President Pranab Mukherjee inaugurated the Tagore Centre for the study of culture and civilization and delivered the first Rabindranath Tagore Memorial Lecture at Indian Institute of Advanced Study (IIAS), Shimla here on Friday.
Speaking on the occasion, Mukherjee said: "We must assimilate Tagore's belief that 'wealth is not a precondition of wisdom'. Tagore's ideal is a moral leadership that comes not from power or riches but from ideas and truth."
Mukherjee further said that he believed that the requirement of the times is for intellectuals to engage with moral issues and provide guidance to the people.
The president said that he was troubled by a sense of moral drift that has beset and begun to dominate Indian public lives.
"We do not seem to have exemplars, such as Tagore, today from whom to learn. They say a society needs its exemplars because they serve as the moral compass in uncertain times. He said we are going through troubled times. In such a phase of moral uncertainty, we should go back to great minds such as Tagore to see what direction he has to offer us," Mukherjee said.
