“True happiness is not at all expensive. It depends upon that natural spring of beauty and of life, harmony of relationship. Ambition pursues its own path of self-seeking by breaking this bond of harmony, digging gaps, creating dissension. Selfish ambition feels no hesitation in trampling under foot the whole harvest field, which is for all, in order to snatch away in haste that portion which it craves. Being wasteful it remains disruptive of social life and the greatest enemy of civilization.” | Read the full lecture >>
Source: Rabindranath Tagore in “Robbery of the soil” (Calcutta University, 1922), posted by Tony Mitra on a blog “Exploring citizens duty on food security, environmental sustainability, covid and freedom issues” (27 September 2015) https://www.tonu.org/tag/robbery-of-the-soil/ Date visited: 12 January 2021
I see one India in the pattern. You see another. Light and shadow play. History and modernity collide. Superstition and myth, Rabindrasangeet and rap, Sufi and Shia and Sunni, caste and computers, text and sub-plot, laughter and tears, governments and oppositions, reservations and quotas, struggles and captivity, success and achievement, hamburgers and Hari Om Hari, Sanskrit and sms, the smell of rain and the sound of the sea. A seamless stitching. Many, many hands have stitched, are stitching and will continue to stitch India. […]
I cling to the belief that for any culture as old and ancient as ours to have survived over time and in time, there could only be one basic common and acceptable core thought: humaneness. To accept each other’s right to be human with dignity. This then is my fight. My dream. In my life and in my literature. – Mahasweta Devi during her inaugural speech for the Frankfurt Book Fair titled “The Republic of Dreams”
What Are Human Rights? “Human rights are rights inherent to all human beings, regardless of race, sex, nationality, ethnicity, language, religion, or any other status. Human rights include the right to life and liberty, freedom from slavery and torture, freedom of opinion and expression, the right to work and education, and many more. Everyone is entitled to these rights, without discrimination.” Learn more : Human rights | United Nations >>
Rabindranath Tagore, philosopher, educator, novelist, poet and painter, is without challenge one of the greatest and most noble figures of modern times. Not only was he awarded the rare honour of the Nobel Prize for Literature, but he also won the distinction far more rare, less spectacular but much more significant, of having his works translated into different languages by writers of equal glory, Nobel Prize winners in their own right, such as André Gide in French and Juan Ramon Jimenez in Spanish.
India today does not celebrate merely the thinker and writer. Above all, India reveres Tagore’s generous, universal soul, open to the problems not only of his own land but of the world, the son of the Maharshi Debendranath Tagore, who had been one of the guiding spirits of the Brahma-Samaj. For one of his greatest works, the monumental novel Gora, Rabindranath was to choose as theme the trials and problems of this movement. It is not merely by chance that Unesco, among its many undertakings towards the celebration of Tagore’s Centenary, has decided to publish the first French translation of this very novel. For in this book the poet stresses with great fervour and by moving scenes depicted with all his skill as a writer, his zealous devotion to the ideal of a casteless world, a world without cruel, irrational discrimination between one human being and his fellow men. […]
Writing days after Tagore’s death in August 1941, Jawaharlal Nehru said : “Both Gurudev and Gandhlji took much from the West and from other countries, especially Gurudev. Neither was narrowly national. Their message was for the world.” Tagore was in truth a living link between East and West. And so he willed it. His entire life he fought against narrow distrust of foreign cultures. He had faith in the fruitfulness of cultural intercourse and friendship. With this message he was and remains a Guru to Unesco, and it is both fitting and imperative that Unesco’s homage to Tagore should join that of the rest of mankind.
Listen to Tagore: Unlocking Cages: Sunil Khilnani tells the story of the Bengali writer and thinker Rabindranath Tagore: https://bbc.in/1KVh4Cf >> The acclaimed BBC 4 podcast series titled Incarnations: India in 50 Lives has also been published in book form (Allen Lane).
“I was moved by how many of these lives pose challenges to the Indian present,” he writes, “and remind us of future possibilities that are in danger of being closed off.”1
Sunil Khilnani quoted in a review by William Dalrymple in The Guardian, 14 March 2016[↩]
Die Musik des südlichen Indien birgt viele Geheimnisse, aber soviel sei hier schon verraten: ihre Vielfalt verdankt sie der Lebensfreude und Mobilität von Menschen aus vielen Epochen und Regionen. Und weil dort recht unterschiedliche Kulturen zusammenfliessen eignet sie sich ganz besonders zum spontanen, gemeinsamen Musizieren – auch ganz ohne Vorkenntnisse!
Dazu nimmt uns der in Chennai ausgebildete, in Amsterdam lebende Flötist und Musikpädagoge Ludwig Pesch mit auf eine musikalische Reise. Für seine “Vermittlung von Geist und Leben Indiens” wurden ihm gleich zwei Kulturpreise verliehen.
