Born in then Bombay and speaking Hindi as his first language, thus were the early childhood days of author and short story innovator Rudyard Kipling. Since it was India that he was born in, many of his stories were inspired by our land. Such is his writing prowess that the fame of his novel The Jungle Book precedes his own popularity. This journalist and novelist, who passed away on January 18, 1936, was also the first English writer and the youngest one to win the Nobel Prize for Literature as of 2016. What is lesser-known, however, is his mettle as a short story writer and the power of his poetry. For instance, consider these lines:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run—
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
These motivation-boosting lines are from his most well-known poem If. And while we are talking about his poems, The White Man’s Burden is worth a mention because it reveals that he was a “prophet of British imperialism”. These are not our words, this is what author George Orwell (of 1984 fame) called him. The aforementioned poem reeks of Eurocentric racism.
Such cheaters!
Germany is revered as the best makers of automobiles. And one of their products Volkswagen, a much-revered vehicle around the world, was directed to pay one billion rupees ($14.2 million) on January 18, 2019. Why? To compensate for the "cheat devices'' they installed in their vehicles which helped them bypass emission norms. This is an accusation it is facing in many countries.
