Declaring The Close of The Colonial Era
On 15 August 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of free India, addressed the Constituent Assembly. In his famous speech, Tryst with Destiny, he declared the end of the colonial era and called on citizens to recognize the promise and opportunity of the moment:
"Long years ago, we made a tryst with destiny. Now the time has come 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, 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."
His speech went on to pay homage to Mahatma Gandhi's efforts in the Independence Movement and called upon his countrymen to work together 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."
The declaration ends with an exhortation to work together in the common weal and cautions against narrow sectarian or religious divisiveness:
"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."
Read more about this topic: Indian Speeches About Independence
Famous quotes containing the words declaring, close, colonial and/or era:
“Composed in the Tower before his execution
These moving verses, and being brought at that time
Painfully to the stake, submitted, declaring thus:
“I implore my God to witness that I have made no crime.””
—Anthony Hecht (b. 1923)
“A really tight friendship is when you start to really care about the person. If he gets sick, you kind of start worrying about him—or if he gets hit by a car. An everyday friend, you say, I know that kid, he’s all right, and you don’t really think much of him. But a close friend you worry about more than yourself. Well, maybe not more, but about the same.”
—Anonymous Fifteen-Year-Old Boy. As quoted in Children’s Friendships by Zick Rubin, ch. 3 (1980)
“Are you there, Africa with the bulging chest and oblong thigh? Sulking Africa, wrought of iron, in the fire, Africa of the millions of royal slaves, deported Africa, drifting continent, are you there? Slowly you vanish, you withdraw into the past, into the tales of castaways, colonial museums, the works of scholars.”
—Jean Genet (1910–1986)
“The fantasies inspired by TB in the last century, by cancer now, are responses to a disease thought to be intractable and capricious—that is, a disease not understood—in an era in which medicine’s central premise is that all diseases can be cured.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)