
Editor’s note
While initiating a new Gallerie series ‘Rediscovering India’, a volume on contemporary culture in Bengal, transmuted interestingly, into an issue where poet laureate Rabindranath Tagore got woven through all its features –– not just to celebrate his 150th birth year, but to have his footprints etched again where he once walked; where he once left a magnificent trail of literature, the arts and education. Above all, creative thinking.
Over the years, those footprints have been washed over by waves of debate on whether Tagore’s mind was indeed, as evolved and brilliant as believed by most, or was it as some like the formidable philosopher Bertrand Russell dismissed as, “unmitigated rubbish, cut-and-dried conventional stuff about the river becoming one with the ocean and man becoming one with Brahma. The man is sincere and in earnest but merely rattling old dry bones…” While I have much admiration for Russell, who had challenged my mind during senior school years, I differ with his view on Tagore, even as I am remotely not in the queue of sychophantic Tagore-worshippers.