China gets ready to declare love for Tagore

Often, I think I know China well. However, just as often, it occurs to me that I don't really know what I thought I knew. The visions and experiences collected and stored in my mind while I am awake are gone after I have slept. Reasoning and understanding seem to last only for a few hours before becoming illusory: the images and meanings disappear one by one, stolen from me by apparitions and secreted away, never to be returned in their original form. The understandings that I have assiduously acquired are nothing more than banal when bound together to try and shape the oldest continuous civilization on earth. Experience, learning, and proudly possessed knowledge, gained from many sources and from interaction with its people, are taken from everyone who thinks they know China and passed on to others who share them smugly, use them with confidence, reverently broadcast them as Gospel for a few praiseworthy moments. "I know China." Then, time and circumstance mangle them until they are beyond comprehension. These ,too, will be passed on and shared as truth, only to be proved wrong again. The enigma is this: China never changes, but China always changes. Its people beset by burden, affected with melancholy, inured to bewilderment, and suckled on uninterrupted millennia of incalculable hopelessness and sorrow. "There is chaos under heaven and things could not be better", said Mao Zedong. This is the real truth: "China is a big country, inhabited by many Chinese" - Charles De Gaulle. China: don't ask, it is what it is... ,,,,,,,,W.D. Box

04/18/2010

China gets ready to declare love for Tagore

BEIJING: The Chinese seem to be falling in love with Rabindranath Tagore all over again. The Indian Nobel laureate is to be feted through busts, books and films in the country which he visited twice in the 1920s and, amid controversy, left an influence on the literature of the time.

While a statue of the poet is being put up in Shanghai, a major project of translating his complete works in 28 volumes has been undertaken by a government-run publishing house. Besides, Tagore's birth anniversary will be celebrated in the presence of an international audience at the Indian pavilion during the World Expo in Shanghai on May 10.
Read more at The Times of India

Apr 18, 2010 5:54:28 PM | Books, Current Affairs, Film, History

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