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Loot: in search of the East India Company

Nick Robins
Concerns about corporate power and responsibility are as old as the corporation itself. In this account of the East India Company, the world’s first transnational corporation, Nick Robins argues that an unholy alliance between British government, military and commerce held India in slavery, reversed the flow of trade and cultural influence forever between the East and West and then sunk almost without trace under the weight of colonial guilt.

View of Lahore in the mid nineteenth century,
Mid nineteenth century view of Lahore, home to one of the Emperor’s courts during the Mughal period. Panoramic scroll by an Indian artist. Or.11186
© British Library

Ours is a corporate age. Yet, amid the fertile arguments on how to tame and transform today’s corporations, there is a curious absence, a sense that the current era of business dominance is somehow unique. For there was a time when corporations really ruled the world, and among the commercial dinosaurs that once straddled the globe, Britain’s East India Company looms large. At its height, the Company ruled over a fifth of the world’s people, generated a revenue greater than the whole of Britain and commanded a private army a quarter of a million strong.

Warren Hastings

‘The most formidable commercial republic known to the world’ Warren Hastings, 1780 (1732–1818). Painting by a Mughal artist c1782
Or 6633.f.67r © British Library

Although it started out as a speculative vehicle to import precious spices from the East Indies – modern-day Indonesia – the Company grew to fame and fortune by trading with and then conquering India. And for many Indians, it was the Company’s plunder that first de-industrialised their country and then provided the finance that fuelled Britain’s own industrial revolution. In essence, the Honourable East India Company found India rich and left it poor.
But visit London today, where the Company was headquartered for over 250 years, and nothing is there to mark its rise and fall, its power and its crimes. Like a snake, the City seems embarrassed of an earlier skin. All that remains is a pub – the East India Arms on Fenchurch Street. Cramped, but popular with office workers, the pub stands at the centre of the Company’s former commercial universe.

The absence of any memorial to the East India Company is peculiar. For this was not just any corporation. Not only was it the first major shareholder owned company, but it was also a pivot that changed the course of economic history. During its lifetime, the Company first reversed the ancient flow of wealth from West to East, and then put in place new systems of exchange and exploitation. From Roman times, Europe had always been Asia’s commercial supplicant, shipping out gold and silver in return for spices, textiles and luxury goods. And for the first 150 years after its establishment by Queen Elizabeth I in 1600, the Company had to repeat this practice; there was simply nothing that England could export that the East wanted to buy.

Clive’s victory over the Nawab of Bengal at Plassey in 1757
© British Library

The situation changed dramatically in the middle of the 18th century, as the Company’s officials took advantage of the decline of the Mughal Empire and began to acquire the hinterland beyond its vulnerable coastal trading posts. Territorial control enabled the Company both to manipulate the terms of trade in its favour and gouge taxes from the lands it ruled. Within a few years of Clive’s freak victory over the Nawab of Bengal at Plassey in 1757, the Company had managed to halt the export of bullion eastwards, creating what has poetically been called the ‘unrequited trade’ – using the East’s own resources to pay for exports back to Europe. The impacts of this huge siphoning of wealth were immense, creating a ‘misery’ of ‘an essentially different and infinitely more intensive kind than all Hindustan had to suffer before’, in the words of a columnist writing for the New York Tribune in 1853, one Karl Marx..

‘An unbounded ocean of business’
Daniel Defoe (1660–1731)
Established as a means to capture control of the pepper trade from the Dutch, the East India Company prospered as an importer of luxury goods, first textiles and then tea. From the middle of the 17th century on, the growing influx of cottons radically improved hygiene and comfort, while tea transformed the customs and daily calendar of the people. And it was in the huge five-acre warehouse complex at Cutlers Gardens that these goods were stored prior to auction at East India House. Here, over 4,000 workers sorted and guarded the Company’s stocks of wondrous Indian textiles: calicoes, muslins and dungarees, ginghams, chintzes and seersuckers, taffetas, alliballlies and hum hums. Today, the Company’s past at Cutlers Gardens is marked with ceramic tiles that bear a ring of words: ‘silks, skins, tea, ivory, carpets, spices, feathers, cottons’, but still no mention of the company itself.

