For Rabindranath Tagore’s 145th birthday this month, it would be good to have a fresh look at his Gitanjali (Song offerings), winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 and first Asian Nobel laureate. Tagore composed Gitanjali after his wife’s untimely death, which perhaps taught him the deepest lesson of all. Gitanjali is steeped in the ageless wisdom of India, essentially the Upanishads and the Vedas.

But, when I read it for the first time as a school boy, some lyrics looked like those addressed by a lover to his beloved; they would fascinate, fill you with tenderness and even transport you into the world of the imagination. However, later readings revealed that Gitanjali is indeed the outpouring of the soul, something divine, enlightening, uplifting and more than that.

Verses like, “Ah love, why dost thou let me wait outside at the door all alone?’’; “If thou speakest not, I will fill my heart with silence and endure it. I’ll keep still and wait …’’, in fact refer to love of God. But lovers will take them for lines well-chosen to express their unrequited love. Any young person in love will like to treasure such pieces in his or her notebook to be used at appropriate moments. Such is the appeal of Gitanjali.

Some people daily read lines from Gitanjali as prayers to think no more of the troubles of the world. Almost always, when we pray to God or perform a ceremony, we ask Him for what is best in the world - health, wealth, happiness, success, among others. In our pleasures and self-seeking pursuits, we often tend to forget Him and what is painful and sad awaiting us ahead. And, when anything of this sort happens, we are so shocked that we cannot know what to do: we are simply broken and shattered. In the book, we can read and think over lines to have some comfort:

‘’Give me the strength lightly to bear my joys and sorrows.

Give me the strength to surrender my strength to thy will and love.’’

Wide-ranging as the references in the Gitanjali are, Tagore is hard on his contemporaries, particularly the zamindars (landlords) and those of the religious order. He is furious with those exploiting and oppressing the peasants for whom he has deep compassion. He scolds them saying,

“Leave this chanting and singing and telling of beads! Whom dost thou worship in this lonely dark corner of a temple with doors all shut? Open thine eyes and see thy God is not before thee.

He is there where the tiller is tilling the hard ground and where the path maker is breaking stones. He is with them in sun and in shower, and his garment is covered with dust. Put off thy holy mantle and even like him come down to this dusty soil!

Come out of thy meditations and leave aside thy flowers and incense! What harm is there if thy clothes become tattered and stained? Meet him and stand by him in toil and in sweat of thy brow.’’

One of the most pronounced and quoted verses of Gitanjali is verse 35, “Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;

Father, let my country awake.’’

In his invocation to God, Tagore longs for a world without borders and conflicts. Unlike his own education by private tutors, he pleads for a system where children are free and learn happily. He prays for a better India, a better world.

Gitanjali’s lyrics are so appealing and powerful that W. B. Yeats wrote that they stirred his blood as nothing had for years. Even the Swedish Royal Academy while awarding him the Nobel Prize refers to Gitanjali as “the most distinguished work of an idealistic tendency in the field of literature’’. Living in a world shaken by uncertainties, unrest and violence, we can always turn to Gitanjali for enlightenment, peace and a return to reality.