2025-09-06
The problem with poetry is that you can never be quite sure where you will end up.
So it is with Rudyard Kipling, that despised relic of white colonial life who believed that he could write some lines of words that somebody somewhere would find interesting, despite attending "the school of hard knocks", never studying at the right universities nor schooling in the intricacies of journalism politics and economics.
In the event he ended up with his name plastered all over the outside of packets of pre-manufactured (but "exceedingly nice") cakes in the supermarkets of his home country.
He had what we might think of as a hard childhood, was sent to an "inferior boarding school", and it was his real life experiences in England and in India that shaped his attitude to life, and no doubt his writings. He learned through doing (and being done to).
Perhaps it's no surprise that today's Britain where East meets West on our home turf may offer similarities to life in colonial India - we inhabit a kind of inverted but as yet incomplete reverse take-over where the once colonised have almost taken over the home establishment ... only to find that the "mother of parliaments" is a puppet show and the real power lies elsewhere.
What happens now?
Perhaps his writings may offer some clues ...
