India was most lucky to have had as its founding fathers and elders, men like Rabindra Nath Tagore. Men of boundless vision. Of distinguished minds, worldly wise, secularists that thought way broader than what would have been comforting to them or their national peer, men who were statesmen. Each one more distinguished and dedicated to the homeland and universal truths and the common goddess of all humanity, that needed to be respected and protected across geographical borders.
I share these words from Tagore on this 26th, January, Republic Day of India, as the world is becoming scarily more insular and about protecting isms and cliques, religions and borders, and less about the common humanity that when absent in one around us, will end up robbing that humanity from all of us.
These words of Tagore are as true today as when he wrote them, before India's ever saw freedom. Their inclusive vision, their secular call, their clarion siding with universal truths of reasoning, freedom for all, fearless minds, where the world is one family, and where all minds are without fear.
These lines from Tagore have been so apt across the ages. Lets strive hard to realize them sooner than later.
Happy Republic Day, India!
Here below, I have pasted part of the page on wikipedia for Rabindra Nath Tagore.
Rabindra Nath Tagore:7 May 1861 – 7 August 1941),[a] sobriquet Gurudev,[b] was a Bengali polymath, a poet, musician and artist from the Indian subcontinent.[3][4] He reshaped Bengali literature and music, as well as Indian art with Contextual Modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Author of the "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse" of Gitanjali,[5] he became in 1913 the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.[6] Tagore's poetic songs were viewed as spiritual and mercurial; however, his "elegant prose and magical poetry" remain largely unknown outside Bengal.[7] He is sometimes referred to as "the Bard of Bengal".[8]
A Pirali Brahmin from Calcutta with ancestral gentry roots in Jessore, Tagore wrote poetry as an eight-year-old.[9] At the age of sixteen, he released his first substantial poems under the pseudonym Bhānusiṃha ("Sun Lion"), which were seized upon by literary authorities as long-lost classics.[10][11] By 1877 he graduated to his first short stories and dramas, published under his real name. As a humanist, universalist, internationalist, and ardent anti-nationalist,[12] he denounced the British Raj and advocated independence from Britain. As an exponent of the Bengal Renaissance, he advanced a vast canon that comprised paintings, sketches and doodles, hundreds of texts, and some two thousand songs; his legacy also endures in the institution he founded, Visva-Bharati University.[13][14][15][16][17]
Tagore modernised Bengali art by spurning rigid classical forms and resisting linguistic strictures. His novels, stories, songs, dance-dramas, and essays spoke to topics political and personal. Gitanjali (Song Offerings), Gora (Fair-Faced) and Ghare-Baire (The Home and the World) are his best-known works, and his verse, short stories, and novels were acclaimed—or panned—for their lyricism, colloquialism, naturalism, and unnatural contemplation. His compositions were chosen by two nations as national anthems: India's Jana Gana Mana and Bangladesh's Amar Shonar Bangla. The Sri Lankan national anthem was inspired by his work.[18][19][20]
Some Quote by Tagore:
"So I repeat we never can have a true view of man unless we have a love for him. Civilisation must be judged and prized, not by the amount of power it has developed, but by how much it has evolved and given expression to, by its laws and institutions, the love of humanity."
— Sādhanā: The Realisation of Life, 1916.[138]
"Every person is worthy of an infinite wealth of love - the beauty of his soul knows no limit." ― Glimpses of Bengal [154]
"Who are you, reader, reading my poems an hundred years hence? I cannot send you one single flower from this wealth of the spring, one single streak of gold from yonder clouds. Open your doors and look abroad. From your blossoming garden gather fragrant memories of the vanished flowers of an hundred years before. In the joy of your heart may you feel the living joy that sang one spring morning, sending its glad voice across an hundred years."
"Trust love even if it brings sorrow. Do not close up your heart." ― The Gardener [155]
"The roots below the earth claim no rewards for making the branches fruitful."
"We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us."
"Once we dreamt that we were strangers. We wake up to find that we were dear to each other."
― Stray Birds [156]
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