Indias "Tryst With Destiny".

This speech was made by Jawaharlal Nehru, to the Indian Constituent Assembly,towards midnight on August 14, 1947.It celebrates the liberation of India from the colonial cluthes of the British Empire.It is regarded as a monumental oration in Indian history...Please read on and feel proud to be an India.....

Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we
shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially.
At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to
life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we
step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a
nation, long suppressed, finds utterance. It is fitting that at this solemn
moment we take the pledge of dedication to the service of India and her people
and to the still larger cause of humanity.
At the dawn of history India
started on her unending quest, and trackless centuries are filled with her
striving and the grandeur of her success and her failures. Through good and ill
fortune alike she has never lost sight of that quest or forgotten the ideals
which gave her strength. We end today a period of ill fortune and India
discovers herself again. The achievement we celebrate today is but a step, an
opening of opportunity, to the greater triumphs and achievements that await us.
Are we brave enough and wise enough to grasp this opportunity and accept the
challenge of the future?
Freedom and power bring responsibility. The
responsibility rests upon this Assembly, a sovereign body representing the
sovereign people of India. Before the birth of freedom we have endured all the
pains of labour and our hearts are heavy with the memory of this sorrow. Some of
those pains continue even now. Nevertheless, the past is over and it is the
future that beckons to us now.
That future is not one of ease or resting but
of incessant striving so that we may fulfil the pledges we have so often taken
and the one we shall take today. The service of India means the service of the
millions who suffer. It means the ending of poverty and ignorance and disease
and inequality of opportunity. The ambition of the greatest man of our
generation has been to wipe every tear from every eye. That may be beyond us,
but as long as there are tears and suffering, so long our work will not be
over.
And so we have to labour and to work, and work hard, to give reality to
our dreams. Those dreams are for India, but they are also for the world, for all
the nations and peoples are too closely knit together today for any one of them
to imagine that it can live apart Peace has been said to be indivisible; so is
freedom, so is prosperity now, and so also is disaster in this One World that
can no longer be split into isolated fragments.
To the people of India, whose
representatives we are, we make an appeal to join us with faith and confidence
in this great adventure. This is no time for petty and destructive criticism, no
time for ill-will or blaming others.
We have to build the noble mansion of
free India where all her children may dwell. The appointed day has come-the day
appointed by destiny-and India stands forth again, after long slumber and
struggle, awake, vital, free and independent. The past clings on to us still in
some measure and we have to do much before we redeem the pledges we have so
often taken. Yet the turning-point is past, and history begins anew for us, the
history which we shall live and act and others will write about.
It is a
fateful moment for us in India, for all Asia and for the world. A new star
rises, the star of freedom in the East, a new hope comes into being, a vision
long cherished materializes. May the star never set and that hope never be
betrayed! We rejoice in that freedom, even though clouds surround us, and many
of our people are sorrowstricken and difficult problems encompass us. But
freedom brings responsibilities and burdens and we have to face them in the
spirit of a free and disciplined people.
On this day our first thoughts go to
the architect of this freedom, the Father of our Nation [Gandhi], who, embodying
the old spirit of India, held aloft the torch of freedom and lighted up the
darkness that surrounded us. We have often been unworthy followers of his and
have strayed from his message, but not only we but succeeding generations will
remember this message and bear the imprint in their hearts of this great son of
India, magnificent in his faith and strength and courage and humility. We shall
never allow that torch of freedom to be blown out, however high the wind or
stormy the tempest.
Our next thoughts must be of the unknown volunteers and
soldiers of freedom who, without praise or reward, have served India even unto
death. We think also of our brothers and sisters who have been cut off from us
by political boundaries and who unhappily cannot share at present in the freedom
that has come. They are of us and will remain of us whatever may happen, and we
shall be sharers in their good [or] ill fortune alike.
The future beckons to
us. Whither do we go and what shall be our endeavour? To bring freedom and
opportunity to the common man, to the peasants and workers of India; to fight
and end poverty and ignorance and disease; to build up a prosperous, democratic
and progressive nation, and to create social, economic and political
institutions which will ensure justice and fullness of life to every man and
woman.
We have hard work ahead. There is no resting for any one of us till we
redeem our pledge in full, till we make all the people of India what destiny
intended them to be. We are citizens of a great country on the verge of bold
advance, and we have to live up to that high standard. All of us, to whatever
religion we may belong, are equally the children of India with equal rights,
privileges and obligations. We cannot encourage communalism or
narrow-mindedness, for no nation can be great whose people are narrow in thought
or in action.
To the nations and peoples of the world we send greetings and
pledge ourselves to cooperate with them in furthering peace, freedom and
democracy. And to India, our much-loved motherland, the ancient, the eternal and the ever-new, we pay our reverent homage and we bind ourselves afresh to her
service. Jai Hind........(Inspiration)

Inspiration From Apples CEO

'You've got to find what you love,' This is what Steve Jobs, reiterated in his
Commencement address ,for Stanford Graduation Ceremony delivered on June 12, 2005.Read on to get an insight into the life and thoughts of a visionary......

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement
from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from
college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college
graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No
big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the
dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then
stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So
why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother
was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for
adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates,
so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his
wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they
really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in
the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want
him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my
mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated
from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only
relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to
college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a
college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class
parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I
couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and
no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending
all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop
out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time,
but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I
dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me,
and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all
romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms,
I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk
the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the
Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following
my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you
one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best
calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster,
every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had
dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a
calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif
typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter
combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful,
historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found
it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical
application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first
Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac.
It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in
on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple
typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac,
its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped
out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal
computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was
impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was
very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't
connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.
So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have
to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach
has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My
second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved
to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20.
We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a
garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released
our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30.
And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as
Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company
with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of
the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did,
our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly
out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was
devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt
that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had
dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob
Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public
failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something
slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at
Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in
love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it
turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever
happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness
of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one
of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I
started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with
an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds
first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful
animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought
NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the
heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family
together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't
been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient
needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith.
I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I
did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it
is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and
the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And
the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it
yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know
when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and
better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote
that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday
you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then,
for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked
myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am
about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a
row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead
soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big
choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all
pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the
face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are
going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have
something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your
heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at
7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even
know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type
of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than
three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in
order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your
kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a
few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be
as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I
lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they
stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines,
put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated,
but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a
microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare
form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and
I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope
its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now
say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but
purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want
to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination
we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because
Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change
agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you,
but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be
cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time
is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by
dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let
the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most
important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow
already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole
Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a
fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to
life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal
computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors,
and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years
before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and
great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole
Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue.
It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue
was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find
yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words:
"Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as
you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay
Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

This is a copy of the original speech