Shamelessly stolen from commentor Shroedinger’s Cat, whose post on India’s 68th Independence Day taught me things I did not know, even though I’ve been a Kiplingophile* since I was tiny and I try to keep up. I like this version of the national anthem — and it’s not as though anyone patriotically bound to “The Star-Spangled Banner” can afford to be snobbish about anthems.
Happy belated birthday, India, and many happy returns!
* Yes, he’s problematic.
Big R
Fighting with the missus tonight. She’s pissed because when I say I didn’t do anything worth reporting all day, I then shut up. She seems to expect me to babble about anything and everything.
I can’t even talk about things I read on the internet because my computer has decided to give up the ghost. I spent all day trying to get the damn thing to work, never mind reading things on the internet. The phone is not the same, dammit.
Omnes Omnibus
@Big R: Yeah well, I have come across the night owl/early bird thing. I guess I will get up earlier if I need to. But one can’t make me like it.
Anne Laurie
@Big R: Science suggests you tell her about something that makes you happy:
Steeplejack (tablet)
@Big R:
Duh, exactly. It’s about connection, not content. So babble.
srv
@Big R: Being married is like being on the internet. It’s like another full-time job.
This man knows no boundaries:
Steeplejack (tablet)
Kipling’s Plain Tales from the Hills is a great book. Very un-Kiplingesque for those who have the cliché view of him.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@Omnes Omnibus:
It has helped us to try and go to bed around the same time, though I usually stay up a bit later reading my Kindle since I’m the night owl. G has grown to like having some time to himself in the morning to drink coffee and read his newsfeeds.
I can get up early, but it has to be for something fun, like early admission to Disneyland. I will never be someone who gets up early for the sake of getting up early.
Omnes Omnibus
@efgoldman: Humid desert?
Steeplejack (tablet)
@Omnes Omnibus:
Forget it, he’s rolling.
Omnes Omnibus
@Steeplejack (tablet): ::nods::
Big R
Having been in Washington in August, humid desert is a perfect signifier.
piratedan
@Omnes Omnibus: yeah, it happens during monsoon season out here in Arizona, we get dew points in the 50’s and 60’s which usually portend some really awesome thunderstorm and lightening shows. But since I grew up in the DC area during my formative youth, I can attest to being sticky all of the time during the summer there while growing up. The air is exceedingly heavy with moisture and you can certainly feel like you’re underwater with any kind of exertion. You hoped it would rain to help reduce the humidity….
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@Big R:
You probably need some equivalent of “how ’bout them [name of sportsball team]?” conversation starters tailored to your mutual interests. if neither my husband nor I has done anything interesting in the course of our day, there’s usually some news or blog story to discuss.
Big R
@Mnemosyne (tablet): I don’t disagree. The problem was that there was also no news or blog story, as I had no tubes all day.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@Big R:
So the answer is, “I was fighting with the router all day. Did I miss anything?”
Anne Laurie
@Big R: The Spousal Unit and I (thirty-five years & counting), despite our very different tastes, have a stockpile of DVDs we both enjoy that we save for just such occasions. For us, that includes gentle Japanese anime (Cardcaptor Sakura, Wolf Children, My Neighbor Totoro) and light British mysteries (New Tricks, Lovejoy, Pie in the Sky). When out of sync/favor with each other, we’ll put on something undemanding that will lighten our spirits even if it doesn’t lead to an immediate kiss-and-make-up resolution…
ETA: Pie in the Sky involves a long-time-married couple — he’s a police detective who loves to cook, she’s an accountant who loves junk food — who are happy despite their differences. The actors (Richard Griffiths & Maggie Steed) are completely convincing in their roles!
Steeplejack (tablet)
@Anne Laurie:
If everyone had to watch Totoro once or twice a year, the world would be a better place.
Steeplejack (tablet)
@Anne Laurie:
Pie in the Sky is a good series. I’ve seen a bunch of random episodes, now thinking of watching in order.
piratedan
@Steeplejack (tablet): agreed, it’s a bit less preachy than Nausicaa although I would offer Kiki’s Delivery Service and Summer Wars as a great alternatives.
