Rabindranath Tagore

“t’s not one of his best-known books, but in my opinion, it is one of his very best. It’s a collection of letters to his niece. And when he wrote these, in most cases, there would have been absolutely no thought of publication, which makes their quality all the more remarkable. You might think of this book as an eastern epistolatory nature philosophy. It contains passages of astounding beauty about the natural world that Tagore was inhabiting, which was basically the river deltas around Calcutta. It also contains his reflections on how these give us a very different sense of what’s important and of how to live than one gets in the city. It’s a sort of Eastern counterpart, as I see it, of Romanticism, and again, very visionary.” Read more...

The Best Eco-Philosophy Books

Rupert Read, Environmentalist

“It’s a masterpiece and hugely read. If you go to any house in Bangladesh or West Bengal you will find a copy of this collection of stories. In it you will discover everything about the lives of Bengali families. It would be very unfair of me to single out one or two stories because it will undermine the others – the collection is so good.” Read more...

The best books on Bangladesh

Syed Ashfaqul Haque, Journalist