उम्मीद

HOPE is a Symbolist oil painting by the English painter George Frederic Watts, who completed the first two versions in 1886. It shows a lone blindfolded female figure sitting on a globe, playing a lyre that has only a single string remaining.  The painting’s message of faith in the face of adversity fascinated Rev Jeremiah Wright, who delivered a sermon on the teaching from the painting in Chicago in 1990. He preached, “The harpist is sitting there in rags,her clothes are tattered …. [yet] the woman had the audacity to hope.” In audience was the young Barack Obama, the phrase “audacity to hope’ stuck irrevocably in Obama’s mind. He adapted it as the title of his rousing address to the Democratic Convention in 2004. In 2006, he used it again, as the title of his second book. In a similar vein, the poem exalts the reader to have ‘the audacity to hope (Umeed)’, probably it is the only thing that will help tide over difficult times.