Thomas Blanchett 1 (~1800 -1863) http://www.gpmsdbaweb.com/memoir2/Genealogy/Thomas_Blanchett_1.htm ----- Harshawardhan_Bosham Nimkhedkar Nagpur, India

In many parts of India, tomorrow, Sunday, will be celebrated as New Year's Day, as per traditional Hindu calendar. The day has several names - but the idea is the same - to welcome the beginning of a new twelve-month period. It's a very auspicious event. Here is something to mark the occasion - an old photo from the Mary Evans Picture Library, online at http://www.prints-online.com/pictures_607507/HINDU-NEW-YEAR.html **HINDU NEW YEAR INDIA - The women of a Hindu household offer food to the gods of the heavens in the traditional Pongol new year ceremony. Date: circa 1890** There are hundreds of images at the site from British Raj period. Just search for India. For example, see this interesting item - BADMINTON IN INDIA 1874 Two couples enjoy a game of badminton in India. Date: 1874 http://www.prints-online.com/pictures_608123/BADMINTON-IN-INDIA-1874.html ----- Harshawardhan_Bosham Nimkhedkar Nagpur, India

Hotel with a history The Great Eastern Hotel in Kolkata It all started when David Wilson, an Englishman who owned a confectionery shop in Cossitola, now Bentinck Street, decided to enter the hotel business. In 1840, Dainty Davie, as he was popularly known, set up the Auckland Hotel on the premises in the corner of the road running parallel to the British India Street and the Old Court House Street. According to Major Harry Hobbs, author of John Barleycorn Bahadur (1943), the hotel was set up in 1841. But an advertisement published in The Englishman and Military Chronicle in November 1840 says otherwise: "The Auckland Hotel For Families and Single Gentlemen Opposite to Government House The above hotel is now open Pleasant, airy and well-furnished with A Table d' Hote for Gentlemen 19th November, 1840, D. Wilson & Co." The hotel was named not after its proprietor, but the Governor General at that time, Lord Auckland (1784-1849). But locally, the hotel was known as Wilson's Hotel. Until 1850, the business was carried on in the name of D. Wilson and Co., a partnership firm with A. Clader, Gregory, C.H.B. Wilson, J.C. Mandy and G. Mandy. After 1850, a project to expand the hotel began. A report published on June 16, 1862 in the Calcutta Monthly Magazine said: "David Wilson purchased land on the Old Court House Street in 1851 with existing shops and carried on the business of a hotel keeper under the name of Auckland Hotel and Hall of All Nations." [snip] >From Frontline, Volume 22 - Issue 17, Aug 13 - 26, 2005 http://www.flonnet.com/fl2217/stories/20050826001608400.htm ----- Harshawardhan_Bosham Nimkhedkar Nagpur, India

Photographs of Calcutta in 1947 http://ssreela.sulekha.com/blog/post/2007/05/calcutta-in-1947.htm ----- Harshawardhan_Bosham Nimkhedkar Nagpur, India

