Would you want to settle down in the US?

[utubekhiladi]

Would you want to settle down in the US?

- YEP

India has become a rotten country,...

and it stinks..

 

[Singh]

Would you want to settle down in the US?

- YEP

India has become a rotten country,...

and it stinks..

I hope you relinquish your Indian citizenship !

 

[Ray]

The US is a great country.

Its greatness is best appreciated from far.

 

[Ray]

Would you want to settle down in the US?

- YEP

India has become a rotten country,...

and it stinks..

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven


AND


Breathes there the man with soul so dead
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne'er within him burned,
As home his footsteps he hath turned
From wandering on a foreign strand!
If such there breathe, go, mark him well;
For him no minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonored , and unsung.

 

[W.G.Ewald]

Breathes there the man with soul so dead ...

As many time as I have heard the first two lines of that poem, I had to look up the fact that Sir Walter Scott was the author.

Sir Walter Scott was highly thought of in the antebellum South (US).

 

[W.G.Ewald]

The Man Without a Country

The Man Without a Country - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The protagonist is a young United States Army lieutenant, Philip Nolan, who develops a friendship with the visiting Aaron Burr. When Burr is tried for treason (historically this occurred in 1807), Nolan is tried as an accomplice. During his testimony, he bitterly renounces his nation, angrily shouting, "Damn the United States! I wish I may never hear of the United States again!" The judge, on convicting him, icily grants him his wish: he is to spend the rest of his life aboard United States Navy warships, in exile, with no right ever again to set foot on U.S. soil, and with explicit orders that no one shall ever mention his country to him again.

The sentence is carried out to the letter. For the rest of his life, Nolan is transported from ship to ship, living out his life as a prisoner on the high seas, never once allowed back in a home port. None of the sailors in whose custody Nolan remains are allowed to speak to him about the U.S., and his newspapers are censored. Nolan is unrepentant at first, but over the years becomes sadder and wiser, and desperate for news. One day, as he is being transferred to another ship, he beseeches a young sailor never to make the same mistake that he had: "Remember, boy, that behind all these men... behind officers and government, and people even, there is the Country Herself, your Country, and that you belong to her as you belong to your own mother. Stand by her, boy, as you would stand by your mother...!"

Deprived of a homeland, Nolan slowly and painfully learns the true worth of his country. He misses it more than his friends or family, more than art or music or love or nature. Without it, he is nothing. Dying, he shows his room to an officer named Danforth; it is "a little shrine" of patriotism. The Stars and Stripes are draped around a picture of George Washington. Over his bed, Nolan has painted an eagle, with lightning "blazing from his beak" and claws grasping the globe. At the foot of his bed is a dated map of the old territories. Nolan smiles, "Here, you see, I have a country!" Nolan dies content after Danforth finally tells him all that has happened to the U.S. since his sentence was imposed. Nolan asks him to have them bury him in the sea and have a gravestone placed in memory of him, at Fort Adams, Mississippi, or at New Orleans.

 

[Ray]

I read the book "The Man Without a Country" a story by American writer Edward Everett Hale.

It is the story of American Army lieutenant Philip Nolan, who renounces his country during a trial for treason and is consequently sentenced to spend the rest of his days at sea without so much as a word of news about the United States.

I have never forgotten the story.

It is so moving and so painful a truth that not to love your country is merely an expression of anger that one regrets when one is denied his country!

God own truth is that we love our country so much that when it does not deliver our dreams, we curse it (in actuality not the country, but the skunks who govern it)!

That too, is nothing unusual!

 

[W.G.Ewald]

I have never forgotten the story.

It was so well written a piece of fiction that many believe it to be a true story.

 

[Ray]

I always thought it was a true story.

The poor man was denied all reference to the US including newspapers or people talking about the US to him.

So moving and so heart wrenching!

I wish no one faces that Fate!