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Tagore’s works to be available online

Indrani Dutta

KOLKATA: The completed works of India’s Nobel Laureate poet Rabindranath Tagore will now be available free online along with the notations of songs that he composed.

The project, conceived and implemented by the State Information Technology Department, was launched by Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee earlier this week.

When told about a powerful search engine that will be part of the project, Mr. Bhattacharjee enquired about certain songs of his choice, which were then promptly searched for and displayed on a giant screen put up for the launch.

As part of the 150th birthday celebrations of Gurudev, as Tagore was reverentially called, the notations of all 2,200 songs written and composed by him and numerous letters will be made available online. Currently, some 100 songs and their notations will be available on the site, www.rabindra-rachanabali.nltr.org. State Information Technology Minister Debesh Das said that while the Bengal Engineering and Science University (BESU) helped with making the entire project compatible with UNICODE — the global platform that improves accessibility of the Bengali language for an international viewer — the Indian Institute of Technology-Kharagpur helped create the search engine which will allow the reader to locate a song, line or even a film based on a Tagore novel.

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