Tagore online
The entire oeuvre of Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore is online, in both Bengali and English. “Bichitra” (meaning variety) will provide a full electronic archive of Tagore’s works in manuscript and print, with all significant versions and revisions of each work. It is offered as a tribute to Tagore and a contribution to his own idea of universal dissemination as part of the 150th birth anniversary celebrations of the bard. It has been developed by the universities of Jadavpur and Visva-Bharati, the university that he founded at Santiniketan, West Bengal.
The effort had the support of the union government. The website, launched by President Pranab Mukherjee on Sunday, is the largest database of original texts by a single author.
From Cuba with love
A partnership between Cuba and a private US foundation is working to preserve more of writer Ernest Hemingway’s papers and belongings that he left at his home near Havana when he died.
About 2,000 Hemingway papers and materials are to be digitised. The digital copies will be transferred to Boston’s John F Kennedy Library.
This is the first time anyone in the US has been able to examine these items from the writer’s Cuban estate, Finca Vigia. They include passports showing Hemingway’s travels and letters commenting on such works as “The Old Man and the Sea.”
Murakami’s message
Japanese author and keen runner Haruki Murakami sent a "personal message" to the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing and said he also felt wounded by the attack on his favourite race.
"So, even from far away, I can imagine how devastated and discouraged the people of Boston feel about the tragedy of this year's race," he wrote in a piece for the New Yorker magazine titled: "Boston, From One Citizen Of The World Who Calls Himself A Runner."
