Pop toast.

Okay, okay. I’m sure most of you already seen this video but ever wonder who sang the song? I thought it was vaguely familiar and guess I wasn’t wrong… I thought the song is sung in Bangla and turns out it is! The lyrics are from a poem called “Stream of Life” by the Bengali Shakespeare Rabindranth Tagore, a Nobel prize winner and a literary influence for the Bangladesh Liberation War in the 1970’s for you history junkies out there. The voice behind it is a seventeen year old Palbasha Siddique, an American Bangladeshi native in Minneapolis.

Praan (“Life”) – Garry Schyman

Bangla Romanized lyrics

Bhulbona ar shohojete
Shei praan e mon uthbe mete
Mrittu majhe dhaka ache
je ontohin praan

Bojre tomar baje bashi
She ki shohoj gaan
Shei shurete jagbo ami
(Repeat 3X)

Shei jhor jeno shoi anonde
Chittobinar taare
Shotto-shundu dosh digonto
Nachao je jhonkare!

Bojre tomar baje bashi
She ki shohoj gaan
Shei shurete jagbo ami
(Repeat 3X)

English Translation
Stream of Life
by Rabindranath Tagore

The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day
runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.

It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth
in numberless blades of grass
and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.

It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth
and of death, in ebb and in flow.

I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life.
And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment.