Damn, major blast from past I’d completely forgotten about. Was just reminded of the Soviet Misha children’s magazine I used to read as a kid. There’s some weird programming in my head.
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Semi related- we tend to assume that people we like have similar internal worlds to our own. The intellectual landscape of educated Indians is vastly different from that of educated Brits or Americans, I am starting to understand
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Well, I shouldn't overstate it. Strong Soviet influence for my generation, but main foreign influence is still British. We read Russian stuff in English translation. People like me think in English. Indian stuff runs on a different non-default VM with hypervisor switching.
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The contribution of english speaking Indians to modern British culture is important and subtle. For example - we all forgot about PG Wodehouse. There’s something special about your culture being fully grokked from a truly foreign perspective
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You think it is fully grokked? I don't actually think it is. PGW is mainly appreciated at a relatively shallow level of linguistic wit.
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“Fully grokked” - at least as well as by European heritage folks like me, I think. Although if I say that too wholeheartedly I’m contradicting my whole “we don’t know what other people are thinking” thing. Tricky business this Twitter
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I think there's an important difference -- there's no ground truth to reference. For local brits, you've seen 1890s - 1920s world actually transform to modernity. For Indians, it's all books triangulating each other (PGW triangulates Christie/Doyle/Blyton...)
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Hmmm - I’m not sure I disagree - but if I did what I’d say is 1 my generation hasn’t seen anything before the 70s we see it all reflected through other people’s words 2 I don’t think humans are very good at remembering what things were like before - we all behave like things /1
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Heh, this year for the first time, I spent time outside london, stayed in a small town in an airbnb in an actual old vicarage... definitely added depth to purely textual/tv understandings
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Like gay marriage have always been popular causes when even Barack Obama was opposed to it in his first term in office... 3 the transformation of British culture is hugely to do with empire and who has experience of all aspects of empire more than educated wealthy Indians? /2
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I'm guessing it's like 30% "empire colonizes back", 30% modernity/technology, 40% genuinely new things happening on the island itself...
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