or something. Hee hee.

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  7. In my old school, they used to assign it to one house per week, with points docked for not preparing them.

    Newspaper headlines were a bit risky for a prissy girls' school, though- I mean, there are plenty of awful things that can go in a headline.

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  8. by the way, it's Nisha here. Blue Floppy Hat has become, for the time being, just too long a username.

    hugzixej: What you tell someone to do to stop themselves falling off a cliff, if you

    a) have the hiccups
    b) are French (no offence to anyone actually French)

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  9. Fuck.. how come you guys remember school prayers? I never actually sang during assembly... mumbling incoherently sufficed... but I was in the choir (not-prayer specific).. I remember an Assamese song we did... it was fun...

    our assemblies were good fun... now and then some class would get punshed so they had to stand infront of the school and apologise or shit... there was this one time my class refused! Had to stand in the ground for the first half of the day... but since life's like that, all the boring classes were in the second half...

    I was house Captain and always had a hard time finding people for News and "Though for the Day"... we had to get new people every day and the shy ones often fainted...

    Ya, assemblies were fun (before College)

    bwajaru: small bribes in Azerbaijan (go figure)

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  10. As I said, every single day between the ages of five and eighteen... and I had catechism lessons on top of those. Try forgetting it then. They come in handy for quizzes sometimes, though, all this Biblical stuff.

    dwbfhbu: Dorky person named Fubu?

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  11. Nisha are you going to be in Cal over the winter? I'll be there till the 6th of Jan, you can reach me at 9830654806 if you're there. Cheers.

    eedyc - a futuristic pony and trap.

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  12. Anonymous2:17 AM

    No, I won't be there...damn the stupid term schedule. Have fun, though. When are you getting there?

    wmbikmw: wombat I kill in megawatts.

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  13. I'm here, I came in Sunday morning. Too bad I was looking forward to catching up with you... ah well, lawyers will be lawyers.

    iowgzeyw - is that a word, really?

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