Tagore Festival 2011

“Who are you, reader, reading my poems an hundred years hence?
I cannot send you one single flower from this wealth of the spring, one single streak of gold from yonder clouds.
Open your doors and look abroad.
From your blossoming garden gather fragrant memories of the vanished flowers of an hundred years before.
In the joy of your heart may you feel the living joy that sang one spring morning, sending its glad voice across a hundred years. ”

Rabindranath Tagore (7 May 1861 – 7 August 1941)

Was Tagore a poet or a scientist – did he empower the human spirit with his mystical words and paintings or was he a keen traveller and a philosopher? Were Tagore and Gandhi two sides of a coin that would bring the East and the West together? This central theme of bringing the Spirit of the East and the Science of the West together lay at the heart of the Tagore Festival organised by Resurgence Editor, Satish Kumar and Earthlinks Trustee, Minni Jain at Dartington Hall, Devon.

Tagore the multi visionary, who was all of the above and more, was celebrated and envisioned for our time by many amazing and diverse scholars and artists like Mark Tully, Aditi Mangaldas, Sonal Mansingh, Andrew Motion, Tim Smit, Tony Juniper, Vandana Shiva, Jane Goodall, Michael Morpurgo, Wajahat Khan, Philip Franses, Dharambir Singh, Sangeeta Datta, Paban Das Baul and Mimlu Sen, Peter and Alice Oswald, Ilan Pappe and Benjamin Zephaniah. And many many more came together to make this a week to remember for ever more.