More Rudyard Kipling Fun!

Kipling had quite a wicked sense of humour. A smattering of quotations from the book Kipling Abroad:

• On Calcutta, one city on the subcontinent of his birth which he despised:

[p. 62] "When I had disgusted all who knew me, I fled to Calcutta, which, I was pained to see, still persisted in being a city and transacting commerce after I had formally cursed it one year ago. That curse I now repeat, in the hope that the unsavoury capital will collapse."

• On the city of Oakland, East of San Francisco:

[p. 108] "We pulled out at the wholly insignificant speed of twenty-five miles an hour through the streets of a suburb of fifty thousand, and in our progress among the carts and the children and the shop fronts slew nobody; at which I was not a little disappointed."

• On Yellowstone National Park, which provoked all Kipling's favourite bugbears, primarily "tourists," whom he scorned with an intensity completely unmatched by even the most vociferous travel-snob of today:

[pp. 112-3] "To-day I am in the Yellowstone Park, and I wish I were dead... The tourists -- may their master die an evil death at the hand of a mad locomotive!"

• On Chicago, which reminds him of the first city he truly despised. [While there he witnessed the slaughterhouse industry, which in a few years would be the subject of Upton Sinclair's famous exposé The Jungle (1906) ]:

[p. 116] "It holds rather more than a million people with bodies, and stands on the same sort of soil as Calcutta. Having seen it, I urgently desire never to see it again. It is inhabited by savages. Its water is the water of the Hughli, and its air is dirt."