Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World. Part 7Twain, Mark
General
Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World. Part 7
Twain, Mark
Equator -- Description and travel; Twain, Mark, 1835-1910 -- Travel; Voyages around the world
"The education that we give makes the boys a little less clownish in
their manners, and more intelligent when spoken to by strangers. On
the other hand, it has made them less contented with their lot in
life, and less willing to work with their hands. The form which
discontent takes in this country is not of a healthy kind; for, the
Natives of India consider that the only occupation worthy of an
educated man is that of a writership in some office, and especially
in a Government office. The village schoolboy goes back to the plow
with the greatest reluctance; and the town schoolboy carries the
same discontent and inefficiency into his father's workshop.
Sometimes these ex-students positively refuse at first to work; and
more than once parents have openly expressed their regret that they
ever allowed their sons to be inveigled to school."
The little book which I am quoting from is called "Indo-Anglian
Literature," and is well stocked with "baboo" English--clerkly English,
hooky English, acquired in the schools. Some of it is very funny,
--almost as funny, perhaps, as what you and I produce when we try to write
in a language not our own; but much of it is surprisingly correct and
free. If I were going to quote good English--but I am not. India is
well stocked with natives who speak it and write it as well as the best
of us. I merely wish to show some of the quaint imperfect attempts at
the use of our tongue. There are many letters in the book; poverty
imploring help--bread, money, kindness, office generally an office, a
clerkship, some way to get food and a rag out of the applicant's
unmarketable education; and food not for himself alone, but sometimes for
a dozen helpless relations in addition to his own family; for those
people are astonishingly unselfish, and admirably faithful to their ties
of kinship. Among us I think there is nothing approaching it. Strange
as some of these wailing and supplicating letters are, humble and even
groveling as some of them are, and quaintly funny and confused as a
goodly number of them are, there is still a pathos about them, as a rule,
that checks the rising laugh and reproaches it. In the following letter
"father" is not to be read literally. In Ceylon a little native
beggar-girl embarrassed me by calling me father, although I knew she was
mistaken. I was so new that I did not know that she was merely following
the custom of the dependent and the supplicant.
"SIR,
"I pray please to give me some action (work) for I am very poor boy
I have no one to help me even so father for it so it seemed in thy
good sight, you give the Telegraph Office, and another work what is
your wish I am very poor boy, this understand what is your wish you
my father I am your son this understand what is your wish.
"Your Sirvent, P. C. B."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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