Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) received early recognition as a Bengali poet of genius. His later translations into English of his celebrated Gitanjali brought him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 and international fame. Though best known as a poet, Tagore was a remarkable and prolific short-story writer,novelist,essayist as well as an innovative painter and composer of songs.
The book Glimpses of Bengal consists of letters he wrote between 1886 and 1895,as a manager of his family's estates in eastern Bengal (now in Bangladesh) writing from his houseboat to his niece at home in Calcutta. A whole new world of sights and sounds and feelings had opened before him, and he responded with a characteristic blend of humour and sympathy, spontaneity and contemplativeness.
The letters are selected and translated by Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson.

June 2nd,1892Shelidah
I hate all the demands of good manners. Nowadays I keep repeating that line: 'Much rather would I be an Arab Bedouin!* Oh for a healthy, strong, unfettered barbarity !
I want to quit this creeping senility of mind and body, constantly preoccupied with ancient quibbles over custom and convention, and feel the joy of a vigorous incautious life; to hold confident, carefree, generous ideas and aspirations- for better or for worse; to break free of this perpetual friction between custom and reason, reason and desire, desire and action. If I could escape utterly the bonds of this restricted life, I would storm the four quarters with wave upon wave of exitement, grab a sturdy horse and tear away on it to the very heights of ecstasy. But I am a Bengali, not a Bedouin ! I sit in my corner, moping and worrying and arguing. My mind is like a fish being fried - first this way up, now the other-blistered by the boiling oil on one side, and then on the other.
Enough of this. Since it is impracticable to be uncivilised, I'd better try to be thoroughly civil - why forment a quarrel between the two ?
* A line from Tagore's poem 'Wild Hopes'(Duranta Asha- 1888)