Tagore

"There are many paradoxes in the world and one of them is this, that wherever the landscape is immense, the sky unlimited, clouds intimately dense, feelings unfathomable - that is to say where infinitude is manifest - its fit companion is one solitary person, a multitude there seems so petty, so distracting."

I havent managed to completely read a book since I traveled back to Sam's land. Until, last week that is. Thanks to the new gadget that I spend most of awake hours with, I am finishing free classics from project Gutenberg. They had a couple of Tagore's books. One I am reading now is called 'Glimpses of Bengal'. As I read the book, modified scenes of Parineeta project themselves at the back of my mind. The over-crowded streets, the bustle, cheap public transport in the form of trams, the sweet smell of...well, sweets by the road side, the fuchkas(!), people blabbering away in a language that puts the sound of 'o' to best use, banks of Ganga-Brahmaputra, women in extra large gorgeous red bindis.

Apparently everything Bengali is clearly very idyllic in my head, so it is in Tagore's. His love for poetic prose (and poetry in general) draws you into even the most substance-less accounts of his day-to-day life. This particular book is just that, random musings put together. It made me realize how much of me I have forgotten. My new project is to compile everything memorable that I have ever written (addressed to someone or otherwise) into one document and saving it on portals like dropbox, hoping I will never lose it.

When I am seventy (and hopefully alive and healthy), I can sit in my library room, with the sunshowers making their way through. Grand teakwood decor, with magnificent shelves of every book that I ever read or attempted to read, and open this printed annal of my life - with sagas about events that I glorified in my teenage frenzy, tragedies of lost love, stories of self-pity, written accounts of attempted inspirational and motivational soliloquies, my darkest and brightest moments trapped in ink, poems written in the moonlight, whole poems conceived during eureka moments, bursts of rhymes due to lack of sleep (which by the way work very much like puking after drinking, in that, they are very relieving once out. Alright, so I could've picked a better metaphor there) - and re-live it all over again, and hopefully be content at a life well dramatized!

So this shiny new gadget allows for -wait for it- highlighting and notes, when reading. It's my favourite feature, I have the tendency to quote and save sentences from books I read.

Brace yourself for some magnificent prose --

"The quiet floating away of a boat on the stream seems to add to the pathos of a separation - it is so like death - the departing one lost to sight, those left behind returning to their daily life, wiping their eyes. True, the pang lasts but a while, and is perhaps already wearing off both in those who have gone and those who remain, - pain being temporary, oblivion permanent. But none the less it is not the forgetting, but the pain which is true; and every now and then, in separation or in death, we realise how terribly true."

[A very amusing one, his choice of conjunctions especially]

"One girl in particular attracts my attention. She must be about eleven or twelve; but, buxom and sturdy, she might pass for fourteen or fifteen. She has a winsome face - very dark, but very pretty. Her hair is cut short like a boy's, which well becomes her simple, frank and alert expression. She has a child in her arms and is staring at me with unabashed curiosity, and certainly no lack of straightforwardness, or intelligence in her glance. Her half-boyish, half-girlish manner is singularly attractive - a novel blend of masculine nonchalance and feminine charm. I had no idea there were such types among our village women in Bengal."

[Part of the Introduction]

"This is a form of literary extravagance only possible when a surplus of thought and emotion accumulates."..."It has been rightly conjectured that they [letters written in the past] would delight me by bringing to mind the memory of days when, under the shelter of obscurity, I enjoyed the greatest freedom my life has ever known".

...and thus began my admiration for Tagore's sheer ease of translating emotions to words :)

Life is good.