Steeplejack (tablet)
@piratedan:
Love Kiki, also Spirited Away, of course.
divF
@Anne Laurie:
Madame divF and I have a similar selection of DVDs. Last night it was Steelyard Blues. Great ensemble cast, and filmed mainly in berkeley and oakland in 1971 or so, which is when and where we first met.
Tomorrow it’s off to visit my MIL in Santa Rosa.
Anne Laurie
@piratedan: The Summer Wars guy was also responsible for Wolf Children — if you haven’t seen it, you should like that, too.
He’s got a new anime due for release here soon, per i09, but now I’m blanking on the title…
Anne Laurie
@Anne Laurie: Found it: The Boy and the Beast. Looks like Funimation has the English-language license…
piratedan
@Anne Laurie: ty, will check it out. My anime viewing has been on a bit of hiatus since Yowamushi Pedal ended. Hope you were able to finally get caught up and seen Gin no Saji (Silver Soon)
Joel Hanes
Steelyard Blues
Hippies! Wack!
“This sounds like a job for …”
Anne Laurie
@Steeplejack (tablet): Kiplings’ semi-autobiographical Baa Baa Black Sheep and Stalky & Co deserve to be more widely read by people interested in How the British Empire Got That Way. They demonstrate as vividly as Dickens how the “splendor” of the Victorian Age rested on child abuse and exploitation even for the “victors” — attempted suicide by a six-year-old, semi-sexual torture of younger boys by public-school seniors, the brutality routinely handed out by schoolmasters and other authorities in the certain conviction that such brutality would later be “handed on” to future generations.
I first read both books when I was in primary school — neither style nor vocabulary are “demanding” — but even then I could understand that Kipling was both explaining what made “the upright British gentleman” and leaving a record for posterity that its eventual, predictable ending would not be an unmixed tragedy.
I’ve heard Kipling called “the last Victorian” but he was just as much an early “rebel colonial”.
Steeplejack (tablet)
@Anne Laurie:
Yup. Kipling started as a journalist, and he saw the messy internal mechanisms of empire. The Plain Tales reflect that, without the later sugarcoating.
DivF
@Joel Hanes: … The eagle (Peter Boyle).
I forgot to mention the soundtrack. Paul Butterfield, mike Bloomfield Nick Gravenities, and the heavenly Maria Muldaur.
piratedan
@Anne Laurie: as much as I liked Kipling, I thought that George MacDonald Faser’s Flashman series was awesome in that he takes the formula that worked for Zelig and Forrest Gump before they were done and gave you a grand tour of the Empire through the eyes of it’s protagonist to reveal and revel in the hypocrisy and attitudes of the age.
Steeplejack (tablet)
@piratedan:
The Flashman books are great, but they are pastiches, so that blunts their “serious” impact a good bit.
DivF
From LGM: RIP Julian Bond.
piratedan
@Steeplejack (tablet): granted, they’re intended to get the historical sweep done regarding earmark events during that timeframe. Although I have to admit that burrowing down through thee footnotes and those references is pretty awesome stuff. Plus Fraser does have a certain style and panache to his characters.
Anne Laurie
@piratedan: The Spousal Unit adores Flashman (who’s based on a character from a Kipling-era “boy’s book”). He’s got at least two copies of every novel — one for himself, and one to loan out to whomever he can force them upon!
piratedan
@Anne Laurie: probably would be an awesome series if done properly by HBO (if they kept the naughty bits in) or History Channel if they had to clean it up.
SectionH
@piratedan: @Anne Laurie:
OMG, I love the Flashman books. Read the first one when it was new. I was living in England – long before they were pubbed in the US.
AL: I hope your SU also has The General Danced At Dawn?
Um, Steeplejack, no, they’re not pastiches. Fraser references Arnold’s book to start, but the stories are completely original and are told in no style but his own.
