150 years -RBT

Rabindranath Tagore 7 May 1861 – 7 August 1941Gurudev,

•  was an Indian Bengali polymath who reshaped his region's literature and music.
•  Author of Gitanjali and its "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse.
•  he became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913.
•  In translation his poetry was viewed as spiritual and mercurial; his seemingly mesmeric personality, flowing hair, and other-worldly dress earned him a prophet-like reputation in the West. His "elegant prose and magical poetry" remain largely unknown outside Bengal.^[4]
• A Pirali Brahmin from Calcutta, Tagore wrote poetry as an eight-year-old.^[9
• ^] At age sixteen, he released his first substantial poems under the pseudonym Bhānusiṃha ("Sun Lion"),
•  which were seized upon by literary authorities as long-lost classics. He graduated to his first short stories and dramas—and the aegis of his birth name—by 1877. As a humanist, universalist internationalist, and strident anti-nationalist he denounced the Raj and advocated independence from Britain. As an exponent of the Bengal Renaissance, he advanced a vast canon that comprised paintings, sketches and doodles, hundreds of texts, and some two thousand songs;
•  his legacy endures also in the institution he founded, Visva-Bharati University.

. Gitanjali (Song Offerings),
Gora (Fair-Faced), and
Ghare-Baire (The Home and the World) are his best-known works, and his verse, short stories, and novels were acclaimed—or panned—for their lyricism, colloquialism, naturalism, and unnatural contemplation.

His compositions were chosen by two nations as national anthems:

• the Republic of India's Jana Gana Mana and Bangladesh's Amar Shonar Bangla; and Sri Lanka's national anthem: Sri Lanka Matha (in Bengali, Apa Sri Lanka, Nama Nama Nama Nama Mata, Sundar Sri Boroni) was also composed by Tagore in Bengali in 1938; later Ananda Samarakoon translated it into Sinhalese language and it was officially adopted as the national anthem of Sri Lanka in 1951.