Remembering Rabindranath Tagore Volume - High Commission of ...

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Remembering Rabindranath Tagore
...and I felt a sweet trace of a strange fragrance in the south wind.
I knew not then that it was so near, that it was mine, and that this perfect
sweetness had blossomed in the depth of my own heart.
We think of personal redemption and in the name of religion we follow a host of rituals
hoping that it would deliver us. We are lost ourselves and have little time for our fellow
beings. A smile, a little act of kindness can make another’s world beautiful. But lost as we
are in our own petty worlds we do not realise it and engage ourselves in useless rituals.
A man whose house is all dark and lonesome asks a girl for the lamp which she carries to
float in the river. He sees it uselessly drifting in the tide.
In the moonless gloom of midnight I ask her, ‘Maiden, what is your quest,
holding the lamp near your heart? My house is all dark and lonesome – lend me
your light.’ She stopped for a minute and thought and gazed at my face in the
dark. ‘I have brought my light,’ she said, ‘to join the carnival of lamps.’ I stood
and watched her little lamp uselessly lost among lights.
I have highlighted only a few instances where Tagore’s poetry speaks of things close to
the human heart, its innermost yearnings. In my mind Tagore remains a poet essentially
of the east whose thought process encapsulates the lofty ideals of eastern thought and
world view. The tag of ‘mysticism’ to his poetry should not conceal its beauty and the
inherent realistic approach though his mode of expression is sometimes couched in
mystic phraseology.