Pie Happens (opiejeanne)
@Anne Laurie: I bought Lovejoy for my dad (Lovejoy was his grandmother’s maiden name) and at first he was a little put out because the guy’s a bit shady, and then he decided it was great. We have the first two seasons, but haven’t picked up the rest yet. Good stuff.
SectionH
@Big R: Pro-tip: drop “babble” from your word hoard unless it involves brooks.
NotMax
Somebody has to say it.
Person #1: “Do you like Kipling?”
Person #2: “I don’t know; I’ve never kippled.”
Tree With Water
Charles Pierce (Esquire.com) begins a rare Saturday post by noting: “One hesitates to attribute it to the presence of The Man Called Trump in this year’s campaign but, all of a sudden, things seem to have become awfully loud and awfully frank out on the stump”.
I’ll tip my hat to Trump if he’s the first to publicly denounce Bush-Cheney as the war criminals they are … and I do believe the loco sonofabitch just might be impolitic enough to it, too, probably on a whim, at the spur of a moment. Or maybe it could serve as the first political hand grenade he might toss if he announces as a third party candidate. But face it- as it wouldn’t be a news flash to many Americans, it would be acknowledged by most as a politically legitimate charge. It’s a nice thought, anyway…. Goodnight Vienna.
Steeplejack
@SectionH:
Poppycock. Much of the humor in the series stems from the fact that the books are narrated in the style of a Victorian memoir but detail all the heinous and bawdy stuff that never would have made it into the standard Victorian memoir.
As for the stories being “completely original”: much of the humor builds on the premise of Flashman giving the “story behind the story” of famous historical incidents, so to say the stories are completely original is ridiculous.
Don’t get me wrong: I think the Flashman novels are great. And there’s nothing wrong with a good pastiche. But that’s what they are: “an artistic work in a style that imitates that of another work, artist, or period.”
Anne Laurie
@SectionH: Yup, he does, and I think all the other GMcD Fraiser books as well.
I actually read Tom Brown’s School Days, the book Harry Flashman came from, when I was nine or ten, because I’d finished Stalky & Co and my father had an early Pocketbooks paperback copy. (I’d have read Eric, or Little by Little, but in those days the public library didn’t encourage interlibrary loans for children.) TBSD was… not very good, although it may have been the first novel I read with a subtext for which I would later discover the word is “homoerotic”. (Ten years later, I would be reading early ST slash fiction. The march of history.) Extremely popular in its day, but I suspect all its current readers are either Flashman fans or Victorian-lit doctoral candidates desperate for a dissertation topic!
Steeplejack
@NotMax:
Yeah, I was waiting for that. Thanks for not disappointing us.
Skippy-san
Well I for one, differ from Schrodinger’s Cat. Britain laid the foundation for India’s success and they certainly were not ready for independence in 1947. The positive side of the Imperial coin has been overlooked. Certainly if India had been given only home rule and remained part of the Empire-it would have avoided its useless flirtations with both Communism and Socialism, and we would not have the basket case of a nation: Bangladesh existing today.
Niall Ferguson is right when he points out that every place that was under British rule did better than those that were not.
kdaug
Don’t know if this has been posted yet, but it’s brilliant.
I think “Privatize American Oxygen” has legs – likely already in Trump’s toolbox, but some stalwart co-conspirator could get to it first if he’s fast.
SectionH
@Steeplejack: Um, no it’s not poppycock. Sorry. They don’t remotely fit the definition of “pastiche” – they aren’t written in the style of a particular work, or a particular writer, or anything else directly reference-able. They derive vaguely from the “Victorian” style, of course, but that’s Not what “pastiche” actually means. Srsly.
A Pastiche means a work written in a style closely as possible to a particular original work, or a particular author’s works. It can be meant many ways, in parody, in homage, in imitation, legit or not, licensed to have “NEW FAMOUS CHARACTER” stories. But it always has the original writing as a reference.
Pastiche also doesn’t mean an author taking historical events and characters and weaving them into an original narrative about those events.
Your definition of pastiche is way too broad. Imitating another artist, yes. Style, wut? Period, absolutely not.
