Rabindranath Tagore

Source: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rabindranath_Tagore.jpg

Today we note the birth date of Rabindranath Tagore (May 7, 1861– August 7, 1941), Bengali polymath who worked as a poet, writer, playwright, composer, philosopher, social reformer and painter. In 1913, he became the first non-European and the first lyricist to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Gitanjali 35

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action—
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

--Rabindranath Tagore