Saturday, November 24, 2007 Calcutta Coffee House - Calcutta's Heritage Still Recounts History In the midst of ultramodern coffee shops like Barista, Costa and CCD (Cafe Coffee Day), Kolkata still hold the pride of drawing a chunk of people to its age old coffee house. Its still a best place for the people in mid 60s or even older. Because of the proximity to college street, its also a stamping ground for young bloods. The college street of Kolkata is specially famous for its book stores. All the major publications of Bengal located here. College street is also a hub of numerous colleges. Some of the prestigious institutes like Presidency college, Indian Institute of Social Welfare and Society, Scottish Church College, Bethune College and many more stand tall among many other colleges. Albert Hall in college street was the major stone to built the coffee house. History of coffee house starts from here, which was found in 1876. At that time Albert Hall was the hangout place for posh Britisher, later coffee board decided to make a coffee joint and this way coffee house took birth in the year 1942. Once a stamping ground of Britishers, their families and children, senesced coffee house in Kolkata witnessed the presence of some renowned personalities like Rabindranath Tagore, and Subhash Chandra Bose. The place was a nest of intellectual activities and many literary pieces sprouted here. Coffee house took pride of serving personalities like Satyajit Ray, Manna Dey, Amartya Sen, Aparna Sen, Mrinal Sen, Jagdish Chandra Bose, Ritwik Ghatak and many other intelectuals and artists, who were the regular visitors of coffee house. Several literary magazines, which are now popular now a days owed their origin to the inspiration from the adda sessions at this coffee house. Still the same decrepit doors that open to a smoky big hall where people laugh, discuss, debate and sometimes romance. Still coffee house see number of people seems emerge from naxal period sport in long beard, kurta, slim looking with a ciggarettes in their hand, always on their toes for heated political debate. Coffee house in Kolkata still has the colonial style wooden tables and chair, ceiling fans suspended from ropes, waiter dressed in white uniforms and tall turbans and wall of peeling paints. Really, in this era Kolkata coffee house fights considerably well with modern coffee house's despotism. http://india-majestic.blogspot.com/2007/11/calcutta-coffee-house-calcuttas.html ----- Harshawardhan_Bosham Nimkhedkar Nagpur, India

>From Rashid's Blog on various aspects of Earth Sciences ====================== Rare maps of south Asia and Sindh 140 AD to 1808 AD The British started with scientific maps by actual surveys. John Thoronton was appointed East India Co.'s first Hydrographer in 1685 AD. He produced coastal maps and that of Ganges in 1703 AD, but accurate mapping was still half a century far off. The wars between the English and the French in the mid eighteenth century brought about new interest in geography of the inland and therefore maps of interior were drawn showing the routes, river crossings, forts, sources of food, grass and water supplies etc. This was not done for Sindh which was closed to all foreigners, though the East India Company's factory existed in Sindh between 1758 and 1773 AD. The British also did not need this information and when they needed it badly at least 39 different surveys were carried out between 1808 and 1843 to construct an accurate map of Sindh. Due to ill health James Rennell the official survey or General of Bengal since 1765 the East India Company at Calcutta (Kolkata) left for England in 1773 AD and from rough skatches sent from India, he drew maps in London. He published an Atlas of Bengal and subsequently a map of the Eastern part of Hindustan containing Bengal, Behar, Awd (Oudh) and Ellahabad (Allahabad). Between 1776 and 1779 he published a number of maps of India but his information on Sindh is drawn from earlier maps and therefore is inaccurate. He seems to have made of use of D'Anville too. In 1782 Rennell published a large map of Hindustan, based on rough sketches drawn by engineers at site and also on earlier maps. With it he released a memoir. Three years later a revised edition of the same map was published. Another revised edition came out in 1792 AD, with over 600 page memoir. This memoir was considered a classical work for next fifty years. Scientific work on mapping started after Clive's acquisition of Bengal and with appointment of James Rennell. The purpose of surveys was to know: (a) Extent of East India Company's possessions. (b) To work out extent of cultivated lands for revenue collection. (c) To know of the communication routes. (d) Use of maps in case of military campaigns. After 1760, perambulator was used for measuring distances. This instrument consisted of a wheel with a handle and some sort of revolution counter attached to it for marking up the distances in miles. Up to 1761 AD, the measurement of longitude was a guess work but introduction of accurate chronometer in this year changed the position. [ snip] Full text with some old maps at - http://tinyurl.com/2mto4e http://rashidfaridi.wordpress.com/2008/04/03/the-art-of-map-making-and-some-rare-maps-of-the-south-asia-and-sindh-140-ad-to-1808-ad/ ----- Harshawardhan_Bosham Nimkhedkar Nagpur, India

