New vending machines in Canary Wharf are serving up free reads on white privilege and colonialism. The Telegraph has the story.
Publisher Penguin Books and the Canary Wharf Group have teamed up to relaunch Short Story Stations in the area’s Crossrail Place Roof Garden and Jubilee Place.
Poems, stories and extracts championing “diversity and inclusion” will be free to print from vending machines to celebrate South Asian Heritage Month, Black History Month and LGBTQ+ Pride Month.
Commuters will have access to extracts from books such as Sathnam Sanghera’s Empireworld, in which he explores the cultural, economic and political impact of the British Empire, and Kalwant Bhopal’s Race and Education. …
Visitors will be able to print the one, three or five-minute-long stories onto eco-friendly paper. …
The short story vending machines were first launched in Canary Wharf in 2019.
It comes after it was announced that the HSBC skyscraper in Canary Wharf would turn it into a tourist hub with terraces for visitors to enjoy views of London. …
Just over half of the businesses based in Canary Wharf are now in the finance industry, down from 70% about a decade ago.
Worth reading in full.
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White Privilege is the privilege non-white people enjoy from all the great things white people have given the World freely over the course of the last 2 000 years or so, which non-whites otherwise wouldn’t have.
Where do we send the bill?
I didn’t know there was a South Asian Heritage Month. Of course much like
Blacks, South Asians can simply be lumped together into one group, and they all get along so well together.
Morgan Freeman said most of what needs to be said about Black History Month.
I highly recommend Kartar Lalvani’s book, The Making of India, the Untold Story of British Enterprise.
Quoting the author from the back cover,
In the seventeenth century, a small seafaring island dispatched fragile sailing ships in search of new opportunities. In the end they helped build a new nation, from dozens of kingdoms and languages, that became the world’s largest democracy. The sheer audacity, courage and enterprise of such an endeavour have no parallel in world history.
The sins of colonial rule are well documented, but now 70 years after Independence, are we not obliged to look back dispassionately and to give credit where credit is due?
It is worth pausing to consider what India would be like today if the British had chosen to stay at home. This is the untold story.
And on the inside cover:
From the iron girders, tools and workers that made the treacherous 12,000-mile voyage, to the tea, spices, silk and cotton that returned home, this book assesses those first ground-breaking endeavours and the two centuries of British imperial rule that followed … the first pioneers used girders for more than 100,000 bridges, track for 45,000 miles of railway and countless pieces of heavy machinery to begin physically building the world’s largest democracy. With penetrating detail on the establishment of trade links through to the creation of the judiciary, universities, museums and libraries, via chapters on the roads, railways and seas, the author examines the British engineering feats that remain unparalleled today.
Of course, the amazing effort of those times did not only apply to India but also to the other countries in the British Empire. And note how vastly much more of that effort was ‘give’, as opposed to ‘take’, driven primarily by the British desire to do good to others, to share advancements, to improve the world we and others live in. Ultimately, this good will was the reason why the empire was disbanded, creating numerous democracies such as India.
And from 1577 onwards, England – then GB – traded gold, silver, linen for goods from overseas particularly Asia, not taken as plunder as the usual dummkopfs insists.
Tata was set up by an Indian entrepreneur that made his money selling cotton to the UK when the supplies from the US stopped during the US Civil War. Tata went on to become the largest steal producer in the British Empire. At no point was Tata impeded by GB. India’s space programme has its roots in the EIC.
I worked in Canary Wharf for a short contract and my job was to mentor a team in India to do what I did. Once the overall project was in a good state my contract ended and the Indian team were brought here and housed. The rest of the UK team was also let go even though they were highly skilled.
On another contract for a different company the same strategy prevailed where there was a large Indian team here ad in India. On one occasion a very experienced and excellent women programmer was let go and she was replaced by a much cheaper Indian in India.
Very useful information, that! The Indian Tata Billionaire pulled the same trick with British Steel, building replica factories in India, forcing British steel workers and engineers to train their replacements, then once the replica factories were up and running in India, he announced he was shutting down UK production, and blamed “China”.
Another example like yours was a friend whose IT colleagues at Boeing in Seattle, with decades of experience, were forced to train their Indian replacements, and then made redundant.
The Indian IT applicants in the West have plenty of impressive-looking-but-fraudulently-obtained certificates to wave, but are generally so incompetent that their work needs to be repaired by Ethnic Europeans.
I forgot to add that Boeing then handed over the whole IT operation to India, and later wondered why their planes were falling out of the sky.
This is the other side of mass immigration. The new arrivals turn on the original population. First they claim everything we do is racist, so the race card gets played at every opportunity. We bend over backwards to accommodate them with equality and diversity acts etc, We spend vast sums on interpreters so the new arrivals are not disadvantaged, meaning there is no urgency for them to learn English and they can remain in their enclaves for longer. We arrest our own people for “hate crimes” should we dare to question this mass immigration with no concern for where all these people are to live, where they are to get their health care and schools for their children etc. The new arrivals bring with them their own culture and way of life and try to impose that on us. They rant on about colonialism, they haul down statues in an attempt to erase our past and we are so scared to be labelled racist and realise how our own government will clamp down on us if we are, that we keep our mouths shut, creating a huge anger bubble that eventually bursts. It is bursting NOW.
Save the ‘eco friendly’ paper. The rubbish should be printed on coconut or aloe vera infused toilet tissue. Then a real use can be found for it.
Not again! I well remember having a book by Andrea Levy being pressed on me in numerous outlets including the library. I forget the title – I think it was in the 1990s.
The booksellers almost begged me to take this free book and although I declined (I sensed it was the sort of book that was going to chide me for being part of Imperialist Britain and inviting me to feel ashamed) a copy was popped into my bag ‘well, take it anyway – you might change your mind’.
I never even opened it. This has been going on for too long; is Penguin yet another brand I’m going to have to boycott?