Rabindranath Tagore and the trees

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was a Bengali poet and philosopher from the Brahmo movement Saraj subsequently converted to Hinduism. He also excelled in the fields of art, theater, music and literature. Precisely because of his skills as a writer he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, becoming the first non-European to receive this recognition. Two of his musical creations are now the national anthems of Bangladesh and India.

His contact with Western civilization, -especially the european- allowed him to establish close ties with major contemporary figures such as Albert Einstein, H. G. Wells, Robert Frost or Thomas Mann, while maintaining a close relationship with his fellow citizen Mahatma Gandhi. The relationship with these historical figures influenced his most famous and significant thought summed up in this sentence to raise awareness of responsible exploitation of natural resources: "Turn a tree into a log and it will burn for you, but it will never bear living flowers and fruit."