ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF GITANJALI

AND INDIA'S FIRST NOBEL

(TAGORE’S SONG OFFERINGS)

(By Rema Prasanna Pisharody)

“I came out on the chariot of the first gleam of light, and pursued my voyage through the wildernesses of worlds leaving my track on many a star and planet.”

From the prayer room of Life there emerged a garland of poems which enriched the innermost mysteries of the complex human nature and conquered the world. There no loud announcement and gallant claims in Gitanjali . We hear not the trumpets of a vanquisher in his offering but a prayer like soothing song.

‘Thou hast made me endless, such is the pleasure. This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again and fillest it ever with fresh life. This little flute of a reed thou hast carried over hills and dales, and hast breathed through it melodies eternally new.’

Light of thy music illumines the world.. The life breath of your music, runs from sky to sky. The holy stream of your music breaks through all stony obstacles and rushes on..

Reading Tagore is like a Prayer. His words got this magnetic impact and take the reader to world that like that of heaven.  He blends his verse in a prayer garland and offers to a supreme mystic power. It travels far across the seas and horizons and continents and a celestial world.

‘Now it is time to sit quite face to face with thee, and to sing dedications of life in this silent and overflowing leisure. ‘

His mystic verse had the power to mesmerize a world.  In his invaluable offerings, Nobel was yet another precious gem. 

Who are you, reader, reading my poems an hundred years hence?I cannot send you one single flower from this wealth of the spring, one single streak of gold from yonder clouds.

Open your doors and look abroad.
From your blossoming garden gather fragrant memories of the vanished flowers of an hundred years before.
In the joy of your heart may you feel the living joy that sang one spring morning, sending its glad voice across an hundred years.

There the purest voice heard from a century old sanctuary, a prayer from the meditating promontories of  life. He gifted us the first Nobel for our country and unfortunately we could not save that Nobel in our unsafe museums.  There remains the replica but his songs were pure and fresh like a morning prayer; Songs of Offerings.

Even after one hundred years, people read  song offerings to understand what hides behind the mystery of his whole prayer songs.  

There this pure prayer we hear from a heart which adorned a century in its simple prayer room.