Hundred years back, Tagore faced a threat from Spanish Influenza as it ravaged length and breadth of India in its second wave. Shantiniketon was no exception. Eighteen years into service, Tagore’s school there was still limping. There were only a handful of students.
As the pandemic struck Shantiniketon, there was very little chance that guardians would find it safe to send their wards to his school any more.
Tagore was feeling the pressure. But true to him, he kept it within. None felt that he was going through any spell of anxiety.
The poise and calm, trademarks of Tagore, saw him through the crisis as his school, after initial hobble, went on song.
Tagore is a symbol of journey that defies brooding gloom and numbing glum by holding on to unshakeable faith and indomitable hope. A lone traveller may lose his path and go astray but that cannot blur his vision of goal riding on passion of life.
In 1920, Tagore received a letter from a grieving mother of an English soldier-poet, Wilfred Owen, who lost his life while in action at the battlefield of France at the fag-end of First World War in November 1918. Susan Owen recalled in that letter how his son, just about the time of departing, mumbled to her ‘When I go from hence, let this be my parting word’; redolent of poet’s Gitanjali, poem no. 96, while mother-son duo were looking across sun-glorified ocean for the last time.
To an overseas poet, soldiering the challenges of battle field is an occasion to invoke Tagore. Perhaps, in Tagore, Owen found the lighthouse of hope and calm, two vital ingredients to combat choppy waters of a turbulent life.
Disquiet in life strums out the melody of a veena; Tagore believes and in 1918, the year Spanish flu pandemic started throwing the world into pandemonium, he penned “Oshanti je aghat kare tai to veena baje.”
Let us take life that way: pick up the loose threads for now and when good times beckon, knit them to life once again.