 Gitanjali or song offerings came at a time when Europe, particularly Western Europe, was seeing one of the greatest of human catastrophes in the making. The war was only two years away, the first world war spurs. But the Balkan regions were still already in flames and the Irish Civil War was seething underground. It was a time when song offerings of Gitanjali gave the western people some hope. It took the people away from material pursuits to some kind of spirituality, some elemental mysticism which rescues people from the kind of distress or kind of catastrophe Western Europe was moving towards. Tagore was born in his ancestral mansion in Durashanko, Kolkata in 1861, four years after India had passed under the British Crown. His father, Devindranath Tagore, was a pillar of the Brahmusamaj, a reformist Hindu faith. The Tagore's were an unusually gifted family, but he rebelled against formal schooling and was given private lessons at home from tutors. His father introduced him at an early age to the ancient Upanishads. Gurudev, Devindranath Tagore, as we call him in India, is a universalist. His philosophy is based upon humanism and essentially I feel upon the philosophy of the Upanishads in which the whole, not only the whole human race but the whole universe is included. So there is no exclusivism whatsoever in his philosophy or in his poetry. Many of the early poems were written in Shilaydaho, the family estate now in Bangladesh, in the utmost seclusion of his houseboat on the Quadra River. In 1912, Tagore planned to visit London to gather funds for his school. A sudden illness forced him back to Shilaydaho to recuperate. There, as a light-hearted exercise, he began translating some of his poems into English. He was diffident about his English, learnt from his tutors and his reading but enjoyed the activity of translation. There is a simplicity in Tagore's translations and there's a musicality too. Most of the poems in Gitanjili are actually songs and although when he travelled abroad I don't think he tried to communicate this particularly, nevertheless in his translations I think he was trying to capture a song-like quality. Tagore carried the manuscript of translations with him when he eventually sailed for England in May 1912. The first person to see the poems was Tagore's artist friend William Rothenstein who shared it with the distinguished Irish poet W. V. Yates. Yates carried the manuscript with him for days, reading it again and again. Inspired beyond measure, London's intellectuals reacted ecstatically to the Gitanjili poems. Gitanjili was first published privately by India Society in London in 1912. Macmillan published it in 1913 which ran into ten reprints before the poet Thomas Sturge Moore sent it as an entry for the Nobel Prize. Tagore returned to India in September 1913, two months before he received the news of the award. The Nobel Citation said that he had been given the prize because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse which had become a part of the literature of the West. In 1921, Tagore gave a formal acceptance speech before the Nobel Committee in Stockholm. He recalled the circumstances in which he had written the poems in the seclusion of a houseboat on the Podda. When I was about 25 years, I used to live in utmost seclusion in the solitude of an obscure Bengal village by the river Ganges in a boat house. The wild ducks which came during the time of autumn from the Himalayan lakes were my only living companions. And in that solitude, I seemed to have drunk in the open space like wine overflowing with sunshine and the murmur of the river used to speak to me and tell me the secrets of nature. And I passed my days in the solitude dreaming and giving shape to my dream in poems. And then came a time when my heart felt a longing to come out of that solitude and to do some work for my human fellow beings. And the one thing, the one work which came to my mind was to teach children. The vigor and the joy of the children, their chats and songs filled the air with the spirit of delight which I drank every day I was there. In this atmosphere and in this environment, I used to write my poems Gitanjali and I sang them to myself in the midnight under the glorious stars of the Indian sky. Tagore died in 1941 at the age of 80 in Jurashako, his Kulkata home where he was born. In an incredibly rich creative career, he had written poetry, novels, short stories, dramas, essays and children's literature while also composing over 2,000 songs and painting hundreds of watercolors. He inaugurated his university Bishra Bharati in December 1921 at Shantiniketan. He dreamt of creating here an international center where the whole world could meet in one nest. The curriculum would include all cultures and educate students in an artistic atmosphere although he had faced considerable sorrow and grief. He never lost his zest for creativity. He felt that through the creative medium he was in constant dialogue with the supreme creator. In one salutation to thee, my God, let all my senses spread out and touch this world at thy feet Like a flock of homesick cranes flying night and day back to their mountain nests let all my life take its voyage to its eternal home in one salutation to thee.