I was in Class 10. Every year, during the annual day function, prizes were awarded to students who excelled academically during the year. It so happened that I topped my class during that year and was given a gift-wrapped book as prize. After reaching home, I opened the gift pack. It was Macmillan’s hardcover edition of Rabindranath Tagore’s Personality, a collection of six lectures delivered by the savant in America during 1916-1917.
At that age and stage of mental development, I was too preoccupied with my school syllabus to read anything of wider import. The name Tagore was familiar and the word personality, to my mind, had something to do with mental makeup, temperament, physique etc. So I put the book aside without as much as looking into its contents.
After school, I started taking an interest in science, philosophy and religion in a vague search for meaning and direction to life. One day, I found Tagore’s Personality lying in the bookshelf. The structured exposition of Tagore’s thoughts was so engrossing, exquisite and nothing like whatever I had read earlier. I read the six essays—“What Is Art?”, “The World of Personality”, “The Second Birth”, “My School”, “Meditation” and “Woman” at one go. Since that day Tagore became my friend, philosopher and guide. I am yet to find a more rounded, balanced, eclectic and organic world view, than that presented by the poet-seer.
With modern science throwing up a view of the cosmos with immense space and time, the big bang, black holes, dark energies and dark matter—giving a nihilistic existential picture of human life on this puny planet revolving around the sun—here is Tagore defending the majesty of the human personality. “I know”, he says, “I am not a mere stranger resting in the wayside inn of this earth on my voyage of existence but I live in a world whose life is bound up with mine”
On how our works, actions and life in general should be here show Tagore at his best: “In life’s movement, though nothing is final, yet every step has its rhythm of completeness. Even the bud has its ideal of rounded perfection, so has the flower and also the fruit.”
In this day of corporate-style spiritual establishments, let us listen to Tagore on spiritual teaching: “In our spiritual attainment gaining and giving are the same thing, as in a lamp, to light itself is to impart light to others.” These are some ‘stray birds’ of wisdom from our poet-seer.
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