“Where the Mind Is Without Fear”

(In honor of Rabindranath Thakur)

Where Amazon is an endless rainforest, not an endless orgy of shopping

Where Cloud is lavishly rain bearing, not a data loaded aid to snooping

Where Reliance is what you have in your friends, not some capitalist’s hand in your pocket

Where Apple is a delicious fruit for all to adore, not a company with a rotten core

Into that world, my Indigenous friend, lead us

Where Shell is that wondrous thing we find on the seaside, not a corporation that tears up the oceans

Where Twitter is what birds do in the sky, not a playground of the chatterati

Where Jaguars are cats stalking their preys in jungles, not knocking down pedestrians on city streets

Where Microsoft is the gentle touch of a mother, not a monopolistic profit making machine

Into that world, my eco-feminist friend, lead us

Where my Face is a Book, but not to be sold to surveillance regimes

Where Musk is a Himalayan deer’s fragrant gland, not a fat-cat helping the rich to escape to Mars

Where Gautam is a teacher of compassion, not the head of a rapacious Indian corporation

Where Smart is 40,000 years of Australian aborigines living with the earth, not what IBM wants to make the planet

Into that world, my climate justice friend, lead us

Where religion at its radical core is about compassion, not a dogmatic theocratic fashion

Where power is everyone’s birthright, not the prerogative of a centralized state

Where intelligence is what nature has given us, not something forged in labs

Where wealth is a measure of wellbeing, not what puts you on Forbes (500) list

Into that world, my “disabled” friend, lead us

Into that world, without fear or dread, let us all lead and be led

Into that world, only a seeming impossibility, let us boldly tread

(Ashish Kothari is founder-member of Indian environmental group Kalpavriksh. He taught at the Indian Institute of Public Administration, and coordinated India’s National Biodiversity Strategy & Action Plan process. This poem was earlier published in Radical Ecological Democracy.)

Janata Weekly does not necessarily adhere to all of the views conveyed in articles republished by it. Our goal is to share a variety of democratic socialist perspectives that we think our readers will find interesting or useful. —Eds.

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