The following is just an abstract of the original paper, the full text of which has to be purchased. ----- Harshawardhan_Bosham Nimkhedkar Nagpur, India The White Town of Calcutta Under the Rule of the East India Company by P. J. Marshall Abstract Late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Calcutta was the setting for the first sustained encounter between Asian intellectuals and the west. An Indian intelligentsia living in Calcutta responded in a most creative way to aspects of European culture that became available to them in the city. Much about this response is now contentious. If the term Bengal Renaissance is still generally applied to it, the implications of that term are disputed. It is no longer necessarily assumed that 'modern' India was born in early nineteenth-century Calcutta by a fusing of what was western and what was 'traditional'. Assumptions that Indian cultures in general and that of Hindu Bengal in particular lacked a capacity to change and to develop on their own internal dynamics, whatever the input from the west, now look more than a little 'orientalist'. Furthermore, even if the Bengal Renaissance can be shown to have had its roots in its own culture, to some recent critics it was still a movement whose impact was severely limited by the very narrow base on which it rested: an elite group enclosed in a colonial situation. Yet, however the Renaissance may be reassessed, there can still be no doubt that Calcutta under the East India Company contained Indian intellectuals of exceptional talent, who absorbed much from the west. 'The excitement over the literature, history and philosophy of Europe as well as the less familiar scientific knowledge was deep and abiding', Professor Raychaudhuri has recently written. Modern Asian Studies (2000), 34: 307-331 Cambridge University Press doi:10.1017/S0026749X00003346 http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=21467

Postcards from the Raj November 11, 2004 A Melbourne musician's passion for antique Indian paintings propelled him on a fascinating journey through colonial history to life today on the subcontinent. http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/11/10/1100021858923.html?from=storylhs ----- Harshawardhan_Bosham Nimkhedkar Nagpur, India

Snipped from http://www.ensemble-modern.com/english/kritiken/archiv/s_indian.htm Indian music entered Europe as a phantom: In 1799 William Jones published his treatise "The Music of Hindostan". Around 1800, this book was widely read: the German translation appeared in 1801 and was dedicated to the great composer Joseph Haydn. Vienna, then the musical capital of Europe, seems to have been buzzing with discussions on the yet literally "unheard-of" Indian Music. Ludwig van Beethoven notes: "Have read the Book on the Music of the Indians. Extremely interesting philosophically, but of no practical consequence to my work." Of all colonial personnel musicians were the least prone to travel. Especially, if they were famous composers who had enough work and fame at home. So - even if Jones' book introduced the musical community of the West to the theories of Indian music - throughout the entire 19th century no European composer of consequence ever had the opportunity to actually listen to this much-talked about Indian music. This deficit was badly felt: for throughout the 19th century India was all the rage in Central Europe. The countries that had lost the colonial battle for India (France) or had never entered into it (Germany, Austria) opened themselves to non-combatant values of the subcontinent: Every important German writer in the first half of the 19th century let his audience know that he had studied Indian philosophy and the great epics. Kalidasas plays, especially "Shakuntala" were translated, performed and feted as equals of Shakespeare in France and the German world. India's real musical influence on the West finally took shape in the years before World War I. In the first years of the 20th century, two young French composers independently visited India: Albert Roussel and Maurice Delage. Both visits seemed accidental: Roussel stopped over for a few weeks as a naval officer on duty, Delage accompanied his parents on an inspection trip - they owned a shoe factory in South India. But India's music changed their compositional careers forever: [snip] =========== ----- Harshawardhan_Bosham Nimkhedkar Nagpur, India

