Accidental Blogger

The video itself is quite amazing. But what really got my attention was not so much the charming dance moves which would make any seventh grader proud, the heart warming locales or the article in the New York Times about Matt Harding, the man who has danced across some seventy or so locations across the globe from Mumbai to Madrid, with a stop in Madagascar in between. No, what spurred me to take a second look or rather strain my ears, is the background music Matt is dancing to. It is  first described in the NYT article merely as New Agey but later revealed to be a poem by Tagore in original Bengali!

However you interpret it, you can’t watch “Dancing” for very long without feeling a little happier. The music (by Gary Schyman, a friend of Mr. Harding’s, and set to a poem by Rabindranath Tagore, sung in Bengali by Palbasha Siddique, a 17-year-old native of Bangladesh now living in Minneapolis) is both catchy and haunting. The backgrounds are often quite beautiful. And there is something sweetly touching and uplifting about the spectacle of all these different nationalities, people of almost every age and color, dancing along with an uninhibited doofus.

I am fluent in Bengali and quite familiar with Tagore. But I could not make out a word in this rendition.  Fortunately, Sepia Mutiny, the south Asian blog which is far more resourceful than I am, posted the English translation and a reader obliged with the original Bengali version in the comments section.

Stream of Life
by Rabindranath Tagore

The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day
runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.

It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth
in numberless blades of grass
and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.

It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth
and of death, in ebb and in flow.

I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life.
And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment.