The Dead Amongst Us

T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" has quite a number of Sanskrit references, most blatantly with the well-known ending of the repetition of "Shantih, Shantih, Shantih." "Shantih" means as its primary meaning, "peace," but the triplicate usage of it was a standard way to end a prayer in the Vedic and Upanshadic traditions, which Eliot was quite aware, being a man of tradition and talent himself.

In "The Waste Land," there is a line that reminds me of a few things, amongst them, is a picture from National Geographic many years ago of a train station platform in India. I tried to look it up online, as I do not have the magazines currently at my disposal, but it left an indelible image on my mind. It is a busy platform (perhaps in Dehli?), filled with commuters packed into a train, blurred by motion. In the foreground, the corpse of a man is on the ground, passed by without even a single person looking down. Eliot describes the commuters going to work in London,

Unreal City,	60
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.