My Life

My Life - Oswald Mosleybetween their feet swam a glittering variety of oriental fish with jewels round theirnecks and tails, while into his hand was pressed wine in a goblet cut from a singleruby. Sparkling waterfalls—iridescent from various coloured lights placed behindthem—rested their vision until dark, when boats of silver and golden hue conveyedthem to love trysts in pagodas again surrounded by the eternally scented waters. Ittook just three generations of that way of life to turn the northern conquerors intodrivelling incapables; the hard ice melted into the slush of the plain. It was Schillerwho wrote that only the high gods could combine sensuous beauty of existence withspiritual peace, which in his neo-Hellenic thinking could come only from the strivingof achievement and creation.I developed a deep and abiding affection for India, and resolved to help in its difficultproblems if fate ever gave me the chance. Never has there been such a world ofcontrast; the terrible suffering of the masses in the slums of Bombay and Bengal; theabysmal poverty of millions gripped fast in old belief which denied the saving hand ofmodern science; the shock of incidents such as the dwarf, part animal, part human,tapping my leg when I was alone in the midst of a rather hostile Indian crowd, at thebehest of his wealthy and humorous owner, who led him with a chain round his necklike a dog; the physical beauty of many Indian men and women, comparable withanything on earth and illumined by a combination of inner goodness and of high andfine intelligence; the Taj Mahal reflected in the water by moonlight—built by ShahJehan and set in a cadre of cypresses by Lord Curzon—a symbol of Indian beautyrising from squalor and horror. India is a land of contrast, of ineffable beauty and ofdarkest sorrow, a jewel of the world, which challenges mankind to save it.107 of 424