The country was going through its most difficult time, the biggest migration in the history of mankind. Everyone has lost hope but then came the Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru’s speech Tryst with Destiny, which gave an energy to its people to forget the past and look forward, to make their country a happy place to live.
Here is some of the excerpt from his famous speech ‘Tryst with Destiny’:
1) 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.
2) At the stroke of 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, then an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.
3) At the dawn of history, India started on her unending quest, and trackless centuries are filled with her striving and the grandeur of her successes 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.
4) The achievement we celebrate today is but a step, an opening of opportunity, to the greater triumphs and achievements that await us.
5) Freedom and power bring responsibility. That responsibility rests upon this assembly, a sovereign body representing the sovereign people of India.
6) We have to labor 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 imagines that it can live apart. Peace has been said to be indivisible, so is freedom, so is prosperity now, and so also is a disaster in this one world that can no longer be split into isolated fragments.
7) 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.”
