- Lived:
- 1861–1941 · born and died in the Jorasanko mansion, Calcutta (Kolkata) — but the life happened on a boat on the Padma river, in a school under the trees at Santiniketan, and in more than thirty countries
- Field:
- poetry, music, fiction, painting, education — Bengal's Gurudev, the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature (1913)
- The Big Idea:
- That a country is worth loving and a Nation is worth fearing — and that the surest way to serve the first is to build, teach, sing and argue, not to march in step. He put the idea into some 2,230 songs, two national anthems, novels that anatomize demagogues, and a university with the world for a syllabus.
- In their words:
- "Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high… into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake." (Gitanjali, 1912, his own translation)
- If you remember one thing:
- The man whose songs became the anthems of two nations spent his life warning against nationalism — and renounced a knighthood, argued with Gandhi to his face, and kept the friendship anyway. The patriot who distrusted patriotism is the most interesting patriot of all.