Snipped from http://arts.guardian.co.uk/filmandmusic/story/0,,1762418,00.html The forgotten man Conductor Sakari Oramo is on a mission to rehabilitate the lost genius of British music - John Foulds. Friday April 28, 2006 The Guardian Born in Manchester in 1880, John Foulds put down his musical roots in soil nourished by the new sense of direction that British music found in the final years of the 19th century. He left home at 13, making his living playing cello in theatres and cabarets and, in 1900, he gained a position in the Hallé Orchestra. The Hallé, under conductor Hans Richter, was then enjoying one of the most interesting phases in its existence, with strong links through Richter to the mainstream European tradition represented by Brahms and Bruckner. Richter encouraged Fould's own efforts at composition, and the young musician's first mature works - such as the elaborately Straussian tone-poem Mirage, and Apotheosis, an elegy for violin and orchestra - indeed reveal French and German influences, but there was much more to come. Meeting his future wife, the ethnomusicologist Maud McCarthy, and joining the theosophical movement generated a vivid interest in eastern, particularly Indian and Arabic, music, as well as in recreating the ancient musical cultures of the Greeks and Celts. Those influences can be seen first in Foulds's songs and piano music, and are evident too in his works of the early 1920s, when they became an integral part of his musical language. Unlike many of his composing peers his interest in Indian music wasn't cosmetic: he didn't simply glue the exotic elements on top of his own music, but actually allowed them to change his own musical style. Foulds went deeply into the theoretical details of the different scales, modes and rhythmic idioms of the vast musical heritage of the subcontinent. It could even be claimed that he did for Indian music something similar to Bartok's folk-song research in the Balkans, and, like Bartok, he made the results of his theoretical efforts an organic constituent of his own musical style. Returning to Britain in 1930, there were more masterpieces to come, such as the Quartetto Intimo, a strong, tight and dramatic string quartet finished in 1932. But still restless, Foulds embarked on yet another trip, to India, where he was to remain until the end of his life. In 1937 he became director of the European Music Department at All-India Radio, where, as well as giving weekly piano recitals, he worked on a new style of "Indo-European" musical fusion, for which he created an "Indo-European Orchestra". There was a plan to write a east-west symphony, but all this incredibly interesting fermentation was cut short by cholera. Foulds contracted the disease and died - "in exile", as he described it - in Calcutta in 1939. [snip] ========== ----- Harshawardhan_Bosham Nimkhedkar Nagpur, India

Ameer-E-Khan, a former resident of Calcutta, was living in Boston, USA, when he wrote this letter to the Editor of the New York Times on March 16, 1883, on the newspaper's views on the proposed bill ''to give native judges in India powers to try Europeans accused of certain criminal offences''. The letter was published in the issue dated March 24, 1883, Wednesday. See http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9D07E4D81631E433A25757C2A9659C94629FD7CF http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9D07E4D81631E433A25757C2A9659C94629FD7CF ----- Harshawardhan_Bosham Nimkhedkar Nagpur, India

