Tagore &^ Buber

My following letter was published in ‘The Statesman’ in their edition of 9^th October, 2015. My letter was written in the context of Professor. Abhik Roy’s article ‘Tagore and Buber’ published in the 6^th October 2015 edition of the paper where  he elaborated Tagore’s meeting with Buber, a great Jewish philosopher and spiritualist  thrice.  Buber is not very widely known in the academic circle and so I found this article important.

Rajat Das Gupta

TAGORE & CELEBRITIES

TO: The Editor                                      6^th October, 2015                              

        The Statesman

Sir,

  From Abhik Roy’s article ‘Tagore and Buber: A meeting of souls’, I came to know about the Jewish philosopher and religious thinker, Martin Buber, who had met Tagore thrice. There were a few historical celebrities with whom Tagore was in touch. One of them was Victoria Ocampo who viewed Tagore’s enormity with awe, bur never shared the Poet’s immeasurable spirituality. The least that she could have done is to translate a fraction of Tagore’s vast works into Spanish and English.  The other celebrity was Bernard Shaw who once wondered how many wives that ‘bearded man’ had. One may also recall Einstein who believed that the Universe can be explained only by scientific data. Tagore inducted the factor of ‘Human Mind’ for grasping ‘Truth’ behind Creation, which was a ‘jolt’ to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity (E= m/c2). These two ‘rational minded’ stalwarts hardly met Tagore’s ‘soul’ which Buber did. He and Tagore were on the same spiritual pedestal. I am sure that the poet had Buber in mind when he wrote (in translation) ~

   At every land my home is there,

             Which I’m out to conquer:

   At every land there are my kith and kin,

   To reckon whom keen I’ve been

Yours etc.,

 Rajat Das Gupta, Kolkata

 6^th October, 2015