Sunday Posts

Recently, Britain got really bad press. The American right portrays it as a failed state, with violent streets and gangs reminiscent of Danny Boyle's 28 Years Later. And so does the Indian right - bashing up Britain is a parlour game for Indian news channels.  Britain has many problems. But it is not a failed state. British cities, despite their lack of economic growth and slightly boring life, are far safer than either American or Indian cities. There is indeed knife crime, which is declining, but we don't have school shootings. We had grooming gangs, for sure, but we don't have vigilante gangs poking into our homes checking what we eat or who we worship. Most of the Britons know Nigel Farage what he is - a charlatan - and even when someone suggests that all asylum seekers should be castrated on Live TV, no other panellist rushes to defend her with whataboutery. The public transport is rickety and costly, but I don't have to drive every day to go to my office; the NHS ...

When the subject of establishing English style Public Colleges in India came up before the British Parliament in the late Eighteenth Century, the proposition was deemed to be both preposterous, as the Indians were deemed to lack the discipline needed for a college education, and subversive, as American colleges were blamed for the loss of British colonies there.  The East India company administrators, however, were establishing colleges in India at the time - Warren Hastings modelled the Calcutta Madrassah following a version of famed Dars-i-Nizami curriculum followed in Awadh, followed by the efforts of Jonathan Duncan, the resident of Benares, to establish the Benares Sanskrit College - but these colleges were classic orientalist projects, for oriental learning and primarily for the benefit of English administrators wanting to understand Indian society and legal system. Such was the motivation of Wellesley's Oxford of the East - the Fort William College in Calcutta - which woul...