This book is about Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), India's poet par excellence, the first unit of whose name, ‘Ravi’, signifies the Hindu sun god; and who in narcissistic love of that name consciously and endlessly punned on it from the earliest days of his creative genius to the final days of its maturation. Fittingly, he is also the most Apollonian of the creative geniuses India has produced. It would constitute the ultimate sin for a Bengali, or for that matter an Indian, to even faintly suggest that his conception of the universe could be, what Sudipta Kaviraj said about Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay in his famous book, The Unhappy Consciousness, namely, “tense, disorderly, nocturnal, swept by incomprehensible disorders”. Many would simply not understand it. As Bishnu De says it in his verse, in my poor translation, about the synonymousness of the poet's first name with sun, and its signification for us of the blinding and revealing light of his genius: