Rabindranth Tagore Project launched in London

LONDON: On Rabindranth Tagore's 155th birth anniversary, a new crowd-sourced initiative to make his works accessible worldwide has been launched here in the UK.

'The Tagore Project' is a Wikipedia style attempt, aimed at global mobilisation of Tagore fans through a web platform (http://thetagoreproject.org) and a mobile app.

The brainchild of Indian IT professional Subhanjan Sarkar, the project is designed so that anyone with knowledge of Bengali can choose a portion of his works and submit recordings to the open audio library, including his 2,200 songs.

"The Tagore Project is based in the Wikipedia model; nothing like this exists anywhere for any artiste. We are not collecting any donations but partnering with the Akshay Patra Foundation," Sarkar said at a launch event held at the Nehru Centre in London earlier this week.

The project is a way to preserve Tagore's works as well as make them available to the world, for free.

In 1913, Tagore became the first Indian and first non- European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

His works have been translated in over a dozen languages all over the world.

This year also marks Tagore's 155th birth anniversary.