On the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, way back in 1963, when Dr. Martin Luther King uttered in his historic speech, “I have a dream that one day on the Red Hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood†(1), he was giving expression to the aspirations of millions of people singed and scarred by racial discrimination. The words of Dr. King assume greater significance in this post-modern scenario where “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned†(2), where narrow national prejudices, impoverished ideologies, disruptive ideas of caste, creed and color are unleashed, causing untold misery to the ‘lesser mortals’. His egalitarian views that were meant to transform the world into a better place was astonishingly similar to those expressed by the great Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, who in his celebrated ‘Gitanjali’ prays that mankind should be able to walk in a space “Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high†and “the world is not broken up into narrow fragments.†(3) The resilience, the strength of character that King possessed was something that he inherited from his father, who was the pastor of a church in Atlanta. Senior King had never accepted the segregation system and always spoke of the need to challenge it. His mother often spoke of the humiliation the Blacks were subjected to and encouraged him to stand bravely against the evils of discrimination. Being a harbinger of social change, the young King denounced racism for causing estrangement and separating “not only bodies but minds and spirits.†(4) He never gave up on his efforts to lift America from the quagmire of regional and racial prejudices, for he believed that “beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is the vocation of sonship and brotherhood.†(5) Dr. King became deeply involved in the Civil Rights campaign treading the Gandhian path of ‘ahimsa’ or non-violence. He strongly felt that the fissiparous forces could be countered only by a humane approach and not by violence. He urged people to identify and locate the good, hidden in the darker domains of human personality; to discover the divine in the human persona that would elevate them from stilted sectarian preoccupations and absurd ideas of racial supremacy to a higher realm of spirituality. Moral centrality was the common thread that lined his thoughts on various issues, be it poverty, racism or militarism. Today, as we celebrate his life and all the great things he stood for, let us revive the values that make life worth living- love, compassion, faith, fraternity, honesty and human bonding. Or else, we will be compelled to join Matthew Arnold who said- “The world which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.â€(6) References: 1. ‘I have a dream’ - speech by Martin Luther King, delivered 28 August 1963, at the Lincoln Memorial, Washington D. C. 2. W.B. Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’, The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Norton, New York, 2006, PP.2036-37. 3. Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Gitanjali’, Song Offerings to God, Translated from the original Bengali by the poet, Shantiniketan, 1998. 4. Excerpted from Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community (New York: Harper & Brothers 1967). 5. Excerpted from "Loving Your Enemies," Nov. 17, 1957, a sermon given at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala. 6. Matthew Arnold, ‘Dover Beach’, The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Norton, New York, 2006, PP 1368-69. This essay was one of the honorable mentions during Case Western Reserve University's annual MLK Essay contest (2012).