A pile-carpet loom at Hunsur, Mysore 1850
Add Or 755
© British Library

This lifestyle revolution was not without opposition. For hundreds of years, India had been renowned as the workshop of the world, combining great skill with phenomenally low labour costs in textile production. As the Company’s imports grew, so local manufacturers in England panicked. In 1699, things came to a head and London’s silk weavers rioted, storming East India House in protest at cheap imports from India. The following year, Parliament prohibited the import of all dyed and printed cloth from the East, an act to be followed 20 years later by a complete ban on the use or wearing of all printed calicoes in England – the first of many efforts to protect the European cloth industry from Asian competition. And it was behind these protectionist barriers that England’s mechanised textile industry was to grow and eventually crush India’s handloom industry.

‘What is England now? A sink of Indian wealth, filled by nabobs’
Horace Walpole, 1773 (1717–1797)

East India House
East India House, Leadenhall Street c. 1800

Standing on Leadenhall Street facing the site of East India House, it is difficult to appreciate the raw energy, envy and horror that the Company generated in 18th-century England. Today, Richard Rogers’ sleek Lloyds insurance building stands on the site, but on auction days in the 18th century, the noise of ‘howling and yelling’ from the Sale Room could be heard through the stone walls on the street outside.

For 30 years after Robert Clive’s victory at Plassey, East India House lay at the heart of both the economy and governance of Britain, a monstrous combination of trader, banker, conqueror and power broker. It was from here that the 24 Directors guided the Company’s commercial and increasingly political affairs, always with an eye to the share price; when Clive captured the French outpost of Chandernagore in Bengal in 1757, stocks rose by 12%. The share price moved higher still in the 1760s as investors fed hungrily on news of the apparently endless source of wealth that Bengal would provide. The Company was rapidly extending its reach from trade to the governance of whole provinces, using the taxes raised to pay for the imports of cloth and tea back to England.

In the wake of Enron and other scandals of the dot.com 1990s, the malpractice of many of the Company’s key executives is sadly familiar: embedded corruption, insider trading and appalling corporate governance. In the process, a new class of ‘nabobs’ was created (a corruption of the Hindi word nawab). Clive obtained almost a quarter of a million pounds in the wake of Plassey, and told a House of Commons enquiry into suspected corruption that he was ‘astounded’ at his own moderation at not taking more. Thomas Pitt, Governor of Madras earlier in the century, used his fortune to sustain the political careers of his grandson and great-grandson, both of whom became Prime Minister. By the 1780s, about a tenth of the seats in Parliament were held by ‘nabobs’. They inspired deep bitterness among aristocrats angry at the way they bought their way into high society. A few lone voices – such as the Quaker William Tuke – also pointed to the humanitarian disaster that the Company had wrought in India.

All these forces converged to create a new movement to regulate the Company’s affairs. But so powerful was the Company’s grip on British politics that attempts to control its affairs could bring down governments. In the early 1780s, a Whig alliance of Charles James Fox and Edmund Burke sought to place the Company’s Indian possessions under Parliamentary rule. But their efforts were crushed by an unholy pact of Crown and Company. George III first dismissed the government and then forced a general election, which the Company funded to the hilt, securing a compliant Parliament.

‘A transfer of East India Stock’, political caricature by James Sayer 1783. Charles James Fox carries off East India House into a stronghold of the Crown.P1792 © British Library

Yet the case for reform was overwhelming, and the new Prime Minister, William Pitt the Younger – that beneficiary of his great-grandfather’s time in Madras – pushed through the landmark India Act of 1784. This transferred executive management of the Company’s Indian affairs to a Board of Control, answerable to Parliament. In the final 70 years of its life, the Company would become less and less an independent commercial venture and more a sub-contracted administrator for the British state, a Georgian example of a ‘public–private partnership’.

‘Every rupee of profit made by an Englishman is lost forever to India’
Edmund Burke, 1783 (1729–1797)
For centuries, the City of London has ruled itself from the fine mediaeval Guildhall. It was here in 1794 that the Mayor of London made the Governor-General of Bengal, Lord Cornwallis, an Honorary Freeman of the City, awarding him a gold medal in a gilded box. Cornwallis had certainly earned this prize from Britain’s merchant class. He had defeated Tipu Sultan of Mysore, extracting an eight-figure indemnity, and had just pushed through the ‘permanent settlement’ in Bengal, securing healthy tax revenues for the Company’s shareholders. Seeking to increase the efficiency of tax collection in the Company’s lands, Cornwallis cut through the complex patterns of mutual obligation that existed in the countryside and introduced an essentially English system of land tenure. At the stroke of a pen, the zamindars, a class of tax-farmers under the Mughals, were transformed into landlords. Bengal’s 20 million smallholders were deprived of all hereditary rights. Two hundred years on, and after decades of land reform, the effects still live on in Bengal.
This ‘permanent settlement’ was simply a more systematic form of what had gone before. Just five years after the Company secured control over Bengal in 1765, revenues from the land tax had already tripled, beggaring the people. These conditions helped to turn one of Bengal’s periodic droughts in 1769 into a full-blown famine.

