Raining elsewhere
Jayanta Mahapatra's poems give us a whole semiotics of life’s bare face with the outside world, making them candid yet indirect reflections of the hard times we live in.
Rabindranath Tagore Jayanti 2022: Rabindranath Tagore, India’s first Nobel laureate, was born in Kolkata on May 7, 1861. He was a poet, writer, playwright, composer, philosopher, social reformer, and painter. Tagore was known as the Bard of Bengal and Gurudev.
In 1901 Tagore founded a school outside Calcutta, Visva-Bharati, which was dedicated to emerging Western and Indian philosophy and education. It became a University in 1921. He produced poems, novels, stories, a history of India, textbooks, and treatises on pedagogy. His wife died in 1902, followed in 1903 by the death of one of his daughters and in 1907 his younger son.
Tagore was the one who had penned our national anthem ‘Jana Gana Mana’, as well as ‘Amar Shonar Bangla’, which is the national anthem sung in Bangladesh.
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The Bengali poet was awarded a knighthood by King George V in 1915, however, he repudiated it after the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre.
Here are some of Rabindranath Tagore’s quotes and poems:
Inspirational quotes and poems by the Bard of Bengal
Rabindranath Tagore quotes
- If you cry because the sun has gone out of your life, your tears will prevent you from seeing the stars.
- Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storms but to add color to my sunset sky.
- Music fills the infinite between two souls.
- What is Art? It is the response of man’s creative soul to the call of the Real.
- Love is the only reality and it is not a mere sentiment. It is the ultimate truth that lies at the heart of creation.
- Love does not claim possession but gives freedom.
- By plucking her petals, you do not gather the beauty of the flower.
- Death is not extinguishing the light; it is only putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.
- Trees are the earth’s endless effort to speak to the listening heaven.
- We come nearest to the great when we are great in humility.
- Faith is the bird that feels the light when the dawn is still dark.
- If you shut the door to all errors, the truth will be shut out.
- Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time like dew on the tip of a leaf.
- Do not say, ‘It is morning,’ and dismiss it with a name of yesterday. See it for the first time as a newborn child that has no name.
- Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged man.
Rabindranath Tagore poems
1. Where the mind is without fear
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.
2. Defamation
Where are those tears in your eyes, my child?
How horrid of them to be always scolding you for nothing!
You have stained your fingers and face with ink while writing-
is that why they call you dirty?
O, fie! Would they dare to call the full moon dirty because
it has smudged its face with ink?
For every little trifle, they blame you, my child. They are
ready to find fault for nothing.
You tore your clothes while playing-is that’s why they call you
untidy?
O, fie! What would they call an autumn morning that smiles
through its ragged clouds?
Take no heed of what they say to you, my child.
They make a long list of your misdeeds.
Everybody knows how you love sweet things-is that is why they
call you greedy?
O, fie! What then would they call us who love you?
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