Friday, April 30, 2010

Tagore's poems remembered by Chinese

On my recent visit to China, I had the most interesting conversation about poetry and literature.

At the swanky Shanghai airport, as I waited for my connecting flight to New Delhi, I met Shu, a Western-educated octogenarian university teacher, who was deeply in love with the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore.

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was a poet, novelist, musician, and painter who was the first Asian to win the Nobel Prize in literature.

Tagore is probably the only litterateur who had written the national anthems of two countries - "Jana Gana Man" for India and "Amar Shonar Bangla" for Bangladesh.

Shu had met "the bearded man with soft eyes" with her father, when he had visited China to deliver a series of lectures in 1929.

Full report here Shanghai Daily

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