Tagore replied that music of different countries has a common psychological foundation, and so is the case for literature, though he agreed that a 'national music' should exist. The conversation veered towards music as Wells told Tagore how wonderful it would have been if the Bengali bard’s poems could be understood by all people at the same time, without losing much of their essence in translation.

Tagore and Wells also talked about “a tendency to have one common language for humanity”, and seemed to agree that a common language could be forced upon people “whether we like it or not”.ĪLSO READ | 10 Rabindranath Tagore Quotes That Immortalise The Polymath ‘Music Is The Most International Thing’ He was firm in his opinion that the individual has suffered because civilisation split up into separate units and did not merge into a “universal whole”.

Wells replied: “We are gradually thinking now of one human civilization on the foundation of which individualities will have great chance of fulfillment.” “Let the mind be universal”, Tagore said, but added that there was no need for the individual to be “sacrificed”. While Tagore believed the modern civilisation was trying to make the world uniform, with cities in the East “wearing big masks” that represented “no country in particular”, Wells was of the view that this was an indication that the world was reaching out for a new human order that refused to be localised. The meeting took place in June 1930 when the Indian poet was visiting Geneva, and their conversation was documented in A Tagore Reader, edited by Amiya Chakravarty. Wells, who believed there should be one uniform human civilisation, once met Indian polymath and thinker Rabindranath Tagore and had a long conversation on the evolution of civilisation. His experiences may have shaped his socialist views, and his passionate concern for human beings and society showed through his writings that talked about an ideal, peaceful world with no division between the classes. The atomic bomb (The World Set Free, 1914) has since become a reality, unfortunately, and humanity surely hopes his time machine (The Time Machine, 1895) will materialise one day.īorn on September 21, 1866, in Bromley, England, HG Wells saw his family struggle financially as he grew up. The prolific writer, known mostly for his science fiction and comic realism, left a range of technological predictions in his works.

New Delhi: Author, polymath, historian, prophet - Herbert George Wells was all of these and much more.

Selected stories of hg wells