Cyclic Memories - 5 - Swadeshi Tissue

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"India is not an important country, but perhaps the most important country for the future of the world...All convergent influences of the world run through this society: Hindu, Moslem, Christian, secular, Stalinist, liberal, Maoist, democratic socialist, Gandhian. There is not a thought that is being thought in the West or East which is not active in some Indian mind."

.....E. P. Thompson

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Cho Chweet!!!

Let us pat ourselves on our backs for getting such a glorious certificate from a British Marxist Sahib whose neo-capitalists, who employed their own preteens to sweep the chimneys of their sooty factories with devastating consequences to them (the kids) including scrotal cancer, have for more than two centuries mercilessly sucked the blood of this same India and let off only when they could longer latch on to it...like a leech that was sprinkled with salt by that 'half-naked fakir'...long sentence that...like 'marriage' ;-)

Ok, I am ranting...

I can recall only 4 machines and instruments that I have seen in my Village 70 years ago that haven't changed in their materials or technology till today:

1. Bicycle

2. Sewing Machine

3. Clinical Thermometer

4. Stethoscope

But none of these was allowed to be manufactured in India when I was born in 1943. They were all 'Made in England' and exported to British India using materials that were stolen and exported from British India for the sole benefit of the British money-bags and, incidentally, their workers. That is how British Colonialism worked wherever they went...and they boasted that the "Sun never sets on the British Empire" meaning that there was always a piece of inhabited land around the globe where the Union Jack flew and it is daytime. Someone retorted that this was because God didn't trust the British in the dark. Their 'double-exporting trick' is insidious and they were the first in the history to invent it. It was like Ishani's Sharing:

 http://gpsastry.blogspot.in/2012/04/share-shore-shorn.html

Give it to that fakir who finds mention in the blessed quote above...you may hate him as much as your neighbor, but he was the first to understand the nature of colonial roguery and devise a non-violent way to beat it..."Boycott all goods imported by the British to fill their own pockets"...and my grandpa bought a charkha after his retirement ;-)





http://www.treehugger.com/renewable-energy/echoes-of-gandhi-in-electricity-generating-spinning-wheel-a-micro-power-plant-for-the-poor.html

The tables have now turned with the opening up of this country's wretched economy.

Let me explain:

1. The word 'resource': When we were young it meant something like coal or iron or at best wits. When I was a teen I heard of our 'Ministry of Education' (I got a scholarship from them). After Lal Bahdur Shastri died in harness and that Building at New Delhi got to be called 'Shastri Bhavan', it came to be known as 'Ministry of Education & Youth Welfare'. Towards the end of my stay at IIT KGP it came to be called 'Ministry of Human Resource Development'...MHRD...like MSMA (Member, Society of Mutual Admiration).

Hmm! 'Human Resources'? They mean you & me, Boss!

I hear nowadays, in the IT Industry, 'resources' don't refer to their laptops and work-stations and gizmos but their 'software developers'...'s' and 'd' in the lower case befitting their anonymous labels. 

And India leads in that resource...Edwin Taylor of MIT in his 70s called them our software-plantation workers...cotton-pickers...

Yet the West gets jittery whenever they hear the word 'Bangalore' or even 'Hyderabad'. And lose their sleep...from Obamajee to the Dotbuster and his progeny.

2. The common man's (imported) Raleigh bicycle was selling at Rs 250 then...that was my HM Father's Monthly Pay.  

After the Brits left and our economy got liberated, Hero Cycles manufactured in Ludhiana became the world's largest selling bicycle...I quote wiki...

When I last bought my bare Hero Jet in 2000, it cost me Rs 500 and my pay then was about Rs 40,000, give or take a thousand. That means while my Father had to spend his entire monthly income to buy just one bicycle, I could have bought, say, 80 of them.

And both my Father and I have always been utterly-butterly middle-class.

See why I rant against British Colonialism although I love English and Englishmen and taught and thought in English...some shameless hypocrisy there!!!


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