Missionary in Victorian Britain

The role of missionaries was well known in late Victorian Britain. As one contemporary writer remarked, the boys at the St Mary's Redcliffe School in Bristol were asked one day to write an essay on a British colony. One of the boys wrote,
'Africa is a British colony. I will tell you how England makes her colonies. First she gets a missionary; when the missionary has found a specially beautiful and fertile tract of country, he gets all his people round him and says, "Let us pray," and when all the eyes are shut, up goes the British Flag!' The commentator realized that the 'great mass of the people of Nigeria [had] come under the protection of the British flag with their eyes shut'.

Excerpt from 'Ghosts of Empire' by K Kwarteng

White Man's burden

Take up the White Man's burden
Send forth the best ye breed
Go, bind your sons to exile
To wait, in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild
Your new caught sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child

R. Kipling

Wall Street Bail Out Plan

Once upon a time a man appeared in a village and announced to the villagers that he would buy monkeys for $10 each.

The villagers, seeing that there were many monkeys around, went out to the forest and started catching them.

The man bought thousands at $10 and, as supply started to diminish, the villagers stopped their effort. He next announced that he would now buy monkeys at $20 each. This renewed the efforts of the villagers and they started catching monkeys again.

Soon the supply diminished even further and people started going back to their farms. The offer increased to $25 each and the supply of monkeys became so scarce it was an effort to even find a monkey, let alone catch it!

The man now announced that he would buy monkeys at $50 each! However, since he had to go to the city on some business, his assistant would buy on his behalf. In the absence of the man, the assistant told the villagers: "Look at all these monkeys in the big cage that the man has already collected. I will sell them to you at $35 and when the man returns from the city, you can sell them to him for $50 each."

The villagers rounded up all their savings and bought all the monkeys for 700 billion dollars.

They never saw the man or his assistant again, only lots and lots of monkeys!

Now you have a better understanding of how the WALL STREET BAILOUT PLAN WILL WORK !!!!

The Kashmir collage

Excerpts from Chapter 7 of 'Ghosts of Empire' by K Kwarteng

It took the British more than three hundred years to build up their Indian Empire. They dismantled it in just seventy days in 1947.

Nehru, a Kashmiri Brahmin, loved Kashmir like a supremely beautiful woman whose beauty is impersonal and above desire.

Muslim League in Punjab and NWFP are making preparations to enter Kashmir in considerable numbers. Nehru.

Arrangements are in train to send immediately supplies of arms and ammunition to Kashmir. Sardar Patel.

It would be a very good thing if Kashmir could be filled up with armed Muslims to the greatest possible extent, out line here must be that all officers and our police etc. give no support or sympathy to the movement. Abdul Qayum governor NWFP.

The invading Pathans had sensed an opportunity of gaining both religious merit and rich booty.

If there is going to be a plebiscite, then obviously we have to work in such a way as to gain the goodwill of the majority of the population of the State, which chiefly means Muslims. Nehru

Direct action against Kashmir (by the tribal Pashtuns) now would tend to make the Maharajah join Pakistan than otherwise. Abdul Qayum.

Jinnah is conscious of having made a blunder (of sending the Tribals into Kashmir). Cunningham.

A unique situation had arisen, in which both the opposing armies were led by nationals of a third country.

British Government seemed to be divided, with Attlee etc favouring Pakistan and a group led by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Cripps, supporting India.

Whatever errors may have been committed by both sides since the trouble started, the basic cause was the action of the Hindu ruler in suppressing popular agitation in favour of Pakistan. British Indian Gov. memo.

It was disingenuous to say, as was said subsequently, that Kashmir had the option to accede to either Dominion, as the India was divided on communal grounds and the only rational course was for a state if it decided to accede, to assure itself first whether its population would support the accession.

Religious enthusiasm, and the strong identification people have with their religion, was a phenomenon which the Congress party, in its secular liberal way, had never really confronted.

It was Lord Mountbatten's idea to refer the dispute to the UN's, and he urged Nehru to take the step.

On 1 January, India took the issue to Security council. The received wisdom among Indians is that this was a mistake. They have always felt that they have failed to get a fair hearing at the UN.

It has become part of the Indian mythology that Pakistan, in Sir ZafarUllah Khan, had a 'superbly gifted orator', and that Philip Noel-Baker, a member of the British delegation at the UN, was a 'vigorous' supporter of Pakistan.

