If you look like a ruler, the people will treat you like a ruler ... An enormous bluff. ibid.
Indian troops rose up and killed their own officers. ibid.
After four and a half months British relief forces arrived ... The pretence of British rule had been shattered; the bluff called. ibid.
The earliest Britons in India were traders ... With wealth came power: the East India Company gradually took control of huge swathes of the land. ibid.
It was the greed of Robert Clive and men like him that built Britain an empire. ibid.
At one time chintz made up three quarters of India’s exports. ibid.
They [India] would demand and eventually get independence in 1947. ibid.
14th August 1947: the English Empire will release its grip on its most prized possession: India. A vast nation of some four hundred million people. Days that Shook the World: End of the British Empire, BBC 2003
Just over four hundred years ago a group of London merchants arrived here on the India coast hoping to do some peaceful trading ... and built from scratch a commercial enterprise to export goods to Britain ... and by accident created one of the most powerful empires in history. Dan Snow, The Birth of Empire: The East India Company I, BBC 2014
The greatest company the world has ever known. ibid.
Determined to reassert supremacy, Clive recaptured Calcutta. ibid.
The nabobs represented the East India Company at its most venal and corrupt. ibid.
It’s estimated that between two million and ten million died: a salutary lesson in the dangers of unchecked corporate power. ibid.
Massive government bail-out ... it was decided that the East India Company was too big to fail. ibid.
It was nothing less than the birth of empire. ibid.
Nepotism and corruption, and eventually a chilling story of drug running and famine. Dan Snow, The Birth of Empire: The East India Company II
The emerging struggle between Trade and Empire. ibid.
There was now nothing else standing in the way of total British domination in the sub-continent. ibid.
European customs and manners were emphasised. A huge gulf was opening up between the British governing elite and the Indian subjects. ibid.
A government-backed trade in drugs. ibid.
The Indian Mutiny – but to the Indians it was the first war of independence. ibid.
The East India Company made some devastating mistakes. ibid.
They never were conventional parents. Here they are doing what they loved most of all: playing Shakespeare in the land they loved most of all – India. Felicity Kendal’s Indian Shakespeare Quest ***** BBC 2012
This was once Calcutta’s theatre land. ibid.
We travelled far and wide playing Shakespeare to Indian audiences. ibid.
English became the official language of Indian administration. ibid.
Before long Indians weren’t only studying Shakespeare they were performing him too, and that’s when the plays really catch fire. ibid.
By the 1850s Shakespeare had become an icon for educated Indians. ibid.
My father’s passion and sheer bloody-mindedness kept Shakespeareana’s show on the road well into the 1970s. ibid.
My father believed Shakespeare and India were a natural fit. ibid.
In north-east India they are mining coal so fast that fires are burning out of control underground. 70% of India’s electricity comes from coal. Environmentalists including many in India say the country cannot develop on coal the way the West did. What the Green Movement Got Wrong, Channel 4 2010
India can live without nuclear weapons. That’s our dream, and it should be the dream of the US also. A P J Abdul Kalam
August 15th 1947 New Delhi: India is born in blood. More than a million people die in the ethnic and religious disturbances which accompany the creation of the separate states of India and Pakistan. Infamous Assassinations: Indira Gandhi & Rajiv Gandhi: India 1984/89
But at home Indira antagonizes many people by building up the power of central government and cutting across the rights of individual states. ibid.
June 1975 Jalalabad: after a narrow election victory the State Supreme Court finds Indira guilty of election fraud and orders that she be removed from office. ibid.
On June 23th 1980 Sanjay, her youngest son and political heir apparent, is killed while stunt-flying an aircraft. ibid.
October 31st 1984 New Delhi ... 9.18: moments later as she passes him Beant Singh fires three shots into her body. As she collapses, Satwant Singh empties his Sten sub-machine-gun into her. Neither man attempts to escape. ibid.
Sri Lanka had become independent from Britain in 1948. And the Sinhalese quickly increases discrimination against the Tamils. ibid.
But over the next two years it becomes increasingly obvious that the Sinhalese-dominated government would prefer a military solution. It imposes a naval blockade upon the Tamil stronghold, the Jaffna Peninsula, which leads to serious food shortages and steps up its military assaults. ibid.
Rajiv’s image as Mr Clean is tainted by scandal. ibid.
May 21st 1991 Sriperumbudur: suddenly an explosion rips the crowd apart. The explosion kills Rajiv and fourteen other people. ibid.
England has to fulfil a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating – the annihilation of old Asiatic society, and the laying the material foundations of Western society in Asia. Karl Marx
The future Vice Roy must ... not be guided by the snobbish and vulgar, over-bearing and offensive behaviour of our Civil and Political Agents, if we are to go on peaceably and happily in India ... not trying to trample on the people and continuously reminding them and making them feel they are a conquered people. Queen Victoria, letter to Lord Salisbury 27th May 1898
It’s a hot and humid July in 2001. And something very strange has happened on planet Earth. Here is southern India many villages are the focus of a possible alien invasion. It starts with rain. Red rain. The local people were horrified. Horizon: We are the Aliens? re 2001 downfall of red rain southern India, BBC 2006
The particles weren’t dust at all. They were alive. But what was this mysterious life-form? There was only one way to find out: take a look at the DNA. The results came back: there was no DNA. It was life but not as we know it. ibid.
The discovery of DNA in the red rain cells has been corroborated by another lab. Yet this recent finding has done nothing to dent Chandra’s unshakable belief that the red rain is extraterrestrial. He believes that all life in the cosmos will probably share various types of DNA. ibid.
On the other side of the planet meteor showers bring another strange rain. July 2001 India: people hear an explosion in the sky. Then as it does every year the summer monsoon brings heavy rainfall in southern India. When the rain comes it is blood-red. Paranatural s1e3: Blood Rain and Star Jelly
Civilizations have arisen in other parts of the world. In ancient and modern times, wonderful ideas have been carried forward from one race to another ... But mark you, my friends, it has been always with the blast of war trumpets and the march of embattled cohorts. Each idea had to be soaked in a deluge of blood ... Each word of power had to be followed by the groans of millions, by the wails of orphans, by the tears of widows. This, many other nations have taught; but India for thousands of years peacefully existed. Here activity prevailed when even Greece did not exist ... Even earlier, when history has no record, and tradition dares not peer into the gloom of that intense past, even from until now, ideas after ideas have marched out from her, but every word has been spoken with a blessing behind it and peace before it. We, of all nations of the world, have never been a conquering race, and that blessing is on our head, and therefore we live! Swami Vivekananda
India was the mother of our race and Sanskrit the mother of Europe’s languages. She was the mother of our philosophy, mother through the Arabs, of much of our mathematics, mother through Buddha, of the ideals embodied in Christianity, mother through village communities of self-government and democracy. Mother India is in many ways the mother of us all. Will Durant
The most spectacular terror attack since 9/11 was underway. Frontline: A Perfect Terrorist, PBS 2011
Civilians, Indians and westerners were methodically gunned down. With guns, grenades and military precision ten men were laying siege to the port city of Mumbai. 166 people were killed. ibid.
For two years an undercover operative had been casing the city ... David Coleman Headley. He had been chosen for the job because he had the perfect cover – he was an American. ibid.
Help came from the ISI [Pakistan Security Service]. ibid.
Here he is a household name. ibid.