ETA: at least we agree about the actual books.
sharl
@Skippy-san: In the London Review of Book, a 2011 review by Indian scholar Pankaj Mishra took Niall Ferguson to task for the latter’s adoring view of the British Empire and its aftermath.
As befitting an opportunity that clearly invited vigorous philosophical discourse, Ferguson took up that challenge and…
No wait, that’s not what happened. Instead, Ferguson threatened legal action (and with that, the opportunity to experience the Streisand Effect up-close-and-personal):
Why on earth is the history man being quite so hysterical? Niall Ferguson’s resort to legal threats over a bad book review smacks on bullying, not intellectual rigour
I couldn’t find out whether Ferguson actually made good on his threat, though I suspect not – I’m pretty sure it would have been BIG news if he had sued. An “intellectual” whose first response is hurt feelings and the issuance of legal threats is someone who loses my interest; he’s more Trump than Socrates IMO.
SectionH
@Anne Laurie:
I’m sorry. Yes, I know from Tom Brown’s School Days. you seem to have survived. I read the requisite Arnold (thank FSM the poetry isn’t that bad), and the rest, but I spent a great deal of my graduate school energy avoiding Victorian novels – and 19th c. American novels too – as much as I could – I wanted to study Anglo-Saxon – which is why I ended up a graphic designer (it’s like an artist without the pretension, but better income).
But my absolutely favorite author ever, well co-favorite, is Plum. And Tom Brown comes near enough to Plum’s early stuff that, well, there you go.
Another Holocene Human
@sharl: Niall Ferguson is a gutter racist who impresses Americans for some damn reason. (Accent. It’s the accent.)
Zinsky
India is a hot (literally) mess of a country. In fact, it’s probably twenty or more countries glommed together, with at least that many disparate languages, dialects, ethnic strains, etc. The Indian society is still deeply scarred by the caste system, which is fundamentally at odds with the American concepts of upward mobility, free interaction between races, etc. India has only become “hot” from an economic prospective because of pirates like Mitt Romney, who see an opportunity to exploit India’s relatively well-educated, yet poorly paid workers.
Cervantes
It could be that being a Kiplingophile keeps one from understanding India.
(And yes, I do see the asterisk.)
RonzoniRigatoni
Having plodded through “The Raj Quartet” last year, followed by several British TV Detective Series (e.g. “Inspector Morse”), I was struck by the similarities ‘twixt the Indian caste system and the British class system. Of course, we have our own version of both here as well. It apparently will always be so, everywhere, alas. George McDonald Fraser tho’ was a historian, as well as a great read. Flashy remains my favorite fictional character. (and I still have the ol’ man’s soft cover of “Tom Brown’s School Days,” published back pre-1920)
Cain
The other thing is that if you recall the bank scandal in switzerland where banks were forced to reveal the wealth that was stored, it turns out that a lot of India’s rich has been storing billions worth of dollars in swiss bank accounts. Just sitting there, not being spent. These guys hoard money and won’t invest in India at all. What do they spend it on? Ostentatious bullshit like big weddings, tall towers, and what not. India’s wealthy class are just as bad as the British and are the natural inheritors of their assholeness. They don’t pay a lick of taxes just like India’s poor. The entire country is run by the middle class. It is the shittiest situation. Greed, corruption, population is holding back an ancient civilization. Until we can get over the collective disenfranchisement of the people, this is not going to get better.
schrodinger's cat
Thanks Anne Laurie for highlighting my post!
schrodinger's cat
@Zinsky: So you are criticizing India for being a diverse nation? Is your ideal country then a monoculture where everyone looks the same and speaks the same language.
There have been entire sections of population in the United States which have been systematically kept away from upward mobility. Or have you completely forgotten about slavery and what happened to the Native Americans.
India has been “hot” since before Romney was even born. Alexander the Great, came to plunder India of its riches. Remember Columbus? He wanted to go to India and landed in America by mistake. That’s why Native Americans were known as Indians. The French, the Dutch and the Portuguese were in India too, its just that the British kicked their ass militarily.
