Rudyard Kipling has written a story called "The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows" about opium smokers of Calcutta of his times..... It can make for a brilliant read. The story is available online for those who are interested to read.... There is a Chinese connection too......

Beautiful talk, just one point to mention, the talk is in Taj! The company owned more than one third of the tea industry & the colonial legacy & oppression that still exists in these tea estates

Fascinating talk!!!!! Would love to read this book!!!

Thanks very much, The Wire, for getting Mr Ghosh

I am blown away by the contribution of Mr. Amitav Ghosh to my perception of the world history and the world today. Grateful indeed! Alhamdolillah SubhanAllah

Thanks Wire for doing this.

I truly, truly love your polished English. Pronoy Roy is the other person whose English really fascinated me back in my school when he was doing World This Week on Doordarshan.

@cafewaves

Жыл бұрын

English is still a second language to all Indians, they are too verbose and less creative with English...if you really want to appreciate use of English, then listen to Sam Harris, Christopher Hithens, Scot Fitzgerald. They own English

@nawazishalam1027

Жыл бұрын

@@cafewaves Thanks for the suggestion. There was a time when I used to listen to BBC radio regularly in order to improve my English pronunciation.

@krisgopi_8

Жыл бұрын

BBC radio cricket commentary john arlott, Christopher Martin Jenkins, trevor bailey, braint Johnson and in mid 80's Richie Benaud. They improved my whatever little English language 😉

This now reminds me of manipur how burning poppy fields started this

Good reporting Sir

Very nice discussion, I want to read 📚 this book 📖 and I also want opium.

While Govt says "smoking kills" cigarette companies carry on their business with impunity and sponsor classical music schools . No guilt . Why is Amitav surprised Christian opium traders felt no guilt ?

Emperor Babur the first Moghul Emperor in India was an opium eater. I guess his supply of narcotics used to come from Afghanistan. Amongst the great Khanates of Central Asia, the custom of opium eating was also known. East India Company have started the opium trade on an industrial scale but the cultivation of the crop in our part of the world definitely precedes them.

Strangely, in the opening paras of the book Amitava Ghosh says he was born in West Bengal, "an Indian state that shares a border with China". That's a blooper, because West Bengal never has nor does share a border with China. Unless someone educates me on Indian geography, I wonder what made him write such a thing and how the proof readers missed it. By the way, opium back then didn't have the reputation of being a nefarious drug like it does today. Trade in it was legal, as was trade in cocaine (early Coca-Cola actually had cocaine in it), and as much as the trade in alcohol and tobacco (which are also intoxicants and wreak havoc on lives) which was legal then and is legal now. And opium was grown and used in India by the locals even before the British got into the act.

@shubhamkumar-nw1ui

Жыл бұрын

Legal is what the lawmakers make...and lawmakers are not divine....what the British did to China was a crime and they knew it....why didn't they sell the opium back to the people of London ?

@shoumomukherjee5662

Жыл бұрын

Editorial error surely. In Calcutta old ladies used to have opium obtained from licensed shops and have it with milk for good sleep . Used to get addicted. Changdu ruined many lives . Like cigarette and gutka today and Govts have been hand in glove . Narcotic cannabis is smoked with impunity along the Ganges and in Uttarakhand and Himachal

@vishweshwermangalapalli3137

Жыл бұрын

My father is 87 years old... and we come from Telangana region and he tells me that there were licensed opium shops in our town where one could go and buy opium freely. Typically it was bought by old people to manage body and knee pains. Post prandial smoke and sleep well... Ah ! what a life :)

@budsurtees4224

Жыл бұрын

@@vishweshwermangalapalli3137 You are correct. Even now opium is legally used in morphine medications for pain management, especially for cancer patients. Opium didn't have a negative connotation in India, but when the Brits used (exported) it to force the Chinese to consume it in huge quantities and turned them into addicts, it became nefarious. Ghosh's book Smoke and Ashes is actually a very good researched history of opium. Definitely worth a read.

👍🏼

America & Western Media barely gives podium to Amitav Ghosh, the great writer of our times & potentia futurel noble laureate.

@budsurtees4224

Жыл бұрын

Noble (it's spelled Nobel) laureate? Keep dreaming.

The economic theory of supply and demand is all bunkum. The demand especially the one of the addictive nature can not only be created, but actually fostered to snowball ad infinitum. It is abundantly evident in our time by the example(both proliferation of number of units and the duration of their use) of mobile telephones.

