26 Apr 2011
Competition Time! Win tickets for my talk at the Tagore festival on Saturday May 7th…
Next week is the Tagore Festival, a celebration of the life and work of Rabindranath Tagore, at Dartington Hall, close to Totnes, and on Saturday 7th I am giving a talk, together with Theo Simon of Seize the Day, and I have two tickets to give away! It will be quite an unusual talk, entitled ‘Recipes for Resilience: how doing Transition is like baking a cake’: if you want to come anyway, you can book tickets here, but here is the opportunity for a day out to sunny Dartington to hear the latest about Transition and stories of what different Transition initiatives are up to. So, here we go, fingers on buzzers….
To enter, please let me know which two of the following statements about Rabindranath Tagore are not true. Don’t post your answer as a comment, but email rob (at) transitionculture.org before midday on Monday 2nd May. OK, here we go…
- Tagore was quite pally with Mussolini until Tagore was critical of him and the two fell out
- When Tagore was at Dartington with the Elmhirsts in the 1930s, he set a local record for ‘welly wanging’ (hurling a Wellington boot over long distances) which stood until 1984. Superstitious locals attributed his success to Eastern mystical powers…
- In 1916, Tagore was nearly assassinated at a hotel in San Francisco, but the assassins had an argument and fell out while they were waiting for Tagore to arrive, and the assassination attempt failed
- Tagore wrote 2, 230 songs during his lifetime
- Tagore once had a trial with Leyton Orient FC, but wasn’t signed up, much to his disappointment. His sense of rejection was captured in his poem “A Lonely Lament from Between the Posts” (Tagore was a goalkeeper)
- Tagore met Einstein in 1930 and discussed mathematics and music, and the connections between the two
- The author Graham Greene thought that Tagore’s poetry was rubbish, writing that he doubted “anyone but Mr. Yeats can still take his poems very seriously”.
Good luck! My thanks to the organisers….