I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy. RABINDRANATH TAGORE

I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy. — RABINDRANATH TAGORE

I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.

I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service is joy.

I slept, and dreamed that life was beauty;
I woke, and found that life was duty.

In a letter dated 10 November 1937, Tagore explained the true story: ‘A certain high official in His Majesty’s service, who was also my friend, had requested that I write a song of felicitation towards the Emperor. The request simply amazed me. It caused a great stir in my heart. In response to that great mental turmoil, I pronounced the victory in Jana Gana Mana of that Bhagya Bidhata (Bengali pronunciation; “dispenser of destiny”) of India who has from age after age held steadfast the reins of India’s chariot through rise and fall, through the straight path and the curved. That Lord of Destiny, that Reader of the Collective Mind of India, that Perennial Guide, could never be George V, George VI, or any other George. Even my official friend understood this about the song. After all, even if his admiration for the crown was excessive, he was not lacking in simple common sense.’

I slept and dreamt life is beauty, I woke and found life is duty.

I was early taught to work as well as play, My life has been one long, happy holiday; Full of work and full of play — I dropped the worry on the way — And God was good to me every day. That titan was John D. Rockefeller, who wrote the poem at age eighty-six.

as a well-spent day gives, joy in sleep
so a well-spent life brings, joy in dying

I slept, and dreamed that life was Beauty;
I woke, and found that life was Duty.
Was thy dream then a shadowy lie?
Toil on, poor heart, unceasingly;
And thou shalt find thy dream to be
A truth and noonday light to thee.

The joy of life is living it, or so it seems to me;
In finding shackles on your wrists, then struggling till you're free;
In seeing wrongs and righting them, in dreaming splendid dreams,
Then toiling till the vision is as real as moving streams.
The happiest mortal on the earth is he who ends his day
By leaving better than he found to bloom along the way.

Tagore’s poems and stories are mostly set in Bengal. However, in his non-fiction, that is to say in his letters, essays, talks, and polemics, he wrote extensively on the relations between the different cultures and countries of the world. Tagore, notes Humayun Kabir, ‘was the first great Indian in recent times who went out on a cultural mission for restoring contacts and establishing friendships with peoples of other countries without any immediate or specific educational, economic, political or religious aim. It is also remarkable that his cultural journeys were not confined to the western world’. He visited Europe and North America, but also Japan, China, Iran, Latin America, and Indo-China. That these travels were undertaken without any instrumental purpose marks Tagore out from the other members of our great quartet. Gandhi studied law in London and later went to South Africa to work. After he finally returned to India, in 1915, he visited England, once, to negotiate with the British Government. Apart from a short trip to Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon), he did not otherwise travel abroad in the last three decades of his life. As a young man, Ambedkar went to the United States and the United Kingdom to acquire advanced degrees in law and economics. Then he came back to a life of social activism in India. In later years, his trips overseas were to participate in political or academic conferences. At first glance, Nehru seems to have matched Tagore as a world traveller. Nehru first went overseas as a boy, to study at an English public school. Later, in the nineteen twenties and thirties, he travelled through Europe to forge links between the Indian freedom struggle and the world socialist movement. Still later, as Prime Minister of India between 1947 and 1964, he visited many different countries and continents. He went in his official capacity, representing and negotiating for his nation. Before and after Independence, Nehru’s journeys abroad were thus wholly political. (The one exception was when his wife fell seriously ill, and had to be taken to Europe for treatment.) On the other hand, Tagore travelled to other lands out of curiosity, simply to see and speak with humans of a cultural background other than his own.

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high; Where knowledge is free; Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls; Where words come out from the depth of truth; 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 habit; 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!” — Rabindranath Tagore

You might call it ‘bright sadness’ (as does the priest and author Richard Rohr), ‘stubborn gladness’ (the poet Jack Gilbert), or ‘sober joy’ (the Heidegger scholar Bruce Ballard).9, 10, 11 Or you could just call it finally encountering real life, and the brute fact of our finite weeks.