What Freedom means to me

“Be water, my friend!” - Bruce Lee

Let’s start with a simple experiment. Take a glass of water. Pour it on the floor. See the water spread. Enjoy the beauty of it. If it doesn’t annoy the people around you, do it again. If it does annoy them, don’t worry, still do it. Every time, the water spreads in a different pattern in different directions. That’s the beauty of nature - the abstraction. And that is what freedom means to me - living life without any boundaries. Stretching one’s water in every direction – more in the direction one wants to go, less in the direction one doesn’t want to go. The water on the floor stops spreading after sometime. That’s when it has reached its maximum point. Similarly, the human brain should be allowed to expand to its maximum potential. Not confined by pouring the water into a well-defined container. That’s when the water is tame, not wild and carefree as on the floor – much to the happiness of the people around you.


Freedom is not being judged in whatever you do and not judging others, whatever they do. A new-born child is free – the mind is pure and sees the world as it is. Opinions, labels and so-called facts are planted into the mind of the child mostly by the people around and also by personal experiences. This is the main cause of inter-racial/religious hatred. Fixed notions and stereotypes develop. People are not ready to accept new things which threaten the basic foundation of certain fixed opinions they have which they have considered to be truths. I, on a personal level, don’t believe in having fixed opinions. If someone tells me that the earth doesn’t revolve around the Sun, I will listen to him/her and say yes, there is a chance although majority of well-researched documents say otherwise. Maybe we are the ones missing something. As Gustave Flaubert says – “There is no truth. There is only perception.” Freedom is to live with an open mind to all perceptions, and at the same time, to be responsible enough to not encroach upon someone else’s freedom.

Freedom, to me, does not fit into categories like regional or national – it goes much beyond that. When the universe and the conscience is one, our world is free from the shackles of states, regions, nations and continents, then we can consider ourselves truly free. When mankind and animal kingdom, life and non-life attain a level of equality, that utopian state is what freedom means to me.

Freedom is the right to tweak Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore’s quote a bit and say-

“Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father conscience, let my country universe awake.”