Biographies

Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 for his collection of mystical lyric poems, Gitanjali. Throughout his long life, Tagore has been a prolific poet, musician, novelist, short story writer, essayist, and playwright. While he is successful in all these genres, it is his lyric poems that have earned him maximum acclaim. At a very early age, Tagore traveled to the Himalayas with his father, Maharshi Debendranath Tagore, who gave his young son lessons in the Upanishads, one of the primary Hindu scriptures. Tagore’s spirituality draws deeply from the Upanishads, and is reminiscent of other great mystic poets Rumi, Kabir, and Kahlil Gibran.

Sramana Mitra

Sramana Mitra is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and strategy consultant. She has founded and run 3 companies, consulted for over 50, and writes a business blog called Sramana Mitra on Strategy. In her rare spare time, she writes short stories, poetry, essays, and screenplays. Rabindranath Tagore has always been a source of inspiration, solace, and resonance for her, and in Golden Raft, she attempts to convey her understanding of Tagore to a broader audience, beyond the boundaries of the Bengali language.

William Carter

Since the early 1960s, when his pictures first appeared in LIFE and other major publications, photographer William Carter’s career has spanned worldwide assignments, four published books, countless exhibitions, and important collections throughout the U.S. and Europe. His book, Ghost Towns of the West, sold 350,000 copies. The J. Paul Getty Museum, which has accessed over 100 Carters, will include him in a 150-year survey of the nude in 2007.

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