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To talk about the relevance of Tagore is to see him in the greater light of his personality and the time he walked the earth as we do today. And to do this we need to see him beyond his literary achievements. We need to look into the essence of this man, the things he stood for and the legacy he left for us to follow.
He is an international figure widely respected—home and abroad, and has been inspiration to many a great man and woman—the poet Wilfred Owen, Scientist Albert Einstein might be taken as example. But if we talk about his relevance he is more relevant to us Bengalis than any other race in the world, because he with his life and action and with his conviction showed what a Bengali needs to be, and what we have really come to.
The time that is gone is gone forever and the time that is to come is a mere presumption and the same premise holds good in our life as well. People who have lived their lives contributing to the ethos, or people who have been simply demolishing what took ages to build have equal influence on all of us. So the future lies in our hand, the young generation, the students, on whose shoulders rest the world.
The life of Rabindranath was a multifaceted one that ideated the need of a questing mind something that is far above the muddle of pre-conceived familiarity we are so much given to now. Today we need to have this originality of thought and action in our day to day life. Over the years this sense of enquiry so vital to our ancestors has now indeed taken a beating. We have lost the legacy of being a rebel and poet, of being people of great courage and vitality and of original thinking.
Gopal Krishna Gokhale once said, “What Bengal thinks today, the rest of India thinks tomorrow.” The question is do we still have that conviction? Does the accolade still apply on us? Do we really deserve it in the present run of time?
Today our intellectual world is steeped in mediocrity and self complacency. But what we have really inculcated post independence is a pathetic snobbery that has made us incapable of seeing things worth seeing, somewhat robbing us of the very sense of pragmatic analyses. In the short story ‘Daakghar’, Tagore showed us the danger of losing our intrinsic judgement to half baked understanding of things around.
We live in a world where we have no respect for our language, and the world once glimmered with the likes of Sarat Chandra, Jibonananda Das, Shakti Chattopadhyay Bishnu Dey is crumbling to cheap and vulgar Bollywood mediocrity. And we see no offence!
Ergo, today we need to re-live Tagore, resurrect the Tagore that we all have in us because we need him to survive the world, to keep our name on the atlas of people and great nation and be proud of being a Bengali.
We cannot expect to change people who won’t change, but we, the young generation can as well gear up to imbibe those true qualities epitomised by our beloved Poet laureate that we might one day be the precursor to a great Nation of great people.
