150th Birth Anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore
Image source : Pradip Jain, Patna
To mark the 150th Birth Anniversary of Tagore India, Srilanka and Bangladesh will issue commemorative postage stamps on 7 May 2011.
Over the weekend India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka will celebrate the 150th birth anniversary of poet and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, who was born May 7, 1861
The writer and painter who gave both India and Bangladesh their national anthems—“Jana Gana Mana” and “Amar Shonar Bangla”—and who traveled widely, making friends from Europe to Argentina, is still seen as towering cultural icon today. He was the first person who was not from the West to win the prestigious Nobel Prize for Literature for his prolific body of work. According to Judith Plotz, a George Washington University professor who moderated an event in the Nobel laureate’s honor at the Asia Society in March, Tagore wrote 12 novels, 3,000 poems and and over 2,000 songs.
The government of Sri Lanka will release on May 7, a postal stamp and first day cover on Rabindranath Tagore, on the occasion of his 150th birth anniversary celebrations.
The stamp, priced at LKR 5, will be released by Sri Lankan Minister for Postal Services Jewan Kumaranathunga at a function presided over by Indian High Commissioner to Sri Lanka Ashok K. Kantha, said Vikram Misri, Indian Deputy High Commissioner in Colombo.
Tagore visited Sri Lanka thrice – in 1922, 1930 ad 1934 – and was instrumental in the renaissance of its culture. Tagore wrote the national anthem for two countries – India and Bangladesh – and influenced the anthem in Sri Lanka. The Sri Lankan national anthem was written by Ananda Samarakoon, most probably in 1939-40, while he was Tagore’s disciple at Visva-Bharathi University. Samarakoon’s first Shantiniketan stint ended after six months but he heralded a new brand of Sinhalese music influenced by Rabindra Sangeet.
"Creation is not repetition, or correspondence in every particular between the object and its artistic presentation. The world of reality is all around us. When I look at this phenomenon with my artist's eye, things are revealed in a different light which I try and recapture in my picture - call them realistic or not. There is a world of dreams and fantasies which exists only in a man's imagination. If I can but depict this in my pictures I can beat the Creator at His own game."
- Rabindranath Tagore
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