Air
The writer Rabindranath Tagore flew in a plane in 1932. He had awoken at three-thirty in the dark morning and was in the air at four. Tagore was travelling in what was then called Persia; at half-past eight the plane reached Bushire. "Now comes an age in which man has lifted the burdens of earth into the air," the writer noted in his travel diary. The achievement of flight did not always promise freedom for Tagore. On the contrary, he felt that the airplane was not in harmony with the wind. It roared like an animal in rage. A plane in flight suggested very strongly that human conflict had been raised from the level of the mundane world into the heavenly skies above.
Tagore had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 for his book of poems, Gitanjali. The thought that the earth lost its hold on man when he flew into the sky was not the result of poetic fancy. A few paragraphs later in his travelogue, Tagore had supplied the context for his thoughts. "A British air force is stationed at Baghdad," he wrote. "Its Christian chaplain informs me that they are engaged in bombing operations on some Sheikh villages."
The fields, ponds and rivers of his childhood bound Tagore to the earth and its beauty. To fly was to lose this contact with the earth. Only one sense remained for the one who was in the air, the sense of sight, and it gave man the disease of aloofness. For Tagore, the man in the plane raining bombs below could not even in good faith ask himself who is kin and who is a stranger: he has put himself in a place from where he is unable to be aware of the difference and to judge accordingly. "The men, women and children done to death there," wrote Tagore, "meet their fate by a decree from the stratosphere of British imperialism — which finds it easy to shower death because of its distance from its individual victims."