Why Does China Care About Tibet? PLUS, WHEN ARE MONKS ALLOWED TO GET VIOLENT? Buddhist monks and other Tibetans began protesting in and around Lhasa onMarch 10, the anniversary of a major uprising against Chinese rule. Tensions have been flaring in the region ever since, with some protests turning violent. Tibet is a remote, impoverished mountain region with little arable land. Why does China care so much about keeping it? Nationalism. China invaded Tibet in 1950, but Beijing asserts that its close relationship with the region stretches back to the 13th century, when first Tibet and then China were absorbed into the rapidly expanding Mongol empire. The Great Khanate, or the portion of the empire that contained China, Tibet, and most of East Asia, eventually became known as China's Yuan Dynasty. Throughout the Yuan and the subsequent Ming and Qing dynasties, Tibet remained a subordinate principality of China, though its degree of independence varied over the centuries. When British forces began making inroads into Tibet from India in the early 1900s, the Qing emperors forcefully reasserted their suzerainty over the region. Soon after, revolutionaries overthrew the Qing emperor—who, beingManchu, was cast as a foreign presence in Han-majority China—and formed a republic. Tibet took the opportunity to assert its independence and, from 1912 to 1950, ruled itself autonomously. However, Tibetan sovereignty was never recognized by China, the United Nations, or any major Western power. Both Sun Yat-sen's Nationalists and their rivals, Mao Zedong's Communists, believed that Tibet remained fundamentally a part of China and felt a strong nationalistic drive to return the country to its Qing-era borders. The 1950 takeover of Tibet by Mao's army was billed as the liberation of the region from the old, semi-feudal system, as well as from imperialist (i.e., British and American) influences. Resentment of the Chinese grew among Tibetans over the following decade, and armed conflicts broke out in various parts of the region. In March 1959, the capital of Lhasa erupted in a full-blown but short-lived revolt, during which the current Dalai Lama fled to India. He has lived there in exile ever since. There are also strategic and economic motives for China's attachment to Tibet. The region serves as a buffer zone between China on one side and India, Nepal, and Bangladesh on the other. The Himalayan mountain range provides an added level of security as well as a military advantage. Tibet also serves as a crucial water source for China and possesses a significant mining industry. And Beijing has invested billions in Tibet over the past 10 years as part of its wide-ranging economic development plan for Western China. Bonus Explainer: When are Buddhist monks allowed to get violent?When it's for a compassionate cause. Monks and nuns in Tibet take at least two, and sometimes three, sets of vows that constrain their behavior. For most violations, the penalty is usually a confession that the act was committed. But if a monk were to kill another human being—one of the most serious violations of the Pratimoksha vows—he would be liable to expulsion from the monastery. That being said, there is a tradition in Tibetan mythology that could be used to justify taking violent action against an oppressor. The ninth-century king Langdarma, a follower of the Bön tradition, is popularly believed to have persecuted Buddhists during his reign. A monk assassinated him on the grounds that, by killing Langdarma, the monk was acting compassionately toward the tyrant— taking bad karma upon himself in order to spare the king from accumulating the same through his despotic actions. It's important to note, however, that the actual extent to which monks were responsible for the violence in Tibet remains unclear. Monks instigated the initial demonstrations, but lay Tibetans may have ratcheted up those protests to riot status. Explainer thanks Robert Barnett of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University, Andrew Fischer of the London School of Economics, Melvyn Goldstein of the Center for Research on Tibet at Case Western Reserve University, and Jonathan Silk of Leiden University.

John, I do not have the expertise to speak about the historical relationship between China and Tibet but remember what we read in the India papers in the late 50's/early 60's, when matters like the Dalai Lama seeking shelter in India to get out of China's grasp and the Indian-Chinese strained relationship after the debacle in the North-East were fresh events. Many in those days used to blame Nehru for being overly supine and accommodative towards China. His External Affairs Minister in those days, the acerbic V.K.Krishna Menon, and the erstwhile Indian ambassador in Peking (as it then was) K.M.Panikkar also shared in the blame. Both of them were known for their leftist leanings. K.M.Panikkar was much derided for his 'sophistry' in making a distinction between Chinese suzerainty and sovereignty over Tibet. The critics, who were mostly on the right, found fault with Nehru for carrying his anti-imperial rhetoric too far, being overly trustful of China and dropping his guard when dealing with China. They would point out that the British did not recognize that China had any special status in Tibet. Younghusband did not seek Chinese approval before entering Tibet in 1904. When the MacMahon Line was drawn at Simla in 1914, the Chinese were not invited and the Tibetan Delegation signed on it as an independent nation. Nehru did not use any of these strong points to keep Tibet out of China, as he considered the Simla Agreement as an imposition on a weak China in 1914. Events did emerge to justify some of this criticism. Forgetting all talk of Hindi-Chini Bhai-Bhai (Indians and Chinese are brothers) and India's consistent support of China for getting a seat in the UNO, China tried to - and actually did - encroach upon Indian territory in Ladakh and the Northeast. After that, Nehru was a broken man and died soon afterwards, some say, as a result of it the Chinese perfidy. Krishna Menon, who was the Defence Minister when the Chinese came in, had to resign and was driven into political wilderness, as the Indian Army was found to be woefully unprepared against the Chinese. The border stalemate still smolders but I think both India and China have decided, as a matter of pragmatism, to let sleeping dogs lie for the foreseeable future. Defence preparedness-wise India is now in a far better position than in 1962 but does not want to waste its energy on re-acquiring territory 'in which not a blade of grass grows'. This is how Nehru had described Aksai-chin in the Parliament, a statement that would haunt him later and be remembered forever. Arvind Kolhatkar, Toronto, April 02, 2008.

