Honorable/Esteemed President/Principal/Headmaster, respected Chief Guest/ Chief Speaker /Teachers, and my friends.
Today, I am standing in front of you to express my speech on the topic “Rabindranath Tagore”. The greatest and most popular Indian Poet.
During pre-independence, those veteran and versatile dignitaries have taken birth on the soil of India and have glorified the land because of their unique and incomparable talent, Rabindra Nath Tagore is one.
His poetic career, his Gitanjali, his east-west philosophy, love for spiritual order are not only widely accepted in India but also in the west where Tagore was worshipped as a living God.
Tagore was born at Jodasankha in Kolkata on 7th May 1861. His father Debendra Nath Tagore was a saintly man. Rabindra Nath was the 14th child of his parents. He got his education at home. Later he went to Brighten School, and then London University where he got higher education.
At the age of 22, he married to Mrinalini Devi, and then looked after his father’s business. Tagore had an inborn instinct for writing poetry. He wrote divine poems highlighting God’s creation. He composed the songs too and became a lyricist, and musician. He wrote beautiful short stories.
He was chiefly a bilingual poet. Most of his Bengali work has been translated to English and have got immense publicity. The English poets recognized the profound beauty of his poems. “Some passages in the ‘Geetanjali”, “are among the loftiest, most profound
and most divinely human ever written.” No wonder, this single work, brought for him the most prestigious Nobel Prize in 1913. Tagore was a great patriot. In the dark days of Punjab horros, he renounced the knighthood which had been confered on him in 1914. He was in the forefront of the Swadeshi Movement which came in the wake of the Partition of Bengal.
He was a practical visionary. He conceived the great and grand idea of founding in India a home of culture and education where all the varied ideas of world will meet in mutual friendship. To translate such a lofty dream to reality he founded Viswabharati at Shantiniketan in 1901.
He spent the entire money he received from the Nobel Prize for its development. Now it is one of the premier educational institutions of the world. Rabindranath passed away in his ancestral home at Jorasanko on August 7, 1941, at an ripe old age of 81. “Tagore is a saint. India salutes him.