From Swedish dinner party to week end in Jaipur

October 29, 2013: I returned from a weekend in Jaipur yesterday. I was there on a pre-Diwali visit to catch up with some of my friends and acquaintances and also do a couple of meetings. Like Delhi, Jaipur too has a culture of nightlong Diwali parties and I attended 11 of them on Saturday and Sunday. Of course, it was very tiring and by the time I finished on both the days it was almost sun up.
 

Before leaving for Jaipur, I attended the dinner party of The Embassy of Sweden on October 25 in Kolkata which set the ball rolling to celebrate the Swedish Government endorsed Nobel Foundation’s series of centenary events in Kolkata and other metros of India to mark Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore’s 100 years of Nobel Prize which was conferred on him in December 1912.

 
The Swedish government has already invited foreign minister Salman Khurshid to attend the Stockholm programme which is a first for any country or laureate.

This is a very rare gesture and a great honour for Tagore and Indians. Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore – the first non-European and Asian to receive the Nobel Prize for literature. The Swedish embassy in India has planned a week-long programme in December 2013 in Indian metros and Stockholm and has collaborated with the Calcutta Metro to establish “Nobel Walls” — walls that will serve as tributes to India’s Nobel laureates — at three city stations with a Tagore connect.

At the dinner party, I met the Swedish envoy to India, Harald Sandberg and his wife and also Mr Tobias Degsell, the curator of the Nobel Museum in Stockholm, who was in in the city on Friday. A large number of eminent Kolkatans were there at the party cutting across all walks of life. I met the different consular corps of Kolkata and others. I am told that a group of 10 choir singers from Lund, Sweden, who have been practising Rabindrasangeet, would be visiting Kolkata and Shantiniketan in December.  This is, I think a major cultural initiative from Sweden and for a befitting reason for Gurudev lives in the hearts and minds of millions across the world. ess bee