There is no easy walkover to freedom anywhere, and many of us will have to pass through the valley of the shadow again and again before we reach the mountain-tops of our desire. Jawaharial Nehru
I shall be the last Englishman to rule in India. Jawaharial Nehru
But nothing in India is identifiable: the mere asking of a question causes it to disappear or to merge in something else. E M Forster
We owe a lot to the Indians, who taught us how to count, without which no worthwhile scientific discovery could have been made! Albert Einstein
If there is one place on the face of earth where all the dreams of living men have found a home from the very earliest days when man began the dream of existence, it is India! Romaine Rolland
In India I found a race of mortals living upon the Earth but not adhering to it, inhabiting cities but not being fixed to them, possessing everything but possessed by nothing. Apollonius of Tyana
Bhima’s Son Ghatotkacha-like Skeleton found: Recent exploration activity in the northern region of India uncovered a skeletal remains of a human of phenomenal size. Hindu Voice news report
In the war that erupted between rival French and British-supported Nawabs, Clive turned a diversion into the main event. Simon Schama, A History of Britain: The Wrong Empire, BBC 2000
The Black Hole of Calcutta now entered British history’s lexicon of infamy. ibid.
Increasingly the stock in trade of British India was not spices, not cloth but taxes. ibid.
Mutiny – the word by which we know the terrible slaughters of 1847. Simon Schama, A History of Britain: The Empire of Good Intentions
European Delhi burned. ibid.
Victoria would reign as empress. ibid.
What made the scale of suffering so obscene was that it happened during a time of grain surplus in other parts of India. But so fanatically devoted to the iron law of the market was the government that it refused to liberate those supplies for fear it would artificially bring down prices. So common sense not to mention common humanity were sacrificed to the fetish of the market and millions were abandoned to perish. ibid.
Three years later the empire would ask its loyal subjects to line up for king and country. Millions did from Ireland and India. ibid.
Under cover of darkness ten men climb out of inflatable rafts on to docks in this residential neighbourhood of Mumbai in India. They carry plastic bags and backpacks. When local fishermen ask who the men are they are told to mind their own business. And the group heads into town. Nearly an hour later security cameras capture two of the men as they open fire on commuters at a busy railway station. Another team of men storms the Leopold café. They spray the crowded restaurant with bullets, killing ten people instantly. At the same time the terrorists detonate bombs in two taxis killing five more. It’s the start of a highly organised three-day terrorist siege on India’s largest centre. The terrorists also hit a Jewish community centre and two luxury hotels frequented by western tourists. Inside 9/11: What Happened Next?
The Indian city of Mumbai is in chaos following a series of terrorist attacks. ITV News
The aim of life is no more to control the mind, but to develop it harmoniously; not to achieve salvation here after, but to make the best use of it here below; and not to realise truth, beauty and good only in contemplation, but also in the actual experience of daily life; social progress depends not upon the ennoblement of the few but on the enrichment of democracy; universal brotherhood can be achieved only when there is an equality of opportunity – of opportunity in the social, political and individual life. Bhagat Singh, prison diary p124
There are some parts of the world that, once visited, get into your heart and won’t go. For me, India is such a place. When I first visited, I was stunned by the richness of the land, by its lush beauty and exotic architecture, by its ability to overload the senses with the pure, concentrated intensity of its colors, smells, tastes, and sounds. It was as if all my life I had been seeing the world in black and white and, when brought face-to-face with India, experienced everything re-rendered in brilliant technicolor. Keith Bellows, National Geographic Society vice-president, 2007
A vibrant bustling world ... The most spectacular wildlife, ancient cultures, and extreme landscapes. India: Nature’s Wonderland I, BBC 2015
For Asiatic males [lions] it’s all about protecting territory. ibid.
The number of gibbons has fallen to 2,600. ibid.
India is well known for its tea ... It produces over a million tons of it a year. ibid.
Elephants are dependent on their mother’s milk for three to four years. ibid.
There are just over two thousand Bengal tigers left in the wild. ibid.
