Essays

Rabindranath Tagore's birth anniversary falls on May 9.'On this occasion may we look into the spiritual insights in Ins works. Said he: "Love gives beauty to everything it touches. Not greed and utility; they produce offices, but not dwelling houses. To be able to love material things, to clothe them with tender grace, and yet not be attached to them, this is a great service."

One of his most memorable poem's begins thus: "The world is insane with violence, every day there emerges a new kind of cruel conflict". He goes on to pray to god to instile love and wisdom into a world afflicted with myriad ills. This reflects the gist of Tagore's spiritual  humanism.

Stressing the need for spiritual freedom, he referred. To the uncontrolled excesses of passion that upset our balance and obscure the underlying harmony between the individual and universal spirit. This malady, that he called him, distorts our freedom in the realms of matter, mind and spirit.

"The Religion of Man", as enunciated by Tagore, is an appeal for faith in man's sublimity, for nothing is great than the Divine in man. In his words: "When I was 18,  a  sudden spring breeze of religious experience for the  first  time came to my life and passed away leaving in my  memory a direct message of spiritual reality. I felt that I had found my religion at last, the religion of Man, I which the infinite became defined in humanity." This idea found expression in his poems addressed to jivan devta the Lord of life.

Tagore was inspired by Advaita Vedanta. But he was too independent to stick to the rigidity of any institutional   creep or dogma. Religion for Tagore was a matter of personal conviction. He had greater faith in the individuals “all over the world who think clearly, feel nobly and act; rightly, thus becoming channels of moral truth".

Tagore never wanted to be labelled a theologian or a philosopher. He was happier to be known as a poet. He felt himself one with nature and derived inspiration from it. He saw it as the physical manifestation of the Universal Spirit and expressed this experience through his poetry.

His meditation of God, man and nature, especially in the Gitanjali—offerings of songs to the Infinite—not only echo the Vedantic perception of the Absolute but also convey the ardour of a Vaishnavaite devotee's love for God.

The eternal values of Buddhism appealed to him as being no less significant than the Upanishadic idea of a Supreme Being. With the human spirit afflicted by greed, hatred and violence, the poet's anguished soul cried out for the healing touch of the Buddha: "0 Serene, 0 Free/in thine immeasurable mercy and goodness/wipe away, all dark stains from the heart of this earth."

Tagore renounced the knighthood conferred upon him by the British in protest against the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919. His spirit of humanism finds expression in some of his other works like Ghare Baire and Kabuliwallah.

Tagore considered himself a solitary pilgrim in the eternal quest for boundless bliss.

The poet's invocation for his country's redemption in Gitanjali is one of his most memorable poems: "Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;/ Where knowledge is frees/Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;/ Where words come out from the depth of truths/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 habits;/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."

Tagore's life was a sustained search for a universal form of religious expression, rooted in the spirit of Indian tradition.

Essay in Everyday Life

Shun the hesitation and worries about how to write a good essay. Don't take it to be a tough task. Make it a part of your daily life. If you wonder how one can essay in his daily life, get through the following steps and see the outcome.

— Read a quality newspaper every morning.

— Get a thorough knowledge of the events of the day

— Read the editorial articles with keen interest.

— Select the hottest topic of the day and think well about its pros and cons.

— Discuss and debate the issue with some of your friends, classmates, or whosoever you find competent to do so.

— While discussing, put forward your own points with logic, continuity and in positive direction; don't argue.

— Listen carefully to what the other person says and try to realize its worth for the topic.

— At the end, note down the important points which surfaced during the discussion.

— Now sit alone in the evening and jot down all these points in a logical sequence.

Your essay is ready. And believe me; this essay will be several times better from those written by someone after reading books.