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..Just stumbled across this thread and wanted to thank lorencino, Greenmountaineer, legerdemer, and AlwaysHungry for their comments, recommendations, and overall encouragement of my poetry writing.
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Always good to have a new poet join the forum, welcome
Ashesh Lit won't let me sign in to comment on your Brexit but what makes you think that Dockworkers, Electricians Postmen and Mechanics hate immigrants? My Husband is an Electrician and he's neither a racist nor a bigot I think you'll find many working men think the same and I'll thank you not to assume otherwise.
It's a crime under the Indian Penal Code ( IPC) to treat any fellow Human as an Untouchable : laws were passed immediately after the Raj was kicked out in '47 to outlaw untouchability ! Subsequent laws like tge Prevention of Atrocities against Dalits & other lower Castes act & Affirmative Action has uplifted the Dalit ( previously Untouchable ) community members and a large number of Dalits are now professionals i.e. Qualified Doctors or Engineers !!
Jai Hind !
Many thanx to Lorencino for his magisterial dissertation on my ' gudnite, annie' !!!
Just stumbled across this thread and wanted to thank lorencino, Greenmountaineer, legerdemer, and AlwaysHungry for their comments, recommendations, and overall encouragement of my poetry writing.
It started with
and ended with
And between those two postings I witness an argument between a dear old friend (and Gerund Whore) and a new voice I don't know but find interesting. And the whole argument makes me sad. So I'm re-posting here a response I posted to Ashesh's poem expressing anger and indignation at “Annie” in the hope that I can heal the rift.
Ashesh9, you know better than I the horrors perpetrated by the British Narco State that paid for its subjugation of Indian with the drugs it forced on the Chinese. And then there is the rest of the Empire upon which the sun never sets, where rapacious plundering and arrogance went hand in hand.
The three hundred years of cruelty in Ireland and the subjugation of the highlanders in Scotland add to the English crimes on the charge sheet and then there is the treatment of the lower classes in the United Kingdom. For the treatment of the lower classes in the home of the Mighty British Imperial thugs stung as badly as the caste system in India.
Then there is the enclosure of the commons and the robbing of their means of subsistence of the English peasants at the dawn of the capitalist economic system. Strangely, the equivalent of the enclosure is happening in India today as farmers lose their land to corporate interests and the despairing act of suicide is rife among Indian farmers—and we are now 4.5 months away from the August 14th when India celebrates its 70th birthday as a modern independent state that was born when the British left in 1947. So it isn't ultimately the British or the Japanese or Pakistan or the Hindus, Moslems or Christians that are the problem it is the global economic system whose teeth have been sharpened by the neoliberal agenda that has ravaged the planet for the past 45 years. The British were not necessary once the capitalist jaggernaut got going and the American state succeeded Britain as the hegemonic state controlling the global economic system. That is why Europe had to loose its colonies—the Americans had a plan for exploitation which could be done without colonies as we have so clearly seen since the end of WWII.
Don't be like the British and substitute Indian Nationalism for British nationalism. Rebel against the very idea of a nationalism that ignores the rights of every single human being on earth to a life of personal dignity and where everyone is allowed to strive to reach their full potential without having to trample over others in order to achieve that.
Don't dismiss Gandhi as relevant to a bygone era only, for his ideas and attitudes are as important today as they were in the struggle against British Imperialism.
some more 'info' on caste system courtesy historian-scholar Sayanton Bhowmick
The fraud of the millennium, however, is that 'inhuman caste system' too was a legacy of the Raj, pivotal to their divide-to-rule strategy. Engineered & presided over by that racist eugenicist Herbert Hope Risley over a period of 4 decades, and later instead of discarding it was etched in stone in our colonial constitution of India
Now this is really interesting. I had always assumed that it pre-dated the Raj but it makes perfect sense when one considers what all European colonialists did as they pillaged the rest of the world. And I must thank you, Ashesh, it seemed There is as much for me to learn today than there was when I fell in love with history 60 years ago—actually there is a lot more to learn now than when I was 9.
Thanks to Lorencino and Greenmountaineer for their insightful comments on my latest poem. The feedback you two provided makes me feel like I accomplished what I set out to do with that piece.