Google shows Rishi Aurobindo instead of Rabindranath Tagore on birth anniversary

New Delhi: As the nation is observing the 157th birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore, search engine Google is throwing up a very strange result. The top search result for "India's national poet" is showing a photograph of Shri Aurobindo, a yogi, philosopher and nationalist, who also happened to be a poet.

The other similarities between the two men -- they both were from Bengal and lived around the same time. Not only this, they both had long, flowing beards.

Clicking onto Shri Aurobindo's image leads to more of his pictures. On the pages, he is identified by his name.

Google's error has been largely discussed and talked about on social media, especially in Bengal, where Rabindranath Tagore's birth anniversary is celebrated with a fervour that borders on the religious.

An NDTV report said, a number of jokes are doing the rounds on WhatsApp. In one of these, a Tagore acolyte has paraphrased the biblical line, "Forgive them, for they know not what they do" and simply written in Bengali... "eder khoma kore dio" (please forgive them).

Born in Kolkata in 1861, Rabindranath Tagore had never been officially designated India's national poet. But the Nobel laureate reshaped Bengal's literature, music and art and is regarded as one of the outstanding creative figures of the age.

Tagore's Gitanjali (song offerings), written in 1912 for which he received the Nobel Prize for literature, has been translated into more than a dozen European languages.

The poet was also awarded a knighthood in 1915, but he rejected it four years later in protest against the massacre at Punjab's Jallianwallah Bagh, during which British trooped led by General Dyer had opened fire on thousands of unarmed Indians.