We’re like that only.

Sue in Glasgow in the recently roughed over England has this comment to make: “I'm married to a non-Brit and after 10 years here he still looks on in amusement when he spots a voluntarily orderly queue.” http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7391776.stm. [Italics mine.] I have a strong feeling she is married to an immigrant from the Indian sub-continent. In our interaction with the British rulers for nearly a century (1858 -1947), we made their language, their political philosophy, their administrative style, their second most popular sport and their near pathological compulsion to gamble our own but certainly not their voluntarily orderly queue habit, their sense of humour, their love for animals. Of late, Indians have been relieving the British of a lot of “White Man’s Burden” http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~wldciv/world_civ_reader/world_civ_reader_2/kipling.html – Jaguar, British Steel and Celebrity Big Brother to cite just three examples. Rudyard Kipling’s poem was addressed to American Imperialism, you’ll recall. Indians have by now made their presence felt there too. In spite of all this success, India is not shining. India is no Super Star. Certainly not with all those farmer suicides, the neo-Naxals gaining a foothold and spreading their influence, the gap between the haves and have-nots widening. Not even in the wildest narcissistic “Mein Hoon 60+ Mother India, yaney ki asli Bharatmata in a frilly pink taffeta dress” dream, no matter who dreams it and packages it for the cocktail circuit, domestic as well as NRI. Enough already? http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2008/05/how-to-earn-writing-bad-name-almost.html.

60 years after.

Is in-your-face hypocrisy the birthright of free Indians, as much as it was of their forefathers? I’m amused by the ad released by an international bank which claims to have been in India from 1902. It is said to be an open secret that this worthy hires goons to recover debts from lenders, something that the Pathans who were in the same business before Independence used to do all by themselves. The ad is for celebrating “60 years of partnering with independent India”. Good lord! Then there’s a recent article by a “political psychologist’ agonising over why the partition was a violent-infested event. In all of its long arguments, it never even once considers the simple truth that partition was a property dispute after all and, in India as elsewhere in the world, property disputes trigger extreme passions and are more often than not settled with a knife, a chopper and a gun – not to mention hired goons. Then there’s all this hoopla about the ‘progress’ India has made. At whose cost? The poor and the destitute whose meager holding and right to livelihood is trampled upon? The faceless, voiceless, powerless non-citizens that never even come within the orbit of calculations of the planners? http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2006/06/are-you-hungry-tonight.html & http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2007/04/homeless-in-india.html. There was no freedom at midnight, girls and boys. There was only a ‘transfer of power’ to bully, to exploit, to manipulate from the British to the Indian comprador capitalists, as the Indian Troskyist Vinayak Purohit mentions in his memoirs. Purohit is a Socialist who worked with Dr Ram Manohar Lohia. (By the way, his Troskyist pseudonym according to his Sri Lankan colleague, Hector Abhayavardhana, was most probably ‘Pankaj’ or “Pokoz’. Don’t ask me to even guess the reason why. http://www2.cddc.vt.edu/marxists/history/etol/pseud.htm#india.) Coming back to the present, the only Indian worth remembering at this juncture, to my simple way of thinking, is probably the one whose cause Medha Patkar has been championing all these years. Nostalgia must not be a bare-faced lie.

Rooting for Henry. Well done, mate.

Diabolical, I call it. It was a send-up all along. I should’ve guessed it the last time I read The Further Letters of Henry Root, guffawing aloud all the way. Especially when I spotted more than once the wet fish merchant extraordinaire quoting verbatim his daughter Doreen (20). She reads philosophy and sociology at the University of Exeter, you know. What’s more, she spouts logic while watching TV talk shows where the likes of Malcolm Muggeridge hold forth. Stuff like “This isn’t a game of football; it’s a category mistake” – this gem pitched during a telecast of an England versus Ipswich game. William Donaldson is the culprit. He conjured Henry Root out of his cunning knowledge of the British way of life in the Thatcher era. “The eccentric, ribald, hysterical writings of semi-retired wet fish merchant Henry Root have been England's best-kept comic secret since the late 1970s. … William Donaldson adopted the nom de lettre of Mr. Root and began to offer unsolicited advice – bluffly impertinent, robustly cranky, wonderfully lunatic advice – and propose strange but just-barely-plausible schemes to Britain's most prominent individuals. Donaldson's all-too-straight-talking, archly English crackpot elicited from his targeted bigwigs one unthinkingly self-important reply after another …” says the Barnes & Noble website blurb. And, a reader’s review: “His attempts to purchase a peerage from the Conservative Party are a lesson to anyone who would undertake a serious wind-up campaign against a corporate or political entity. And his efforts to get his Grandmother onto the Terry Wogan TV show '... she's no Shirley Bassey, but she is bad…' – hilarious.” N.B.: Actually, it’s Mrs Root’s mother, Enid Potts (79), he’s trying to palm off to Wogan, if memory serves. http://65.54.246.250/cgi-bin/linkrd?_lang=EN&lah=4be3da7ed1e610d93e11149657f87fac&lat=1092373161&hm___action=http%3a%2f%2fsearch%2ebarnesandnoble%2ecom%2fbooksearch%2fisbnInquiry%2easp%3fuserid%3dz0s12qXxaF%26amp%3bisbn%3d1888173009%26amp%3bitm%20