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In what Lakshmi calls a brief lapse of his normal self, he wrote the following version of Tagore's "Where the Mind is Without Fear", that can be published now that the copyrights on Tagore's works has lapsed:

"Where the disk is without junk and the monitor is held high/ Where the OS is free/ Where the internet has not been broken up into {impregnable} domains/ By narrow corporate {firewalls}/ Where commands come out from the simplicity of the prompt/ Where tireless context switching stretches its arms towards the ultimate job scheduling/ Where the clear flow of {logic} has not lost its way/ Into the buggy code of Windows/ Where the computer is led forward by Thee/ Into ever-widening downloads and {installs}/ Into that heaven of Linux, my Father, let all computers awake."

(c) Lakshminarayan "Satyan" Chidambaran, January 26, 2002 (License Agreement in red below)

Lakshmi tells me that this is version 2.0 (he did send me the beta, which he calls 1.0) and has also dedicated this to me (thank you Lakshmi!). Since I had to beg Lakshmi to grant me the license to publish this wonderful piece of literary plagiarism, I am required by law to provide you with the license agreement with Lakshmi.

This poem is part of the WNC (for those not familiar, WNC stands for "Wnc is Not Copyrighted") Library. The WNC Library is all free writings; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the WNC Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Writings Foundation (FWF); either version 2.1 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

The WNC Library is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the WNC Lesser General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the WNC Lesser General Public License along with the WNC WQ Library; see the file COPYING-WNC.LIB. If not, write to the Free Writings Foundation Unlimited, No. 0 WNC way, Meerut UP 250221, India. */

For those of you who are just setting off to locate WNC Way in Meerut, please do not bother just yet. I have a feeling that the WNC's office location is still under construction. Lakshmi has mentioned that address only because he feels that the location may be ready in time for the mail to be delivered there.