Seeking humanistic ideals

This year the world marks the 150th birth anniversary of the outstanding writer, philosopher, artist, musicians, and first non-European winner of the Nobel Prize Rabindranath Tagore. In Ukraine the outstanding humanist will be commemorated with a literary-artistic action “Where the soul is living without fear,” which includes an exhibit of Tagore’s paintings, drawings, manuscripts, and photos, screening of films based on his novels accompanied by his music compositions, a creative soiree with the Sixtier poets, such as Dmytro Pavlychko, Ivan Drach, Borys Oliinyk, and Les Taniuk, “From poets to the poet,” and workshops on meditative drawing and classical Indian dance. The action will take place at the Bohdan and Varvara Khanenko National Museum.

“Tagore’s contemporaries said that he was a divine creature combining human traits as well as something that can hardly be found in other people,” chairperson of the East European Development Institute, Ph.D. in History, human rights champion Mridula Ghosh. According to her, to cognize Tagore the humanist, one ought to read his traveling notes as well as his well-known talk with Albert Einstein in 1930.

“Tagore is a humanist who could see the best in every person, every culture. He was able to find the most beautiful, kind, and useful features in every people and said that you should not hate anyone. Once you read his traveling notes, you will love the whole world,” Gosh believes.

However, the project is dedicated not only to the artistic exploration and humanistic ideas of Rabindranath Tagore. On October 2 the whole humanity marks the anniversary of another great humanist, born in the Indian land, Mahatma Gandhi. The project’s organizers decided to combine the celebration of Tagore’s anniversary and Gandhi’s anniversary, and International Day of Non-Violence, in order to remind people once again about the need of peaceful protest, seeking humanistic ideals, and non-violence philosophy in current realities. “Like Gandhi was a great humanist in politics, Tagore was a great humanist in culture,” Mridula Ghosh says. On this occasion, a conference “Rabindranath Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi: humanistic ideals and present-day challenges” will be held within the framework of the project, which will be attended by human rights champions, outstanding workers of culture, politics, and science, representatives of international organizations, and simply caring people.

“It will be very interesting, as not only Tagore and Gandhi were humanists. Things they used to do and popularize, what they were calling to, are the guidelines on humankind’s path. We will discuss the streams and peculiarities of peaceful resistance in current life, its role in reforming any society on its way to democracy and freedom, how humanism and non-violence can give way to a better culture between the members of the society, power and opposition, countries and regions. We will talk about many humanists, from Mahatma Gandhi to Vaclav Havel,” Ghosh commented on the conference. In her opinion, the social discussion of such topics today is extremely actual, because the planet’s population is growing, whereas the amount of natural resources is shrinking, which in its turn leads to conflicts and violence. “Ours is a time when the struggle for resources and survival is taking place, and there is no time to stop and look back, think of human and humane things, because life is very cruel. The fewer resources we have, the higher is the likelihood that the conflicts will be resolved through violence. Therefore the humankind needs to reach mutual understanding more than ever,” Ghosh summarizes.