If you had the luck of the Indians
You’d be sorry and wish you were dead.
If you had the luck of the Indians
You’d wish you was English instead!
I have substituted “Indians” for “Irish” in the song “The Luck of the Irish” by John Lennon.
I was born and brought up in India. By most measures, I did get a decent schooling in India. But my education did not expose me to any even remotely accurate version of history. What little “history” was taught was a heap of lies over a handful of selected politically correct sanitized facts about India’s past. The horrors that the Islamic invaders and the European colonial rulers of India committed on Indians were carefully hidden.
Many of my closest friends are Irish. I learned a bit of Irish history as a consequence. Like the Indians, the British brutalized the Irish. We Indians and Irish have something in common: tortured, exploited, and killed by the British.
How brutal was the British Raj is something that most Indians — yours truly included — don’t have any clue about. After all, the Indian education system is government controlled and the government (so far) is just British Raj 2.0. School text books can only have what the government wishes you to know. Neither Nehru nor Gandhi had any reason to really expose the monstrous deeds of the British. But thanks to the internet and the web, people have the opportunity to get a better understanding of what really happened and why.
You must read Rajnikant Puranik’s piece “The Brutalization of India by the British–Part 1” — and weep:
Go read "The Brutalization of India" by @Rajnikant_rkp and weep for those who suffered under the British http://t.co/RH11ZOAhvW
— Atanu Dey (@atanudey) June 10, 2014
//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
And now the song by John Lennon, MBE. MBE of course stands for “Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.” Lennon was English, not Irish. And he was decorated by the British. Yet he wrote a song condemning the British for what they did to the Irish. The man had integrity.
The Luck of the Irish
If you had the luck of the Irish
You’d be sorry and wish you were dead
You should have the luck of the Irish
And you’d wish you was English instead!A thousand years of torture and hunger
Drove the people away from their land
A land full of beauty and wonder
Was raped by the British brigands! Goddamn! Goddamn!If you could keep voices like flowers
There’d be shamrock all over the world
If you could drink dreams like Irish streams
Then the world would be high as the mountain of mornIn the ‘Pool they told us the story
How the English divided the land
Of the pain, the death and the glory
And the poets of Auld IrelandIf we could make chains with the morning dew
The world would be like Galway Bay
Let’s walk over rainbows like leprechauns
The world would be one big Blarney stoneWhy the hell are the English there anyway?
As they kill with God on their side
Blame it all on the kids the IRA
As the bastards commit genocide! Aye! Aye! Genocide!If you had the luck of the Irish
You’d be sorry and wish you was dead
You should have the luck of the Irish
And you’d wish you was English instead!
Yes you’d wish you was English instead!
Life is a Random Draw 
I don’t agree that extreme representations of the mental and physical tortures of the freedom struggle should be depicted in history books in schools. Wonder what benefit it will have. From my school memory, the Indian Freedom Struggle taught to us and the content of the books did imbibe in us pride and deep respect for our freedom fighters and the value of independence from oppression.
LikeLike