The birds [cranes] arrive at dawn ... in formation like ribbons across the sky. India: Nature’s Wonderland II
The Thar desert in the north-west of India is the largest desert in the country. It is as large as Britain. ibid.
The destruction of India’s village system was the greatest of England's blunders. Annie Besant
On the morning of Friday March 12th 1993 they emerged after dawn in their millions. From cracked and crumbling Victorian mansions, from spliffing Art Deco bungalows, from hew high-rises, from tin shacks, from under fraying tarpaulin covers, from gutters and from city sidewalks: the working people of Bombay launched their chaotic charge on the most besieged, battered, but resilient transportation system in the world. Misha Glenny, McMafia
But at 1.28 p.m. on that March 12th, a new and most sinister element joined the merry pandemonium: the roar of half a ton of the world’s most powerful explosive. RDX, ripping up from the underground garage of the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE), and into the pit where traders were just preparing for the lunch bell. ibid.
Over the next two hours, a further seven bombs went off at crowded locations throughout the city, while grenades were thrown in another two places by men on motorcycles. ibid.
Bombay was in crisis: anti-Muslim riots had erupted here in December 1992 and again in January 1993. ibid.
Altogether 900 people, more than two-thirds of them Muslims, the rest Hindus, were slaughtered in those riots as law-enforcement officers stood and watched. ibid.
And although Dawood was unable to travel to Bombay, he succeeded from his base in the Gulf in consolidating and expanding the biggest criminal network Bombay had ever seen. ibid.
The first illicit trade to emerge was the smuggling and production of liquor, but it was not long before the cash generated from booze was equalled from another commodity – gold. ibid.
A charismatic, tough independent trade-union leader and former physician, Dr Dutta Samant, persuaded Bombay's 250,000 textile workers to lay down their tools for an indefinite strike. ibid.
The strike ended not in agreement, but with the virtual collapse of the textile industry. ibid.
The collapse of the textile mills was an economic trauma from which India’s manufacturing powerhouse never fully recovered – the strikes marked the beginning of the end of Nehru’s social capitalism and prepared the ground for the liberalisation of the early 1990s. And with a sudden huge increase in the number of unemployed in central Bombay, especially in areas close to Dongri, the social conditions were perfect for the rise of a new, more violent generation of organised crime – the time of Dawood had come. ibid.
From his distant outpost in Dubai, Dawood set about uniting the various gangs under his leadership. ibid.
Dawood was impressed and recruited him into D-Company. Before long Chhota Rajan, the Little Man, had become the leading figure inside Bombay, bringing together ten or more disparate gangs and creating one of the world's greatest mafias. ibid.
By the early 1990s, police estimated that Dawood Ibrahim’s annual turnover stood at around a quarter of a billion dollars from his Indian operations alone. ibid.
The gangs of Mumbai have grown out of the slums, acting almost as an organic, if malevolent, response to the hip bars and conspicuous consumption of the growing, confident middle class. ibid.
But the D-Company [Dawood] did not lead an exclusively underground existence. On the contrary, its influence extended to Mumbai's most famous industry, Bollywood. ibid.
The gang wars of Bombay that exploded with renewed violence in the 1990s were in a part a conflict between the intelligence agencies of India and Pakistan, ensuring that they were even more dangerous and unpredictable than hitherto. ibid.
The investigation into the Bombay bombings, which lasted for fourteen years before dozens of suspects came to trial, revealed how deeply gangsterism in Bombay had subverted the city’s economic and social life. ibid.
In fact the Governor General controlled three armies; each of the Presidencies maintained its own, and together they numbered 38,000 British and 348,000 native troops, and 524 field guns. John Masters, Nightrunners of Bengal p21
The women, the backbiting – bestial pettiness. But it did not seem so petty now, somehow. They were armouring their minds against this filthy country, sticking pins into human dummies to exorcise the unspeakable things that crouched in every corner of their lives. They had homes, husbands, babies, servants; and every pet they kept, every green thing they ate, every drop of water – the sun in the sky, the beggar in the road, the air they breathed – might to-morrow destroy it all. ibid. p116