Benga-screw-you

WORD to this article. Thank you, Economist, for saying it better than I ever could.

I can just hear the speeches about hanging on to Our Glorious Heritage... what bullshit! You know, India had the chance to educate me about OGH, mould my mind, win me over to its way of thinking. What it did was try to fill my head with cheap propaganda, incorrect maps, blind faith in sainted personalities and next to no real understanding of our history or our society.

I had to leave India to find out the meaning of socialism, the diversity of thought and philosophy among the people always lumped together as "freedom fighters", the true extent of cultural and ethnic differences in the subcontinent, even the real boundaries of my own country. I had to read and find out for myself what my history text books should have taught me about the various kingdoms that governed us for centuries, because all the text books ever held were meaningless platitudes about "good kings" and "bad kings". They lied to me all along!

When I was three years old, my mother explained to me what colonisation meant: "The British stole our flag, little Wendelin." So the kids in my neighbourhood, we made up games where the objective was to steal their flag. My dad went to London on a business trip, and I remember thinking he was a traitor. I'm a total Anglophile now - love their movies, their brand of comedy, their old-school noblesse-oblige culture that probably doesn't even exist any more. Sometimes I catch myself thinking, of all the conquerors we might have had, we really lucked out that it was the British. Imagine if it had been the Japanese that took us over, or the Russians, or (horrors) USA! I doubt these others would have made India their home the way the British did, put in judiciaries and transport systems and schools...

Now you're all going to dump on me talking about rights and atrocities and Jallianwallah Bagh and whatever, but this post is about things that don't get said enough, or at all. Every success that India enjoys today in the world marketplace can be traced to systems that the British set up in our country, and it seems it's not cool to acknowledge it.

What's cool, apparantly, is to identify a rich, vibrant, thriving metropolis with an abysmally dull story of questionable authenticity about - of all things - boiled beans. Boiled beans! By what demented standard is that stupid story greater than the real birth of the city of Bangalore - the English cantonment town, its parks, its courts, its roads, its train station?

You "purists" can go stuff yourselves. It's always going to be Bangalore and Bombay and Calcutta and Madras to me when I'm speaking English.