(Again with Wells, Nehru is not a fan of organized religion, largely viewing it as nothing more than elaborate conspiracy to keep people from thinking about being poor. He also draws out these lessons in contradiction, contrasting “priest-ridden” India with China, which he views as more rationalistic even in antiquity. As an actor in India’s ongoing drama for independence, no doubt there are lessons he hopes to apply in practice. These connections are partially the result of him writing as teacher to his daughter, but as he admits the letters serve him as well, allowing him to reflect and inwardly digest the lessons of history. Even when writing on other topics, like Ireland’s perennial fight with England, allusions to India are common. Not surprisingly, India and Southeast Asia are at the book’s heart. While Wells and Nehru share a common worldview, however - scientifically centered and politically progressive, the two combining in a ready belief that science was on the precipice of conquering politics and economics with state socialism - Nehru writes more broadly of the world. Glimpses reminded me much of H.G.Wells’ Outline of History, and this is no accident Nehru quotes it a few times, using it as one of his sources. He was as conversant with the weaknesses and pains of the human experience as the potential and glory. Here was a man whose deep appreciation for human history allowed him to create from memory and notes, an epic history of the world without recourse to a library - who would, in the progress of the letters, continually connect them to one another in one fabric of historical reflections. Having read Glimpses, having spent upwards of a month with Nehru, reading these intimate letters to his daughter, I can more readily believe that he wrote such a thing. Most striking was a story his biographer, Shashi Tharoor shared - that Nehru was so unnerved by his support in office that he wrote an anonymous letter warning people to be more skeptical - “Nehru has all the makings of a dictator…we want no Caesars”. I first encountered him some six years ago, when I watched the film Gandhi and found him such a sympathetic figure that I read his biography and became utterly transfixed by him. Of course, their author was an extraordinary man.
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