Seven times a clause opens with the word Where, and each names a condition of a country worth waking into: a mind without fear, knowledge free, reason that has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit. first wrote this prayer in Bengali, then rendered it himself into the English that carried him to the 1913 Nobel, the first in Literature ever awarded outside Europe. It is less a poem about freedom than a held breath before it, a whole nation imagined into being one clause at a time and released only in the final line, when the grammar turns at last to command and asks his motherland to wake into that heaven. Written under empire, it reads now wherever a wall goes up between people. Say that closing sentence aloud, and feel how few words it takes to carry the size of a people's hope.