Monday Cup Of Links #29 - Pan-Asianism, Gandhi’s Racism, Jinxed Bungalows, Theranos in the COVID-19 Era.
Also, a revolutionary love story
Happy Monday!
I took a break on the novel this week to read up on my sources again. I came across a couple of interesting stories, but I don’t feel the chemistry between the characters in other sources as much, except maybe in David Garnett’s The Golden Echo where he reminisces about his youth, where he was aiding and abetting the crowd at India House. It will all have to be from my imagination.
Though, one story was particularly intriguing to me about Lala Hardayal. He was studying at Oxford, when in the summer of 1906, he came back to Delhi unexpectedly. His family and friends were curious what was up with him. He wanted to take his wife back to England with him, but neither his family, nor hers would agree to it. They decided to send her back to her village until he left. A cousin was sent with her as an escort. While they were waiting for the train, Hardayal showed up, and tried to take his wife with him. The cousin resisted, and a crowd gathered, ready to beat up Hardayal. The wife and cousin had to stop them and say yes, Hardayal was the husband of the woman he was trying to abduct. In the confusion, he and his wife ran away, changed trains, changed cities, changed hotels, and did everything they could to escape detection on their way to Bombay, to catch the steamer ship to Europe. Their families found them and even tried to board the ship to take her back, but they hid and escaped detection until the ship left. They spent a happy few years in England, when they returned for a brief while, after which he went away to spread the message of revolution among the Indians in America, and I think they never saw each other again.
I’m not sure how to have this inform the character of Hardayal in my book. But it’s an exciting short story by itself.
Also why didn’t her family want her going with him? Was it because they feared she would have to suffer untold hardships in a foreign country? Or because he was only a student and didn’t make enough to support a wife? I have no idea, and this particular source is mum about it.
Onto our links!
Theranos would be thriving in the COVID-19 pandemic. Tyler Shultz, one of the Theranos whistleblowers who was forced to spend more than a half a million defending himself from their panel of lawyers, writes an interesting piece speculating how Theranos would have done in this pandemic, where regulations are relaxed, misinformation abounds, and political influence is how things get done. I’m just glad they were proven to be frauds prior to any of this, because the alternative is incredibly scary.
ICYMI: Guns And Gandhi II - Moar Guns, Moar Gandhi. Excerpts from my novel, India House. Gandhi gets so lionized in the media. I thought it would be interesting to show him as a side character in someone else’s story before he got famous and influential. People find it easy to dismiss his narrow minded discrimination with “Oh, he was a man of his time”, but there were other men of the same time who were pretty confident he was wrong, and probably told him so to his face.
A historic, jinxed house. This colonial-era house in Bangalore was heavily rumored to be jinxed. Don’t know if it was, but they certainly played that rumor up as much as they could to convince the authorities to demolish the building and build a club for legislators. A veritable old Scooby Doo mystery.
The Indian revolutionary in Japan. What a delightful summary of Rash Behari Bose, who connected with Pan-Asians in Japan to find help to overthrow the British. I’ve mentioned him here before, in the context of the restaurant he ran with his wife and in-laws, which he rejuvenated with his chicken curry recipe (which is apparently still served there!). This piece goes more into the history of the INA and how Subhas Bose began to be associated with it. This story is probably going to be my third novel.
GIF of the week: This animation will give you goose-flesh.