@ranjanchadha

Жыл бұрын

Think war machinery...ammo, guns, and war planes!!!

Opium in the past and now opium/poppy in Manipur and the State is “ evaporating “ .

Why just single out British and American merchants when Indian business houses like the Tatas and Tagores they too minted their fortune selling opium. Its not like the british forced them to . They actively participated in trade . Old Indian novels do speak of opium trade , opium consumption especially in Calcutta quite unapologetically. There were opium dens even in britain , Sherlock holmes was a regular visitor to those dens and it was scarcely frowned upon. In fact a practicing physician Doyle alluded to opium' s ability to enhance our access to our subconscious. There was opium usage among Indians, British etc but only Chinese got addicted to it to their own detriment .

Mercantile community in Weatern India means Parsis, Marwaris, Menon, Sikh Punjabi's, Sindhi, Khoja's.

Intro too long. Was waiting to hear the author

Behind every fortune there is a crime..... Balzac

@shoumomukherjee5662

Жыл бұрын

That is a simplified version used in Godfather .Balzac didnt quite say that

It was not expected from Wire, to pass up an important matter of concern to Indians in the opium story. You said tata to the elephant in the room haha

Was Tata family doing business in opium?

@budsurtees4224

Жыл бұрын

No. They didn't. Stop the drainage examination and pandering to your gutter biases. In any case, opium was legal all across the world. Focus instead on your casteism, misogyny, ignorance, superstition, feudal mindset and corruption which still runs rampant in India.

@shoumomukherjee5662

Жыл бұрын

Yes

Sidharth you are a good man but then being a Brahmin how can you point a finger at usa for slavery when Brahmins have been doing it since ancient era?

@monojdas-gupta5918

Жыл бұрын

The USA was mostly the end user of the slave trade. On the supplier side, the trade was monopolized by English, Dutch Spanish, and Portuguese. Actually who benefited most from this infamous trade has not been properly audited, as far as I know. There was widespread public denouncement against the slave trade in contemporary England but none so wide or vociferous in England against opium plying.

@chander3338

Жыл бұрын

Brahmins since ancient times were not expected to accumulate wealth which is required to own slaves. Only recently they have started settling abroad especially in the US where knowledge is valued and respected. Even in the personal autobiography Dr APJ Abdul Kalam writes that in his school days he used to visit daily his brahmin teacher’s house for food. Abdul Kalam became an expert on Vedas and a vegetarian obviously influenced by his brahmin friends.

@budsurtees4224

Жыл бұрын

He can do it because most Indians tend to be quite hypocritical and self-serving in their views and utterances.

@shubhamkumar-nw1ui

Жыл бұрын

Come out of your dreamland ,make beleive storytelling......Brahmins have not been the ruling class in India, see the caste composition of Indian rulers...?Most would be the OBC ,Some Dalits too....Brahmin means just the learner class , which dealt with academics.....caste based exploitation is a recent phenomenon.

@bharat7525

5 ай бұрын

@@budsurtees4224 Hope it is possible for Indians to write nicely about India. I was poor and am prosperous and educated today due to my efforts AND the chances/opportunities here. Grateful really! Problems are everywhere and I know we managed really well, especially after severe colonial horror and unlimited loot.

How sad Siddharth looks when Amitav says Opium trading was carried out by traders of all communities. Nothing there for him to use as fodder for his anti-Hindu rhetoric.

Siddharth Vardarajan's exposition is tiresome to put it mildly. He should learn to talk less, its not his book.

This is what happens when mediocre & midwit individuals are elevated. A lot of their time is spent in researching something so they invent a world where that one explains everything. For example, if you have bought and worn clothes, you are very likely to worn zippers made by YKK. Anyone who owns a savings account or a pension has at least a minute fraction invested in clothing businesses that somehow trade in YKK zippers. Many of those people deal in other things like commercial real estate, pharmaceuticals, publishing. There will be military fatigues made using YKK zippers. There will be business leaders, politicians and public servants wearing YKK zippers. A person Ghosh researching all these connections will come away with imagining there is grand conspiracy or mechanism around YKK zippers.

@frankyong2607

5 ай бұрын

?

Unimpressive in the extreme. So much of empty blabber.

WIRE.very.very.good