Reise- und Lernziele
Tiere schenken Töne (Karnataka)
Innehalten: vom Klang des Glücks (Andhra Pradesh)
Frische Farben, forsche Formen (Kerala)
Zahlen, die klingen und swingen (Tamil Nadu)
Wie bei uns haben regionale Traditionen viel zur gemeinschaftlichen Kultur Indiens beigetragen. Zugleich ist jeder einzelnen auch etwas Besonderes zu eigen. Facetten, die auch unser Leben und Lernen bereichern können, sind Thema dieser musikalischen Reise.
Dieses interkulturelle Programm wird den jeweiligen Altersgruppen und besonderen Möglichkeiten vor Ort angepasst. Es ist überall – bei gutem Wetter auch im Freien – ohne technischen Aufwand realisierbar. Zur aktiven Beteiligung genügend Hände und Stimme.
Zeitlicher Rahmen: die kurze Variante entspricht einer Unterrichtsstunde, die längere ist ein Workshop für Kinder mit Eltern (Museum- und Sonderpädagogik), für Schüler oder Erwachsene. Dabei steht eine fantasievolle Übertragung von Rhythmen und Melodien in Bewegung und Bild zentral. Auf Wunsch wird gemeinsam mit Lehrern bzw. Betreuern ein zum Lehrplan, einem bestimmten Anlass oder einer Ausstellung passendes Programm zusammengestellt.
Die ganztägige Reise klingt vorzugsweise mit einer gemeinsamen Darbietung für Angehörige aus.
Kosten: nach Absprache – Honorar und Reisekostenerstattung mit Unterkunft gemäß ortsüblichen Standards.
Wie kaum einem anderen deutsch-stämmigen Musiker ist es Ludwig Pesch gelungen, tief in das Wesen der südindischen „klassischen“ Musik einzutauchen. Der Autor lebt heute in Amsterdam und ist als freischaffender Musiker, Sachbuchautor und Dozent tätig. Seine Erfahrung befähigt ihn, die karnatische Musiktradition auch einem Laienpublikum verständlich nahe zu bringen.
Seit 1984 bildet die Zeitschrift MEINE WELT ein Forum des Austausches zwischen Migranten aus Indien und ihren deutschen Freunden. Sie erscheint dreimal im Jahr in einer Auflage von knapp 1000 Exemplaren – das größte Printmedium mit Indien-Bezug in der deutschsprachigen Presselandschaft!
It is significant that the poet believes that in the heart of mechanism there is installed a power that can emancipate us from mechanism. He has compared mechanism to a tired mountain. There is a trepidation within, a slowly moving process of disintegration, as a result of which the gigantic mountain will gradually crumble down and slip into the valley. This is how Personality will re-assert itself. Mechanism, therefore, is a temporary eclipse of Personality and will disappear before the incoming tide of Personality.
The parallelism here between the poet’s thought and that of Bergson is remarkable. Bergson believes that it is when the Life-force suffers a check that mechanism makes its appearance. Mechanism, however, disappears again with the restoration of the Life-force. It, therefore, represents only a temporary slowing down or retardation of the Vital Urge. […]
It is in this faith in the ultimate triumph of Personality that the mysticism of Rabindranath lies. The central idea of this mysticism which runs through the plays, Post Office, King of the Dark Chamber, Cycle of Spring, Waterfall and Red Oleanders is that there is an irresistible force shaping the course of the world fighting and conquering mechanism. To the rule of law, which apparently seems to be the last word of Science, there is opposed a force which, though invisible, is gigantic. This force is the force of Personality. Science tries to crush it, but it refuses to be crushed.
RABINDRANATH AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF PERSONALITY by SISIR KUMAR MAITRA in The Golden book of Tagore: a homage to Rabindranath Tagore from India and the world in celebration of his seventieth birthday, p. 145
~~~
The truth Tagore so clearly expresses to-day is one that some Westerners have proclaimed but which transcends all distinctions between East and West because it is a truth about man as man. Let me now select but one aspect of it for emphatic mention. Tagore speaks of an “inner faculty” of our own, which helps us to find our relationship with the supreme self of man; elsewhere he calls this”an inner source of divine wisdom,” or an “inborn criterion of the real.” This is, of course, closely related to the keen sensitiveness which he tells us characterized his mind from infancy. He is occasionally made intensely conscious of an all-pervading personality “answering to the personality of man.” The experience of this inborn criterion is not unlike the “intimate feeling a father has for his son,” in which he “touches an ultimate truth,” the truth of their relationship.
THE INBORN CRITERION by HAROLD E. B. SPEIGHT in The Golden book of Tagore: a homage to Rabindranath Tagore from India and the world in celebration of his seventieth birthday, p. 246