>From Khaleej Times Online When lensmen captured images that spoke a thousand words 2 April 2008 SOME of the world's best photographers, representing magazines like Life and agencies like Magnum, were camping near the Birla House in Delhi then, capturing for posterity the movements of that frail and ageing man, who had humbled an empire, but had still not been able to unify the minds and souls of his own people. The legendary French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson - co- founder of Magnum - was in the capital that cold January in 1948, taking images of the Mahatma. American Margaret Bourke-White of Life magazine, whose 'gut-wrenching' images of the violence following the Partition had been splashed across the pages of the magazine, was also pursuing Gandhi. Also in town was a little known photographer, Constantin Joffe, of Vogue USA, doing portraits of the royal family of Jaipur, of Lord Mountbatten and other prominent personalities. Joffe, accompanied by writer Nada Patcevitch, wife of Vogue's managing director, managed to photograph Mahatma Gandhi in the verandah of Birla House, on his last fast, the day before he was assassinated. Joffe's picture of the Mahatma, walking along with members of his family in the compound of the Birla House, was one of the last known colour photographs of his. Most images of Gandhi are in black and white, and colour photographs are a rarity. Vogue, first published in the USA in 1892 and in the UK in 1916 - it launched its India edition last year - has been covering the sub-continent for nearly a century. An exhibition featuring a fascinating collection of nearly 80 images shot in India - and published in the various editions of the magazine - has been curated by Vogue India and will be on display at the Grand Hyatt, Mumbai, this Sunday. 'Vogue's love affair with India' features photographs shot in the country for the British, French, Italian, American, Japanese and Indian editions of Vogue, spanning the years from 1934 to 2007. It features the work of some of the most stellar fashion photographers and their often equally famous subjects. Says Oona Dhabhar, marketing director, Conde Nast India (publishers of the magazine): "Our London-based archivist, Robin Muir, selected nearly 200-odd images that have been used in the various editions of the magazine since inception. We then picked up nearly 80 photographs for display at the exhibition." Naturally, many of the subjects featured in the international fashion magazine have been glamorous people - royalty, international celebrities, Bollywood personalities and of exotic locales including Ladakh and the deserts of Rajasthan. Cecil Beaton, who first came to India in 1934, had been transfixed by the beautiful Princess Karam Kapurthala, who became a default for 'dark' and 'exotic' for the magazine. The princess was extensively featured throughout the 1930s. More recently, in 1999, Arthur Elgort, a widely travelled photographer, took model Maggie Rizer - and a Vogue team - on a 700-mile odyssey from Mumbai to Jaipur, covering Bollywood filmmakers, actors, extras and elephants. As Muir points out, no Vogue expedition to India is complete "without the majestic pachydermic presence of at least two decorated elephants." Of course, elephants are now banned from Mumbai's streets, and foreign photographers looking for exotic shots of the animal in an urban (or Bollywood) setting have to travel outside the metropolis. http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticleNew.asp?xfile=data/subcontinent/2008/April/subcontinent_April48.xml&section=subcontinent&col= ----- Harshawardhan_Bosham Nimkhedkar Nagpur, India

Design for the Prong lighthouse, Bombay, India, February 1867 Scale drawing from the Gibb Collection made in Westminster, London, showing a cross-section of the lighthouse viewed from the south-west. The lighthouse was built to coincide with the development of reclaimed land in Colaba to the south of the city, which included the construction of a railway terminus and the Sassoon Docks in 1875. The lighthouse protected the approach to the docks and Bombay's harbour. Image at http://www.scienceandsociety.co.uk/results.asp?image=10315226&wwwflag=2&imagepos=22 ----- Harshawardhan_Bosham Nimkhedkar Nagpur, India

