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A LOVER OF LIGHT AMONG LUMINARIES : Dilip Kumar Roy "Know once for all: win freedom you must, my soul!
And tread the way that leads beyond to the Goal."31
But he knew that to be free means to be self-disciplined and not to escape from the responsibilities of life. He has voiced this feeling in one of the sonnets of Gitaajali which Roy has cited in Six Illuminates of Modern li Tagore wanted freedom for his country and his soul as well. And he found true freedom only in self-discipline. But, again, such a self-discipline does not mean the traditional renunciation for him. So, he never escaped from the earth.
Tagore had a mystic revelation of the Infinite while he was watching the sun rising, and he wrote of it in Prabhat Utsav. Tagore, during such a vision, experienced, the marriage of the infinite with the finite."52 In his poems, Tagore expressed his gratitude to God for whatever was given to him with its varied paradoxes as the Divine Will, and felt contented with it.
Dilip Roy quotes profusely from Rabindranath's Bengali poems along with his own English translations to show that Tagore accepted our world in toto of laughter and tears, song and silence, light and shade. He believes that Rabindranath
**... was at home only in the Home of Beauty, as her welcome visitant, a grateful guest, who longed for nothing as ardently as for the freedom that accrues to one through one's tireless worship
of her all-redeeming loveliness."53 Noticing Rabindranath's capacity to converse brilliantly, Dilip Roy says:
"...long before I had my first conversation with him years ago, he had risen to fame as a conversationalist who could, with a torrent of golden words pouring from his lips, cast a spell on his audience.... But he was not merely a great decorator and beautifier of life, he was also suggestive and original to a degree and did, at every turn, open new vistas before us whenever he
came to hold forth no matter on what theme."54
The author accepts that oratory may be more powerful than conversation. Socrates, Demosthenes, Cicero etc. moved masses of people of their time through their oratory. But the conversationalists, the author feels. like Dr. Johnson, Goethe, Einstein, Shaw, Russell, Rolland, Sri Ramkrishna and Rabindranath, too, played an important role in appealing to the intelligentsia of their own respective times.
In 1927, Dilip Roy listened to Rabindranath's discourse on theme of Man and Woman, which he published in detail in Among the Great in 1945 and its summary in Sir Illuminates of Modern India in 1982. During their conversation. Dilip Roy asked numerous questions to Tagore to know whether he believed in
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