Word: india
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...accelerating at an unprecedented rate. But what is more of a vexation in our modern times--a temporal Tower of Babel, as you could call it--is that everything's mixed up: fast and slow are present in every country, often, and in every household. Ancient cultures, as in India and China, are eager to invite the future to come to stay, so long as it doesn't interfere with the way things have always been; software technicians in the Silicon Valley--many of Indian or Chinese descent--try to bring neighborhood to a virtual borderless world (even as their...
...richest empires are Ming dynasty China and the realm of the Ottomans, which blocks western Europe's old land routes to the east. Portugal and Spain seek oceanic alternatives; Lisbon rounds the Cape of Good Hope to reach India; Madrid crosses the Atlantic in hopes of landing in Marco Polo's Cathay but finds the Americas instead. Two continents are suddenly open to conquest...
...when he was 61, and he and his followers marched 240 miles in 24 days to make their own salt from the sea in defiance of British colonial laws and taxes. By the time he reached the sea, several thousand had joined his march, and all along India's coast thousands more were doing the same. More than 60,000 were eventually arrested, including Gandhi, but it was clear who would end up the victors...
Gandhi did not see the full realization of his dreams; India finally gained independence, but a civil war between Hindus and Muslims resulted, despite his efforts, in the bloody birth of Pakistan. He was killed, on his way to prayers, by a Hindu fanatic...
Every afternoon, Gandhi did an hour or two of spinning on his little handwheel, sometimes 400 yards at a sitting. "I am spinning the destiny of India," he would say. The thread went to make cloth for his followers, and he hoped his example would convince Indians that homespun could free them from dependence on foreign products. But the real point of the spinning was to teach appreciation for manual labor, restore self-respect lost to colonial subjugation and cultivate inner strength...