Sab Ton Khatarnak
Pash's poem that the most dangerous thing is the death of our dreams.
Pash's best known poem lists the things that are bad but not the most dangerous: the robbery of honest earnings, the police beating, the betrayal of a friend's greed, sitting silent in fear. The most dangerous thing, it says, is to be filled with dead calm, to lose all feeling, to come home from work and fall asleep, to let our dreams die.
Written in the 1980s, it became the anthem of a generation of Indian students and activists and was translated into Hindi and many other languages; it was included in school textbooks and later, controversially, there were attempts to remove it.
It sums up Pash's poetry: plain words, hammered into a warning, from a poet who was himself killed for what he wrote.
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