She was raged and in full ire
When subjected to jokes and satire
We had taken her as silly object
Always waited for her seriously to react
...
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26 June 2013 TO: Mr. Hasmukh mehta, She was raged and in full ire When subjected to jokes and satire Here we may refer to a Tagore related event who was a champion in leg-pulling. I quote from my book The Eclipsed Sun - While Tagore was an embodiment of supreme dignity, spirituality and aesthetics, his mobility between that height and the mundane, including very refined practical jokes, was indeed amazing. I am tempted to refer here quite elaborately to Maitrayee Devi’s ‘Tagore By Fireside’ (a translation by herself of her original book in Bengali ‘Mangpute Rabindranath’ i.e.’Rabindranath at Mangpu’, a hill station near Darjeeling which was the workplace of her husband) based on her diary she maintained while Tagore was her guest intermittently between 1938 and 1940. Her book is a unique literature of its kind. In no other writing one gets the poet so closely as in this book, through the eyes of Maitrayee Devi. The undernoted incidents/quotes from this book will hopefully be found relevant to the following three poems (not appearing in this extract) . There was no dearth of scandal mongers against Tagore which disturbed very much Maitrayee, a great devotee of the Poet, whenever she would hear all these. Once, when the Poet was in Mangpu, she heard the scandal that the poet must have champagne every evening (the fact is, the Poet was a teetotaler and also that wine & alcohol are taboos even now among the hoi polloi in India) . Overcoming her inhibition one day, she reported the Poet about this baseless scandal. The Poet answered, “Ah, no less than champagne! But even after hearing all these, I find no improvement in your hospitality! ” Maitrayee’s reply was- “Hell! ” Another such scandal was that the Poet never allowed those women to come near him who were not beautiful. Having this report from Maitrayee, the Poet said, “But those who speak thus, must not have seen you! ’. Indignant Maitrayee said, “Such insults on appearance and age is intolerable! ’. The Poet said, “But I never told you anything about your age! (It seems, on some earlier occasion he did.) I know well that you can’t be older than 45! ” (At that time Maitrayee was only 25 years old) . Now, thus he mollified the still indignant Maitrayee – “But why are you still cross? Just think how nice an arrangement it would have been had I been really so (i.e. averse to women not beautiful) . Santiniketan would have been free of the womenfolk there! ” (Only Tagore could be intrepid enough to dismiss all of them as ‘not beautiful’!) Rajat Das Gupta Rajat Das Gupta, Kolkata Jun 26,2013
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Good maria shaw4 hours ago Sometimes jokes and ridicule are taken to heart, we all have our limit to how much we will take before we explode :) Well done.
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