The reason I never sing a Rabindra Sangeet is that I can never sing a line of it with a straight face. Tears well up in my eyes, my jaws feel tight, my voice gets choked with all the unsaid unknown suffocation that gags me from the inside. There is something about Rabindranath Tagore, something that will never die. Something that he has left in all of us and not just Bengalis but people around the world cherish him and bind themselves to him in an uncanny tragedy. Even the most jovial songs have a tinge of gloom and melancholy to them. And the sad ones make my heart beat slow. When Tagore said:
jodi puraton prem dhaka pore jai nobo premo jale
jodithaki kachakachi, dekhite na pao, chayar moto, tobu mone rekho
(if your old love is lost in the web of your new love
if you cannot see me around your you like a shadow, if you doubt
Still, remember me)
I could not believe how a man in the early 1900s could write something people will relate to a hundred years later or maybe five-hundred years from now when Bollywood re-re-remixes a song, original compositions like these will still move musicians far and wide.
It is a glorious thing that a man single-handedly wrote the lyrics to songs, composed their tune, sung them and yet, none of the songs has a compromised quality. They are flawless. How is it that music composers today cannot compose one tune without copying them off some foreign music? Cannot write lyrics for a new song, have to remix some old songs and even then, get lost in the flood of music?
The thing I'm so grateful for is the fact that I can read, listen to and understand Tagore in his language: the language he wrote in. Some meaning is always lost in translation. I have felt that. Reading stories translated by world-famous translators, I have never felt the same closeness or intimacy in their texts as is in Tagore’s own words. Such a huge volume of songs, poems, stories, plays, dramas, and dance dramas: how can one write so much in one lifetime? And let's not forget that he also painted and a bunch of other hobbies with an equal flair in all of them!
A part of me is forced to think that he could write much and this good because of the pain he faced in his life. Tagore lost almost every last one he could call his own: his parents, brothers, his wife, his daughter. His life of eighty years was marred with the losses of the ones he loved and then watch go. Perhaps, that ignited the fire of documenting his feeling. Perhaps, his literary acumen was a result of the colossal mental pain that he called his life. It definitely takes more than a long beard to become Tagore!
He said:
You can't cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water. Don't let yourself indulge in vain wishes.
Perhaps, we can never write that way because we shall never be ready to give ourselves to the tide of life so exhaustively, never allow us to be tossed by the storm of the rough seas or drowned in the fire of longingness. Perhaps, the stinging torture of agony and the desperation that unrequited love brings is so much that we don't let ourselves be fooled more than once.
A hearty birth anniversary to the greatest litterateur of all, the one who introduces every Bengali into the world of art and literature.
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