IF......

It goes as a saying “Had Rudyard Kipling not written anything other than this great poem (which he composed in a night, while sitting at the bedside of a friend, Sir Leandar Starr Jameson, a Scots Surgeon who lay dying after being mortally wounded in a Boer War in South Africa) he would have earned for himself everlasting fame”

“IF”.
(Rudyard .J. Kipling)

IF you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, and blaming it on you.
IF you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowances for their doubting too.
IF you can wait and not be tired by waiting or being lied about, don’t deal in lies or being hated don’t give way to hating. And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise.
IF you can dream and not make dreams your master, If you can think and not make thoughts your aim;
IF you can meet with triumph and disaster, and treat those two imposters just the same. IF you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken, twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, or watch the things you gave your life,
broken and stoop and build ‘em up with worn out tools.
IF you can make on heap of your life’s winnings and risk it on one turn of pitch - and toss. And lose and start again at your beginnings, and never breathe a word about your loss.
IF you can force your heart nerve and sinew to serve your turn long and there is nothing in you except the will, which says to them “Hold On”
IF you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, or walk with kings nor lose the common touch, IF neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you IF all men count with you but none too much after they are gone. And so hold on when--:
IF you can fill the unforgiving minute with sixty-second worth of distance run… Yours is the Earth and everything that is in it, And which is more you’ll be a man… my son.

It may be interesting to know that Rudyard Joseph Kipling was born in Bombay, India, Dec.30, 1865 and as an adult Lived in the Kennedy House in Simla, he has a few score books and poems worthy to his credit “Kim” and “Jungle Book” are examples, his father was an artist and a scholar connected to the highest Anglo Indian Society of the time. Lord Baldwin the then British PM was a first cousin yet Kipling was brought up in a foster home in the UK, where he was inspired to write (later) under the terrible conditions he was placed in. He is said to have declined twice the “Order of Merit” the highest honor that can be conferred on a British Subject, as also the Poet Laureateship