One of my many mental foibles is to turn innocuous numbers into historic dates. So when I read this morning at a most ungodly hour that a section of my site had drawn 1,857 visits this week, my brain cried out: India Uprising …
Or as the history teachers of my schooldays called it, the India Mutiny. Not against the British State, mind, but the all powerful East India Trading Company, depicted brilliantly in the BBC Series (now on Netflix) Taboo – starring the equally brilliant Tom Hardy and Jonathan Pryce.
(Depicted too in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies – shortlisted for the 2008 Booker – and in J.G. Farrell’s The Seige of Krishnapur – which in ’73 actually won it. Sublime reads, both.)
Be that as it may …
(I’m now using this phrase too often not to abbreviate it. Expect future posts to feature – up there with BTL, BTW, FWIW, IMO and the ever popular WTF – BTAIM, pronounced “bee tame”.)
… not 24 hours after my post on Washington’s newfound concern over human rights abuses in Modi’s India, which only the irredeemably cynical would link to New Delhi declining to join the sanctions against Russia by all right thinking members of the ‘international community’ …
The international community
… my weekly e-alert to The Economist landed in my mailbox.
Now as the whole wide world knows, when Washington says “jump”, India’s erstwhile colonial master asks “how high?” And for reasons I’ve been at pains to set out on this site – here for instance – corporate media are systemically incapable of serving truth at the expense of power on matters of non negotiable import to the latter. Unsurprising, then, to see this very British weekly, The Economist – which BTW & FWIW I recently described BTL as having “consistently put out US empire propaganda while speculating whether the Russian President might be put on trial for war crimes” – duly leaping four metres into the air.
WTF?!?
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