Word: indians
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Haze of Heat. The land is vast and cruel, running some 2,000 miles from the icy peaks of the Himalayas, in the heart of central Asia, down to the steaming jungles of Cape Comorin, on the Indian Ocean. In summer, wrote Rudyard Kipling, there is "neither sky, sun, nor horizon. Nothing but a brown-purple haze of heat. It is as though the earth were dying of apoplexy." During this furnace season, millions of Indian villagers lie gasping in their mud huts; wells dry up and fields blow away. When the monsoon rains come in the fall, the torrential...
...this land of paradox, Indian civil airline pilots fly more than 25 million domestic miles a year and jet fighters are being built in Indian factories by Indian workmen. Yet not long ago, when a plane landed for the first time in a district of northern India, peasants tried to feed it hay. The old ways die hard: recently a Westernized and highly educated dean of an Indian law school kept postponing his flight to the U.S. until an auspicious date was selected for him by his astrologer...
India's future hopes and fears both center on the immensity of its population-415 million people. India's population, second only to Red China's, is greater than all of South America, Africa and Australia put together. Indians speak more than 700 languages or dialects and belong to at least seven distinct racial types, from the tall, leathery, light-eyed Punjabi of the north to the frail, black-skinned Tamil of the south. Most of India's millions are underfed, badly housed and racked by disease. The average life expectancy of an Indian at birth...
There are other brakes on progress: the rigidly entrenched caste system, the antipathy of the educated toward manual labor, the 8,000,000 wandering sadhus or holy men (80% reputed to be frauds) who live in idleness. These and the leaden weight of superstition and ignorance make of Indian life, in Nehru's despairing words, "a sluggish stream, living in the past, moving slowly through the accumulations of dead centuries...
Fourteen Hours. Faced with these problems, most Indians beg for time that may not be available. India has been independent only twelve years, they say, and already the inequities of the caste system have been abolished-at least by law if not in practice. The sacredness of cows and the dark night of ignorance will give way, too, they insist, if slowly. But help must come from abroad, and ways and means of rechanneling the stream of Indian life will certainly be discussed this week by Eisenhower and Prime Minister Nehru...