As far as outsourcing goes it is a tiny fraction of India’s overall GDP, less than 10% of its GDP in 2012.
Oatler.
@sharl: I read a book called “Delusions And Discoveries” by Benita Perry that discusses white colonial fiction during the Raj. Sure gives you an idea where Lovecraft got his racism from (the guy grew up in his aunt’s old Rhode Island house w/library).
“It was lovely and hideous, like the faces of the dancing girls, who were not beautiful but transformed by that same, sinister, smothered passion; it intoxicated the senses and benumbed the mind; the order of things, purity, truth, mercy, were thrown into a wild, shoreless sea..”
Jeez go rub one out in the john, Sahib.
schrodinger's cat
@Skippy-san: I say that India would have done better without the benevolent and enlightened British rule which strip mined India of its assets for well over 200 years. I do agree that all said and done the British were better colonial masters than the other European powers.
Its like having a choice between being sick with cholera or small pox. Yeah cholera is marginally better.
Cervantes
@Zinsky:
Those are nice “concepts,” aren’t they?
Cervantes
@Skippy-san:
Could you elaborate your understanding of colonialism? I’m curious. Was India “ready for independence” in, say, 1498? How about in 1756? Were large areas of the world just waiting for the “white man” to shoulder his burden in the common interest of humanity?
Assuming for just a moment that the truth of this nonsensical Fergusonian bon mot can be demonstrated, what do you think its implications are?
What do you say to the assertion that slavery was justified because African-Americans now have a higher per capita income and standard of living than Africans in various parts of Africa?
schrodinger's cat
@Skippy-san:
You have it backwards. Curzon, who was the Indian viceroy at the turn of the last century, said this
Post WWII history shows that Curzon was right. India did not need the British. India is the cradle of civilization, home to some of the oldest languages and religions in the world. Britain needed India, its riches and its manpower to fight the various wars it needed to support its global empire.
RonzoniRigatoni
Well, now, given India’s huge diversity, ethnically, linguistically, etc., the Brits at least gave them a common language.
schrodinger's cat
@RonzoniRigatoni: Also tea and cricket! However it was an expensive bargain for India.
Original Lee
@piratedan: Got hooked on Hunter x Hunter and am waiting for Netflix to grant us access to the other half of the series.
J R in WV
@SectionH:
This.
A Pastiche is a Sherlock Holmes story not by Doyle, a Spenser novel not by Robert B Parker, a Nero Wolfe novel not by Rex Stout. Sonnets not by Wm Shakespeare, etc, etc,
Flashman was a great character, perhaps modeled after Sir Richard Burton, the famous British explorer who wrote/translated 1001 Arabian Nights, smuggled himself into Mecca, etc.
He wrote very racy cultural descriptions of the places he had visited, which his very Victorian wife burned after his death, depriving the world of his interesting insights into the Harem, African mating habits, etc.
Uncle Cosmo
The one thing Britain did during the Raj that set it (a bit) above other nations was to create an Indian civil service open to the indigenous population. When the Brits left there was a cadre that had some familiarity with the trials & travails of civil administration. OTOH the French filled out its colonial apparatus with its own population, & as a result the locals who eventually took charge had (at best) heads full of sociopolitical theory but precious little experience in actual governance.
At least that’s how I heard it…
Cervantes
@Uncle Cosmo:
To some degree, yes.
Here’s a complication, one out of many: In the early 1880s, a bill failed to become law that would have given Indian judges jurisdiction to hear criminal cases involving British defendants.
The Indian National Congress, the oldest indigenous political party in India, was founded as a reaction.
schrodinger's cat
@Uncle Cosmo: You read it right, you are thinking about ICS or the Indian Civil Service. The British did not do it out of altruism, the English simply did not have enough manpower to effectively administer the entire country. There was a cadre of brown sahibs who did that for them. They were usually upper caste Indian men who studied English,even went to England if they could afford it. Most of India’s freedom fighters came from this social class.
Paul in KY
Best wishes on anniversary of Indian independence. Would think that some form of reparations were in order for Raj.