Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet was born near Mount Lebanon . His poetry has been translated into more than twenty languages. Kahlil Gibran was also an Artist and Painter, and his drawings and paintings have been exhibited in many world capitals. His book The Prophet contains his mystical drawings and paintings. Some one has said : ’’ I do not think that the East has spoken with so beautiful a voice since the Gitanjali of Rabindranath Tagore as in The Prophet of Kahlil Gibran,
who is artist as well as poet. He continues: ’’ I have not seen for years a book more beautiful in its thought, and when reading it I understand better than ever before what Socrates meant in the Banquet when he spoke of the beauty of thought which exercises a deeper enchantment than the beauty of form....I could quote from every page, and from every page I could find some beautiful and liberating thought.’’ So do I. Whenever I get depressed I read The Prophet.
Kahlil Gibran is a Sage and a Rebel too. He has said: ’’ What I say now with one heart will be said tomorrow with many hearts’’. His mother said of him, ’’ My son is outside of psychology, ’’ and in this perspective observation lay the essence of Gibran . A pet and a mystic, his voice had the ring and the potency of an oracle. Gibran’s utterances came out of inner ripeness, by direct apprehension of truth, which defies intellectual security and analyses.
In 1983, I had a bereavement. I lost my brilliant twenty-year old son Aseem in a ghastly road accident in Orissa. I was always crying and so also my wife. We found solace in the following words of Kahlil Gibran: ’’ And if you can not but weep when your soul summons you to the prayer, she should spur you again and again, though weeping, until you shall come laughing.’’ In the same vein he has said: ’’ Some of you say ’Joy is greater than sorrow’, and others say, ’ Nay, sorrow is greater.’ But I say unto you, they are inseparable. Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.’’
My Anthem or Mantra in life is : Work is Love made Visible.