Abu Sayeed Ayyub (Bengali language: আবু সয়ীদ আইয়ুব; 1906-1982) was an Indian philosopher, teacher, literary critic and writer in both Bengali and English. Though born into a traditional, Urdu-speaking, Muslim family in Calcutta (Kolkata), he was so deeply captivated in his early teenage by the poems of the Indian Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore that he taught himself Bengali so as to appreciate Tagore better. Later, when he started to write, it was mostly in his adopted language, Bengali. During the initial part of his writing career, Ayyub wrote on aesthetics, religion and socialism. However, it was his philosophical and scientific analysis of creative literature - in particular the poetry and the drama of Tagore - that finally brought him wide recognition as "one of the most serious