This is obviously a commercial site - mentioning it just FYI. I've no connexion with it. ----- Harshawardhan_Bosham Nimkhedkar Nagpur, India *** India & Pakistan royalty-free footage in our collection INDIA (Including PAKISTAN up to end of 1940s) - CHRONOLOGICAL WITHIN EACH SECTION. INDIA BEFORE PARTITION / INDEPENDENCE *** http://www.footagefarm.co.uk/Footage%20Farm%20website/Web%20lists/INDIA%20footage.htm

Mahatma Gandhi in Aden http://www.adenairways.com/gandhi.htm ----- Harshawardhan_Bosham Nimkhedkar Nagpur, India

The following extract is from an exceedingly long write-up on Woodrow Wilson's role in ''the Replacement of the European Lens by a Global Lens'' in 1919. You can visit the webpage, if you wish to read the text in full or to see the advertisement mentioned in the quote below: http://cambridgeforecast.wordpress.com/2008/04/01/from-a-eurocentric-lens-to-a-global-lens-1919-book/ ----- Harshawardhan_Bosham Nimkhedkar Nagpur, India QUOTE -- April 1, 2008 Nationalists in Asia quickly recognized the potential utility of Wilson's rhetoric for their causes, even if its scope and intent remained unclear. A leading nationalist paper in Calcutta, commenting in February 1918 on the address in which Wilson first used the term "self-determination," immediately probed the possible application of his words to India. The American president, it noted, had declared that the "whole world" was affected by the issues at hand, but it remained unclear whether India, and the rest of Asia and Africa, was to be included in the postwar reconstruction of world order. The real cause of wars was the condition of "the helpless and unprotected regions and peoples of Asia and Africa," and peace would not come "until Asia and Africa have secured full national autonomy." In China, too, the publication of Wilson's important speeches was accompanied by commentary that related his rhetoric to Chinese concerns. A major Shanghai daily accompanied the text of the Fourteen Points with an editorial comment noting that the U.S. president's ideas for peace were "a beacon of light for the world's peoples." They were credible, too, the editorial added: the United States already had enough resources to become the most powerful nation in the world, and therefore Wilson could not be suspected of ulterior motives in promoting these ideals. Shortly after the armistice, Ganesh, a prominent nationalist press in India, published a collection of the U.S. president's addresses under the rousing title President Wilson: The Modern Apostle of Freedom. In numerous ads that ran in the Indian press in early 1919, the book prominently headlined Ganesh's list of patriotic publications. The text of the ads described the U.S. president as "the most striking personality in the world" and a "man of destiny," whose speeches, "one of the finest and sweetest fruits of the deadly war," would "bring solace to a war-weary world and hope to small and weak nationalities." Such glowing copy was surely, at least in part, an adman's pitch, but the publisher clearly believed that it would strike patriotic Indians as plausible. Indeed, one reviewer exclaimed that "the eloquent addresses of this great inspiring apostle of Modern Freedom . must find a place in every household of a true patriot," and would enormously help the "itinerant Home Rule propagandist to advocate, in sober but clear and emphatic terms, the cause of liberty before his countrymen." In Shanghai, the venerable Commercial Press published a similar volume that compiled the texts of Wilson's wartime speeches. The book was published in two editions: one in Chinese translation only, and a second, more costly edition containing the original English texts with their Chinese translations alongside. This collection, too, was widely advertised in the press and became something of a bestseller, going through several printings. UNQUOTE

Hi Harshoo, your email said: "On Good Friday I attended a service at Union Chapel > on Lenin Street. The street and the chapel apparently live > together in harmony here in Kolkata. Both are brave > leftovers from bygone eras. " I know the Union Chapel well. My Grandfather's brother was a Deacon up to 1964 when I left Calcutta. Every Christmas religiously, we (my Mother, brother and myself) attended the Christmas Tree Party held by the Union Chapel when my Uncle played the part of "Father Christmas". Thanks for that Molly Sarstedt-Hamilton, Townsville, Australia

http://www.bonhams.com/Magazine/Issue14/Issue14.30.pdf ooroo If you don't hear the knock of opportunity - build a door. Anon.