Rabindranath Tagore .....

7th May - Birth Anniversary of Taogre

Hi ! It's 7th May and it is the Birth Anniversary of great Indian poet,novelist and artist Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore. He became the Asia's first Nobel laureate when he won the 1913 Nobel Prize in Literature. Tagore was knighted by the ruling British Government in 1915, but within a few years he resigned the honour as a protest against British policies in India. Tagore had early success as a writer in his native Bengal. With his translations of some of his poems he became rapidly known in the West. In fact his fame attained a luminous height, taking him across continents on lecture tours and tours of friendship. For the world he became the voice of India's spiritual heritage; and for India, especially for Bengal, he became a great living institution. Today's Post is a Philatelic tribute to India's greatest poet of all time. Many Postal adminitrations have issued postage stamps in his honour. I am giving here some of them as a philatelic tribute to this great Indian Personality. This is all for today !.....Till Next Post ....Have a Great Time !

Rabindranath Tagore (7 May 1861 – 7 August 1941) also known as Gurudev, was a Bengali polymath. He was a poet, visual artist, playwright, novelist, educationist, social reformer, nationalist, business-manager and composer whose works reshaped Bengali literature and music in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He became Asia's first Nobel laureate when he won the 1913 Nobel Prize in LiteratureHe was born in Calcutta, into a wealthy Brahmin family. After a brief stay in England (1878) to attempt to study law, he returned to India, and instead pursued a career as a writer, playwright, songwriter, poet, philosopher and educator. During the first 51 years of his life he achieved some success in the Calcutta where he was born and raised with his many stories, songs and plays.

Tagore wrote novels, short stories, songs, dance-dramas, and essays on political and personal topics. Gitanjali (Song Offerings), Gora (Fair-Faced), and Ghare-Baire (The Home and the World) are among his best-known works. His verse, short stories, and novels, which often exhibited rhythmic lyricism, colloquial language, meditative naturalism, and philosophical contemplation, received worldwide acclaim. Tagore was also a cultural reformer and polymath who modernised Bengali art by rejecting strictures binding it to classical Indian forms. Two songs from his canon are now the national anthems of Bangladesh and India: the Amar Shonar Bangla and the Jana Gana Mana respectively.Tagore was a prolific musician and painter, writing around 2,230 songs. They comprise rabindrasangit , now an integral part of Bengali culture. Tagore's music is inseparable from his literature, most of which—poems or parts of novels, stories, or plays alike—became lyrics for his songs. At age sixty, Tagore took up drawing and painting; successful exhibitions of his many works—which made a debut appearance in Paris upon encouragement by artists he met in the south of France were held throughout Europe. Rabindranath Tagore died on August 7, 1941.

Rabindranth Tagore's Dakghar (Post Office)

The Post Office
Originally written in Bengali in 1912, The Post Office, rich in symbolism and allegory, is a play by Tagore about man's passionate cry for the faraway, for the call of the awakening in the world of spiritual freedom. Mahatma Gandhi was enraptured to witness the play in 1917 and W.B.Yeats thought it a masterpiece.

It's a scene from Drama 'Post Office' performed during recent district level exhibition Surpex 2008. The 4th Surat District Level Philatelic Exhibition, Supex 2008 was organized by Department of Post, Surat Postal Division of Gujarat Circle from 13th to 15th October 2008 at Surat. The drama titled “Post Office” based on Rabindranath Tagore’s play “Dak Ghar” was also performed on the occasion. India Post released a Miniature sheet on this famous play by Tagore on October 13, 2008 ( Shown above). Courtesy - Prashant Pandya

World Tributes to Tagore

Mind 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.


Friend
Art thou abroad on this stormy night
on thy journey of love, my friend?
The sky groans like one in despair.
I have no sleep tonight.
Ever and again I open my door and look out on
the darkness, my friend!
I can see nothing before me.
I wonder where lies thy path!
By what dim shore of the ink-black river,
by what far edge of the frowning forest,
through what mazy depth of gloom art thou threading
thy course to come to me, my friend?

Poems from Gitanjali "Song Offerings" by Rabindranath Tagore ( Translation from Bengali) for which he got Nobel Prize in Literature.