Guwahati: Rabindranath Tagore's poem 'Deeno Daan' has been doing the rounds on social media recently, right around the time of the groundbreaking ceremony of the proposed Ram Mandir in Ayodhya.
It was first shared on Facebook by Banojyotsna Lahiri, an alumna of Presidency University and JNU. She shared an explanation along with it, stating how the poem was written exactly 120 years ago according to the Bengali calendar.
The poem is about a sage who tells a king that the temple which has been built with "two million gold coins" does not have a God inside. Upon hearing this, the king gets angry, calls him an atheist, and asks if such a grand temple could be empty. The sage replies that it isn't empty but in fact filled with the king's pride.
The sage then reminds the king that it was wrong on his part to spend the riches in building a temple in the same year when the people of his kingdom were struck by a calamity and had nothing for themselves.
On August 5, Prime Minister Narendra Modi established a 40 kg silver brick for the start of the construction. The temple construction is expected to cost around Rs 300 crore.
The Ram Mandir celebrations were on at a time when the Covid-19 pandemic situation in India has reached its worst phase, with over 50,000 cases being reported on a daily basis. The deaths from Covid-19 on the same day crossed the 40,000 mark; this is the fifth-highest in the world.