Easter brings to mind the resurrection of Jesus. But Easter was celebrated even before Jesus. It was a spring festival. Many states in India have similar festivals. Vishu in Kerala and Bihu in Assam are examples. In Western literary traditions, winter symbolises death and spring is the harbinger of new life. “April is the cruellest month,” begins T S Eliot’s classical poem, The Waste Land . The Eliotean waste land is a metaphor for the aridity of modern life. In such a world there is only perpetual winter, winter that keeps us warm. Our life is no better than death, implies Eliot. We live death-in-life existence clutching lifeless roots in “this stony rubbish”. Easter, or resurrection as it has come to mean today, is a celebration of new life. Spring comes with a new life that stirs up the dull roots that lay beneath the snow in winter, to use the Eliotean metaphor. The whole Christian concept of the Holy Week which starts a week before Easter Sunday is
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