Birthday of Rabindranath Tagore | Naming the Days

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was a prolific Bengali playwright, novelist, poet, painter, and musician who in 1913 turned the primary non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. His compassion ran deep and permeated his writing. Inside the quick span of 5 years, his spouse, son, and daughter died. Quite than turning into bitter, Tagore turned his sorrow into tenderly poignant mystical poems. In 1891, he went to handle his father’s property, dwelling near villagers and creating sympathy for them, which turned the keynote for his later writings.

Though Tagore was knighted in 1915, he surrendered this award 4 years later to protest the Jallianwala Bagh bloodbath (also called the Amritsar bloodbath) through which peaceable protestors together with Baishakhi pilgrims have been fired upon by troops of the British Indian Military. His resistance to orthodoxy was so robust that he even rebuked Gandhi for saying {that a} 1934 earthquake which killed 1000’s was attributable to karmic retribution for oppression.

Tagore’s legacy endures in work and sketches, a whole lot of texts, some two thousand songs, and his founding of Visva-Bharati College. His final poem, dictated the month earlier than he died, ends with these phrases:

“I’ve given fully no matter I needed to give. In return if I obtain something — some love, some forgiveness — then I’ll take it with me once I step on the boat that crosses to the pageant of the wordless finish.”

Quotes

“Clouds come floating into my life, now not to hold rain or usher storm, however so as to add coloration to my sundown sky.”
— in Stray Birds

“Let me not pray to be sheltered from risks,
however to be fearless in dealing with them.

“Let me not beg for the stilling of my ache, however
for the center to overcome it.”
— in Collected Poems and Performs of Rabindranath Tagore

“The place the thoughts is with out worry
and the pinnacle is held excessive,
the place information is free.
The place the world has not been damaged up into fragments by slender home partitions.
The place phrases come out from the depth of fact,
the place tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection.
The place the clear stream of motive has not misplaced its manner
into the dreary desert sand of lifeless behavior.
The place the thoughts is led ahead by thee
into ever widening thought and motion.
Into that heaven of freedom, my father,
Let my nation awake!”
— in Gitanjali: Tune Choices

“Let my ideas come to you, when I’m gone, just like the afterglow of sundown on the margin of starry silence.”
— in Stray Birds

Religious Practices

The depth of Tagore’s spirituality is plain, however he was not an ascetic. “Deliverance will not be for me in renunciation,” he wrote in Tune Choices. “I really feel the embrace of freedom in a thousand bonds of pleasure.” Right this moment, discover the issues through which you’re taking delight and search for methods through which these bonds make you extra slightly than much less free.