One enterprising Indian historian has even stated that British support for Pakistan's position was somehow 'compensation' for the recent creation of the state of Israel, after which there was need to placate Muslims world wide.

The simpler explanation was that, on the face of things, the Pakistanis had a powerful case.

The Maharajah was an embarrassment to the Indian case....

• his wisest policy, is to do nothing at all. Nehru writing to Patel.
• he believed UN Security Council will take an adverse decision and that the state will eventually have to accede to Pakistan.
• he felt he could have had better terms from Pakistan.
• he complained to Sardar Patel that the Indian army had been hopeless in its military engagements in the Kashmir dispute.

By 1956, Kashmir had been integrated into India, and Nehru had abandoned his earlier commitment to a plebiscite.

By the end of 2010, Kashmir was one of the most militarized regions in the world, although the aspirations for greater independence remain largely unrealized.

The Kashmir dispute from the very beginning has been a battle of different ideas of what constitutes a state. Pakistan was built as an avowedly Muslim state, whose basis is the religion which, it believed, united the country. India, under its Congress leaders, has always proudly maintained its secular status. According to one writer, the battle of Kashmir is an 'uncompromising struggle of two ways of life, two concepts of political organization, two scales of values, two spiritual attitudes'.

The energy that actually shapes the world springs from emotions - racial pride, leader-worship, religious belief, love of war -- which liberal intellectuals mechanically write off as anachronisms. George Orwell 1941.

It is ironic that revisionist historians have pointed to Indian democracy as the British Empire's greatest legacy. Democracy in Kashmir never existed; the system of Indian princes, was absolute opposite of democracy.

To which Dominion the state should accede -- strictly speaking, according to the Government of India Act, I alone am the authority to decide. Hari Singh.

L'Etat, c'est moi, Louis XIV

The Seyyed

Once there was an itinerant, an improvised old man who squatted in a derilct house and made ends meet singing laments in the street about the Imam Hossein. They called him the Seyyed because he wore an old black turban -- it was an ironic name, for no one believed he actually was a decedent of the Prophet. The Seyyed was known to frequent prostitutes. They would sit on his knee, it was rumoured, and weep for their lost grace. Some suggested that the Seyyed's interest in them was more than pastoral.

I confronted him one day, 'I have been told that you spend time with women of ill repute. Why do you do this?'
'I see women for their purity.'
'You mean they benefit from your status as a cleric,' I offered him an olive branch.
'No, I mean that I benefit from their purity.'
'Where is this purity?' I replied rather crossly.
'Its in their belief that there exists nothing so insignificant as them on the face of earth. They have been so crushed under the weight of sin, there remains no trace of pride in them. And when they say they are sinners and worth no more than the cur which sits on my door, I know they are not like the charlatans we see around us.'
He put a hand on my shoulder, 'They're a step ahead of us. they know they're nothing before God, where as we persist in thinking that we are something.'

The Buddha of suburbia by Hanif Kureishi

I thought about the difference between the interesting people and nice people. And how they can't always be identical. The interesting people you wanted to be with -- their minds were unusual, you saw things freshly with them and all was not deadness and repetition. I longed to know what Eva made of things, what she thought of Jamila, say, and the marriage of Changez. I wanted her opinion. Eva could be snobby, that was obvious, but if I saw something, or heard a piece of music, or visited a place, I wouldn't be content until Eva had made me see it in a certain way. She came at things from an angle; she made connections. Then there were the nice people who weren't interesting, and you didn't want to know what they thought of anything. Like Mum, they were good and meek and deserved more love. But it was the interesting ones, like Eva with her hard, taking edge, who ended up with everything, and in bed with my father.
Page 93.

I hate work

i hate work
i hate working
it stops socializing
it stifles relationships
it is boring and monotonous
it is unrewarding


i hate work
i hate working
it is humiliating
it is slavish
it is unhealthy
it is lame

i hate work
i hate working
work is meant for donkeys
work is meant for geeks
work is meant for retards
no wonder work is prescribed in penitentiaries


i hate work
i hate working
i'd rather be playing
i'd rather be idolizing
i'd rather be chatting
i'd rather be not working


i hate work
i hate working
as I sit here wondering
and looking eagerly to my next toilet break
and then they wonder why so many people smoke?