Revisiting the tryst with destiny...

"I still remember, I was in parliament on the midnight of Aug 14. There was a huge gathering in the hall and we were jostling for space," said  Bal Krishna Khurana, who migrated from Pakistan in 1943 at the age of 25.

"When Pandit Nehru uttered the words 'long years ago, we made a tryst with destiny...' there was not a single person in the hall who didn't have tears in his eyes,"

-Hindustan Times

 

Nehru’s ‘Tryst with destiny’ speech is one of the best speeches I have read. I have seen the video a million times and it still has the same effect upon me - A sense of pride, the proverbial  lump in the throat and a familiar glistening of the eye.

I always felt that this speech deserved to be up there among the greatest speeches along with Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ and Winston Churchill’s ‘Britain's finest hour’. What makes it even more deserving is the fact that this speech was made impromptu i.e. without any advance preparations.

(Full text of ‘Tryst with destiny’ available here)

 

 

 

Very similar is Nehru’s ‘The light has gone out of our lives’ speech. Sincere, emotional, eloquent and touching and not to forget, impromptu. Nehru almost chokes with emotion during the speech and it is easily one of the finest eulogies in Indian history.

 

(Read the full text of ‘The Light has gone out of our lives’ here.)