Rudyard Kipling was a British author and poet born in India. He is best known for The Jungle Book (1894) and Kim (1901). I read Kim about 6 years ago. It was my first encounter with Kipling, and I never forgot it. The story takes place here in India, and is as much about the location as it is about the adventures of young Kim. That was also my introduction to India, and it set my expectations for this trip. Just for the record, basing your expectations of a country on an account that is over 100 years old is silly. Years later I read some of Kipling's short stories. My favorite of these is Without Benefit of Clergy, an amazingly sad story of a British officer stationed in India who has a child with an Indian woman.
I've no real point to this entry. Rather I just want to give a shoutout to old Kipling while I'm stationed here in India. Bangalore is where I am. It is a bustling metropolis formerly known as the garden city, and looking out the window of my office building I see that much of the world Kipling described has been choked out by the explosive growth of the tech industry and the tangling roots of foreign companies thriving in the rich soils of a skilled and inexpensive workforce. No doubt in the span of 100 hundred more years my accounts of it will be unrecognizable too, and many times over.
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