Error: I'm afraid this is the first I've heard of a "txt" flavoured Blosxom. Try dropping the "/+txt" bit from the end of the URL.
Rudyard Kipling: Kim
I figured I'd try reading some eBooks on the iPod Touch, as it is easy enough to get free content from Project Gutenberg into Apple's iBooks application, and the latter is not too clunky for the most part; the screen is so small that any decent text blows out to 800+ "pages". The integrated dictionary was quite useful to, especially as I started out thinking that Lahore was on the coast.
In any case I'd been meaning to read Kim for so long I can't remember why. It's a playful romp through colonial (pre-partition) India, about a white kid who goes sufficiently native to attract the interest of the colonial regime in the "Great Game" they play against Russia for control of Asia west of China. According to the fount of all knowledge, Nehru rated it his favourite novel. Rudyard Kipling got the Nobel Prize for literature in 1907, so early and so young; a reactionary opening of the doors by the committee, I guess.
Here Kipling seems to endorse India in all its messiness, and perhaps also the colonial regime insofar as it gives the white man access to the subcontinent and furnishes the story with the ever-attractive gloss of spycraft. I don't think he condescends to the natives here, but what would I know.
#