Wonder of the World

"India is her land - too vast to know,/Outlasting the ploughs that scratch her face,/Or the trains criss-crossing her to and fro." That marks the beginning of William Radice's India's Song. Your columnist met the well-known poet-translator of Tagore in Mumbai briefly during his talk on the minefields and booby-traps that bedevil bilingual encounters.

Radice spoke illuminatingly on Tagore's sense of rhythm and sparing use of commas and some of the wholly unnecessary changes that had been introduced in the first English translation of Tagore's Nobel-Prize-winning collection, Gitanjali. Some of these changes may have risen from fundamental differences in the way life and death is viewed in the East and the West. The western reaction may be summed up as what British philosopher John Gray calls 'death-defying'.

The eastern take has been dubbed as being more fatalistic or death-accepting. Nonetheless, it also flows from a denial or a defiance that is equally profound in its consequences. Yuddhishtira calls our blind acceptance of life in full view of the daily presence of death as the world's greatest wonder ( kim-ascharyam ata param?). The alternative is to face up to final oblivion when one dies and eventual extinction as a species. This is an intolerable vision, particularly for those who have given up religion, Gray argues in The Immortalisation Commission. It also explains why atheists, whether as Victorians or as Communist apparatchiks, embrace science as a means to escape the world seen through Darwin's godless eyes.