ABSTRACT
Rabindranath Tagore was a great poet and profound thinker. He was born in Calcutta on 6 May 1861. He had his own original ideas about education which led him to establish an educational institution at Shantiniketan in December 1901 following the model of forest hermitages of ancient India. He was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1913 in recognition of his outstanding literary activities. Crucially, Tagore's poems, short stories and novels, as well as books and essays, exhibit his love and concern for nature, for land, sea, air, plants and animals that constitute the 'environment' around people. The surplus in man which, according to Tagore, constitutes his spiritual make up, overflows pragmatic need, the stage of pure utility, and 'extends beyond the reservation plots of daily life'. This surplus indicates an aspect of human being, 'a fund of emotional energy' which is 'useless' or 'superfluous' in sense that it is not regulated by self-interest, by any moral or other practical ends.
