Tagore's birth anniversary events will befit his legacy: Manmohan Singh

The events to mark the 150th birth anniversary of Rabindra Nath Tagore will befit the legacy of the Nobel laureate and would rekindle public interest in the works of one of the world's foremost cultural personalities, prime minister Manmohan Singh said today.
    
Singh, who inaugurated a specially curated exhibition 'The Master's Strokes: Art of Rabindra Nath Tagore' at the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) here, said India would organise a grand exhibition of his paintings in Paris next year to commemorate his birth anniversary.
    
"I am deeply honoured to inaugurate this exhibition of one of the world's foremost cultural personalities...The Visva-Bharati, the ministry of Culture and the NGMA are working together on a grand exhibition of Tagore's paintings in Paris next year.
    
"This will mark his 150th birth anniversary in the very city where he displayed his art for the first time in 1930, before a discerning and appreciative audience," Singh said.
    
The prime minister noted that the government had already set up a national committee with several senior ministers, state chief ministers and many eminent scholars, experts and others, "to suggest, formulate and plan a number of events that would rekindle public interest in Gurudev's rich cultural legacy and in his thoughts, ideals, teachings and values."
        
It also constituted an Implementation Committee headed by finance minister Pranab Mukherjee to work out operational details of the proposed celebrations and to ensure that the commemoration was really a befitting one, he said.
      
Noting that Tagore's genius as a poet, dramatist, philosopher, educationist and composer won him universal acclaim, the prime minister said his genius as a painter was, however, less well known, perhaps because he began painting when he was well into his 60s.