India

Narendra Modi, India's new Prime Minister, and Hindu, said yesterday that the only clear reason for a government to exist is so that it may help the disadvantaged.

"Is there any other reason," he asked.

Rabindranath Tagore, poet, was riding through a village in rural India many years ago when he heard a popular song being played on a radio inside one of the village's poorer huts.

"That music sounds so familiar," Tagore said.

"It should," his companion said, "you wrote the lyrics."

Tagore hadn't known a poem of his had been set to music.

Later, in his autobiography, he recalled how delighted he'd been to hear the music and how thrilled he was to realize that words he'd written were being broadcast across the countryside.