On Tagore's anniversary....

From renovating Tagore auditoria, establishing new ones in major cities, publishing a book on his paintings to running a special train to Dhaka, the government has drawn up several plans to perpetuate the legacy of Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore to mark his 150Th birth anniversary.

Tagore,the first Nobel laureate Of India and a phenomena in his own has been a pandemic idea throughout eastern India and Bangladesh but the western world mainly Europe has now forgotten this charisma it once reverberated with.They simply don't read him anymore nor do the India progeny of the west who are more enlivened by levis and twilight than Gitanjali. The west has long ago declared Tagore as the 'bright pebbly eyes of the Theosophists' and has disgraced his contemporary thinking by referring it as a descent of Hinduism and a flow from Ganges.That's what the West does the best....Europe has Americanised and America has probably Mars-ianised.Yes,I shall keep a patriotic tone on his 150Th anniversary.

If Tagore had been a religious thinker and that too a Hindu by vision then it baffles me how Bangladesh which is mainly a Muslim state adopt his song "amar sonar bangla" as its national anthem.London has honoured and rejected Tagore but Indians need to realise the embodiment of mosaic of thoughts,colours and ideas Tagore represents.

It is indispensable to talk of Tagore and not of his distinction with Gandhi,the two foremost thinkers of all time.Nehru said on the death of Tagore "It is not so much because of any single virtue but because of the tout ensemble,that i felt that among the world's great men today Gandhi and Tagore were supreme human beings.What good fortune for me to have come in close contact with them"Tagore and Gandhi were both admirers of each other but differed in the way of thinking about issues like nationalism,internationalism,patriotism with Tagore's view being more of a logic based and less of a conventional nationalist-but India need Gandhi's emotional chauvinism with the nation more than the Tagore's pragmatism and unparochial outlook which is what India has post 1991.Tagore's political thought was complex. He opposed imperialism and supported Indian nationalists. His views have their first poetic release in Manast, mostly composed in his twenties.Evidence produced during the Hindu-German conspiracy trial and later accounts affirm his awareness of the Ghadarite conspiracy, and stated that he sought the support of Japanese Prime Minister and former Premier . Yet he lampooned the Swadeshi movement, denouncing it in "The Cult of the Charka", an acrid 1925 essay. He emphasized self-help and intellectual uplift of the masses as an alternative, stating that British imperialism was a "political symptom of our social disease", urging Indians to accept that "there can be no question of blind revolution, but of steady and purposeful education".Such views enraged many. He narrowly escaped assassination by Indian expatriates during his stay in a San Francisco hotel in late 1916. The plot failed only because the would-be assassins fell into argument. Yet Tagore wrote songs lionizing the Indian independence movement and renounced his knighthood in protest against the 1919 Jallianwala bagh massacre. Two of Tagore's more politically charged compositions, "chitto jettha bhayashunyo" ("Where the Mind is Without Fear") and "ekla chalo re" ("If They Answer Not to Thy Call, Walk Alone"), gained mass appeal, with the latter favoured by Gandhi. Despite his tumultuous relations with Gandhi, Tagore was key in resolving a Gandhi-Ambedkar dispute involving separate electorates for untouchables, ending Gandhi's fast "unto death".

Tagore lampooned rote schooling: in "The Parrot's Training", a bird is caged and force-fed pages torn from books until it dies.These views led Tagore, while visiting Santa Barbara on 11 October 1917, to conceive of a new type of university, desiring to "make Santiniketan the connecting thread between India and the world [and] a world center for the study of humanity somewhere beyond the limits of nation and geography."Here, Tagore implemented a brahmacharya pedagogical structure employing gurus to provide individualised guidance for pupils. Tagore worked hard to fund raise for and staff the school, even contributing all of his Nobel Prize money. Tagore’s duties as steward and mentor at Santiniketan kept him busy; he taught classes in mornings and wrote the students' textbooks in afternoons and evenings.Tagore also fundraised extensively for the school in Europe and the U.S. between 1919 and 1921

Tagore was not only a creative genius, he was a great man and friend to many. For instance, he was also a good friend from childhood to the great Indian Physicist, Bose.Tagore had a good grasp of modern - post-Newtonian - physics, and was well able to hold his own in a debate with Einstein in 1930 on the newly emerging principles of quantum mechanics and chaos. His meetings and tape recorded conversations with his contemporaries such Albert Einstein stand as cultural landmarks, and show the brilliance of this great man.

Rabindranath lived in one of the southern rooms on the ground floor of Udayan. After his illness he had become susceptible to heat, so an air conditioner had been installed in his bedroom. The room was not large. On one side a long table stood against the wall with its rows of medicine bottles, tonics, glasses. There was a bed, an armchair, some books in a small bookcase, and a few leather-stuffed cane stools for visitors. On the walls hung a couple of his own pictures, the picture of a horse by the Chinese artist Ju Peon, and a Japanese cloud-filled landscape. Beside it, there was another smaller room. The whole world: all the world's mountains vistas oceans and cities, all life's togetherness and loneliness, today, for the poet was confined within these two rooms and the two verandas on the sides.

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up
into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason
has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action---
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

Excerpt from Gitanjali.....