Last June in a White House meeting, President Joe Biden gave India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi an extraordinary gift, an autographed first edition copy of the “Collected Poems of Robert Frost,” one of America’s greatest poets.

Modi responded with an equally unique gift, the “Ten Principal Upanishads” by Purohit Swami and William Butler Yeats, the renowned Irish poet whom Biden occasionally refers to and quotes in his speeches.

In India, however, the gift of Frost’s work was seen as a tribute to Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, who was deeply inspired by the poet. Nehru, apart from being a humanist, great statesman and founding father of Indian democracy, was a prodigious writer with a deep sense of history. He loved poetry and nature, and invariably spent his vacations in the awesome beauty of the Himalayan mountains, horseback riding and exploring woods. No wonder he found a kindred soul in Frost, whose meditations on life, nature and human limitations offered profound insights to Nehru.