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- Denis Giles
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Like the man on the moon, there is an old man in Mars. He stroked his white beard as he looked through his telescope at the spaceship that was encircling his planet, "There's a ship from earth!" he announced and watched as his equally old wife came scurrying from an underground cave and peered through the glass which he held out for her. "They'll take photographs and send it back to earth and they'll announce to one another that there's life on Mars!"
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- Denis Giles
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Two years ago, a new dog, with long pointed ears, entered the colony I live in. Nobody wanted the new stray, to stay in the premises, and so all the watchmen were kept very busy, every day chasing it out of the gates, but somehow it managed to enter again and I marveled at its perseverance.
Not only did it have to contend with the watchmen, the pump man and all the sweepers who ran after it with their brooms and sometimes empty dustbins but it also had to deal with the three existing strays in the colony.
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- Denis Giles
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As I watch the Bengal elections, I imagine a foreigner friend asking me, “How can a candidate win an election without a debate?”
To show him we could also have what the west had, I decided to organize one.
We picked a moderator.
“Your speech will make the difference!” said the moderator with a smile to the two candidates.
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- Denis Giles
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Haven’t been to a station in a while, and I’m not sure they have weighing machines on railway platforms like there used to have before. This particular weighing machine, I remember, always had a long line of people waiting to weigh themselves, unlike the one next to it, “Why?” I asked the mother of my friend who worked in the railways booking counter.
“Because it’s defective!” she smiled as she gave her son, my friend, money so we both could have a coke later.
“Defective?” I asked, “But then wouldn’t people avoid it?”
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- Denis Giles
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‘Rebellion!” is the name of the Netflix serial I am watching. Based on incidents just after the First World War when Irish soldiers were used to fight against the Germans, and asked themselves, “Whose war is this? Ours or that of the British?” And then an even bigger question, “Whose freedom are we fighting for? Ours, or that of those who have taken ours away?”
Well, I guess that must have been a question our own soldiers asked as they fought in both the world wars, alongside their British masters, even as we fought for our own freedom. Our leaders like the Irish were jailed, and many were injured. As I watched the movie, and later as I saw the interview Oprah Winfrey had with Megan and Prince Harry, I realized how racist the British were and still are and how important the freedom movement was to us Indians, to be treated as first class citizens of the world!