Rabindranath Tagore(1861— 1941), was the first non- White to receive Nobel prize (1913) for Literature. The event of course caused some furor at the time. The New York Times in its prodigious generosity consoled its readers by alluding to the fact that after all Tagore was of Aryan Stock. It was first published in 1913 as a collection of prose translations made by the author from the original Bengali (a language of India) Poems. Evidence does indicate that the poet W.B. Yeats had a hand in editing and having it published! 

Cithipatra, Vol. I, Letter No.16, Shelidah, June 1898. 

I found your letter when I got back from Dhaka. I’ll go briefly to Kaligram to tie up some business, and then come to Kolkata to make all necessary arrangements. But please, don’t worry yourself needlessly. Try to bear every occurrence with a calm, peaceful, serene mind. This is what I try to do all the time in the way I lead my own life. I’m not always successful, but if you can keep calm, then perhaps - strengthened by our mutual efforts - I also may achieve peace and happiness of mind. Of course you are younger than I am, and your experiences have been much more limited, and your nature is in some respects much more patient, much more easily controlled than mine. Therefore you have less need than I to keep your mind free of emotional disturbance. 

But in everyone’s life major crises occur, in which the utmost patience and self-control are required. We then realize how silly we are to complain of trivial, daily annoyances, petty aches and pains. I shall love, and I shall do my best, and I shall do my duty by others cheerfully - if we follow this principle, we can cope with anything. Life does not last long, its pleasures and travails are also constantly changing. Wounds, setbacks, deception - it’s hard to bear them lightly; but if we don’t, the burden of life gradually becomes insufferable, and it becomes impossible to fix one’s mind on any goal or ideal. If we fail, if we live in dissatisfaction and tension day after day, in constant conflict with our circumstance, then our lives become completely futile. 

Great calm, generous detachment, selfless love, disinterested effort: these are what make for success in life. If you can find peace in yourself and can spread comfort around you, you will be happier than an empress. Bhai Chuti, if you go on fretting over little things you will do harm to yourself. Most of our troubles are self-imposed. Do not be cross at me for lecturing you pompously like this. You do not know the intense concern with which I am saying these things. 

I feel such deepening of my love and respect for you, such a strengthening of the sympathy that ties me to you, that the pure calm and contentment that I wish for you means more than anything else in the world: compared to it, life’s daily troubles and disappointments are nothing. These days I look at things with a new kind of longing. A woman when young can be unsettled and deluded by love, but even from your experience you perhaps know that at a maturer age, admist the extraordinary ups and downs of life, a steadier, quieter, deeper, more real and controlled love develops. 

As her family grows, the outside world recedes. So in one respect her isolation grows - ties of intimacy seal off the married couple from the world around them. Our souls are never more beautiful than when we can draw close and look at each other face to face: real love begins then. There is no infatuation any more, there is no need to see each other as gods any more, unions and partings do not create storms of feeling any more - but near or far, in security or in danger, in poverty or wealth, the pure and joyous light of unqualified trust shines all around. I know you have suffered much because of me, but I also know that because you have suffered on my account you will one day know a greater, fuller joy. Forgiveness in love and sharing of troubles are true happiness; the satisfactions of personal ambition is not happiness. These days my sole desire is that our lives should be simple and straightforward, that all around us there should be peace and cheerfulness, that our way of life should be unostentatious and full of bounty, that our needs should be small and our aims high and our efforts unselfish and our work for others more important than our work for ourselves. And even if our children gradually fall away from the example we have set them, I hope that we may, till the end, live our lives beautifully in mutual compassion and total selfless, unambitious trust. This is why I have become so eager to take you all away from Kolkata’s stony temple of materialism, and bring you to a far and secluded village. 

In Kolkata there is no opportunity to forget profit and loss, friend and foe: one is so constantly troubled by trifling matters that in the end all the finer purposes of life are shattered into fragments. Here one is content with little, and does not mistake falsehood for truth. Here it is not hard to ‘accept with equanimity whatever may come, happy or sad, pleasant or unpleasant.