Geetanjali book

Hindu mystic, poet, teacher, Nobel prize winner, Rabindranath Tagore stands among the greatest of Asiatic poets of all time. William Butler Yeats says that this 19th century writer "like Chaucer's Forerunners, writes music for his words and (that he) is so abundant, so spontaneous, so daring in his passon, and so full of surprise". John Alden Carpenter, the noted American composer, has set several of these beautiful lyrics to music. Rabindranath Tagore was born May 7, 1861 in Calcutta, India into a wealthy Brahmin family. Tagore received his education at home. He was taught in Bengali, with English lessons in the afternoon. Tagore spent a brief time at St. Xavier's Jesuit school, but found the conventional system of education uncongenial. In 1879, he enrolled at University College, at London, but was called back by his father to return to India in 1880. During the first 51 years of his life, he achieved some success in the Calcutta area of India where he was born and raised with his many stories, songs and plays. His short stories were published monthly in a friend's magazine and he even played the lead role in a few of the public performances of his plays. Otherwise, he was little known outside of the Calcutta area, and not known at all outside of India. This all changed in 1912 when Tagore returned to England for the first time since his failed attempt at law school as a teenager. Now a man of 51, his was accompanied by his son. On the way over to England he began transl...

A bomb explodes in a university café, claiming the lives of nineteen students. The Empty Space begins with the identification of those nineteen dead. The mother who enters the café last to identify the nineteenth body brings home her dead eighteen-year-old son packed in a box, as well as the sole survivor of the blast, a three-year-old boy who, by a strange quirk of fate, is found lying in a small empty space, alive and breathing. The Empty Space chronicles the memories of the boy gone, the story of the boy brought home, and the cataclysmic crossing of life and death. The writing is good. It’s lyrical, well translated I feel. However, I feel there’s not much of a story in this book. It starts with an incident killing one son of a small family. Yes, the story will just remain stuck here. Good writing isn’t enough. We need a story. We need to feel something when it comes to families, grief and the uncertainties of life as should have been described in such stories. 3.5 stars A more philosophical novel than The Roof Beneath Our Feet and Mai and more like Geetanjali Shree’s award-winning Tomb of Sand with pages of reflection throughout on what it means to lose a child so violently and to take on another boy as a ‘replacement’. The family in the novel who are just referred to as Father and Ma lose their only son to a terrorist attack – based on something that happened to a dear friend of Geetanjali Shree -and adopt a three-year-old boy found in an ‘empty space’ in the café wher...