RABINDRANATH TAGORE  

But towering over both men - even today - is Rabindranath Tagore - Shakespeare, Schubert and Modigliani all in one, and the first Asian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 with his collection of poems "Gitanjali." Satyajit Ray maintained that was years ahead of his time, especially in his attitudes towards women. Tagore composed the Indian national anthem (Janna Ganna Manna), was a fine post-modernist painter and song-writer, and an unsurpassed writer of novels and short stories, whose modernity belies their composition a hundred years ago in the delta country that is now Bangladesh.