Modi pays homage to Tagore on birth anniversary

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Saturday garlanded a bust of Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore on the bard's 154th birth anniversary, at the start of a government programme where he launched three ambitious social security schemes.

Modi was the first to garland Tagore's bust at the Nazrul Manch, followed by West Bengal Governor K.N. Tripathi and Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee.

Union minister Babul Supriyo, a noted singer, rendered Tagore's famous song "Prano bhoriye trisha horiye".

Born on this day, Vaisakha 25, according to the Bengali calendar (May 7, 1861 according to the English calendar), Tagore in 1913 became the first Asian Nobel laureate and the first non-European to win the prize for literature.

He also holds the distinction of having authored the national anthems of two sovereign nations - India and Bangladesh. The bard's rich, diverse and vast literary oeuvre is virtually unmatched in the world. He was also a painter and a composer par excellence.