Today, the scale of the disaster inflicted on the people of Bengal is difficult to comprehend. An estimated 10 million people – or one-third of the population – died, transforming India’s granary into a ‘jungle inhabited only by wild beasts’. But rather than organise relief efforts to meet the needs of the starving, the Company actually increased tax collection during the famine [similar policies were applied again more than a hundred years later by the government of British India – see Present Hunger, Past Ghosts] . Many of its officials and traders privately exploited the situation; grain was seized by force from peasants and sold at inflated prices in the cities.

Even in good times the Company’s exactions proved ruinous. The Company became feared for its brutal enforcement of its monopoly interests, particularly in the textile trade. Savage reprisals would be exacted against any weavers found selling cloth to other traders, and the Company was infamous for cutting off their thumbs to prevent them ever working again. In rural areas, almost two-thirds of a peasant’s income would be devoured by land tax under the Company – compared with some 40% under the Mughals. In addition, punitive rates of tax were levied on essentials such as salt, cutting consumption in Bengal by half. The health impacts were cruel, increasing vulnerability to heat exhaustion and lowered resistance to cholera and other diseases, particularly amongst the poorest sections.

The Company’s monopoly control over the production of opium had equally devastating consequences. Grown under Company eyes in Bengal, the opium was auctioned and then privately smuggled into China in increasing volumes. By 1828, opium sales in China were enough to pay for the entire purchase of tea, but at the cost of mass addiction, ruining millions of lives. When the Chinese tried to enforce its import ban, the British sent in the gunboats.

‘The misery hardly finds parallel in the history of commerce’
William Bentinck, 1834
By this time, the Company’s dual role as trader and governor was viewed as increasingly anachronistic – not least by the rising free trade lobby that despised its dominance. Eager to sell its cloth, in 1813, Britain’s textile manufacturers forced the ending of the Company’s monopoly of trade with India. The Company’s commercial days were coming to a close. The final blow came in 1834 with the removal of all trading rights; its docks and warehouses (including those at Cutler Street) were sold off.

Technology, free trade and utilitarian ethics now came together in a powerful package to uplift the degraded people of India. But while the Company promoted a mission to make Indians ‘useful and happy subjects’, the twin pillars of Company rule remained the same: military and commercial conquest. By the 1850s, the budget for ‘social uplift’ was meager – while £15,000 was indeed made available for Indian schools, £5 million went to the military war chest.

The telegraph, steam ship and railway were introduced to accelerate access of British goods to Indian markets. The rapid influx of mill-made cloth shattered the village economy based on an integration of agriculture and domestic spinning, and the great textile capitals of Bengal. Between 1814 and 1835, British cotton cloth exported to India rose 51 times, while imports from India fell to a quarter. During the same period, the population of Dacca shrunk from 150,000 to 20,000. Even the Governor-General, William Bentinck, was forced to report that ‘the misery hardly finds parallel in the history of commerce. The bones of the cotton-weavers are bleaching the plains of India.’

‘Exterminate the Race’
Charles Dickens, 1857 (1812–1870)
Walk to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office from St James’ Park and you will go up ‘Clive’s steps’, named after the statue of Robert Clive that stands without apology outside the old India Office buildings. It was here that the government transferred the administration of India in the wake of the disastrous ‘mutiny’ of 1857. Many explanations have been given for this uprising against Company rule in northern India, but the Company’s increasing racial and administrative arrogance lay at the root.

The East offering its riches to Britannia, by Spiridione Roma Click here for a detailed tour around this painting

Anglo-Indians were excluded from senior positions in the Company; non-European wives of the Company were forbidden to follow their husbands back to Britain. Verbal abuse mounted, with ‘nigger’ becoming a common expression for Indians. This slide into separatism also affected the Company’s relations with its Indian soldiers, the sepoys. One by one, ties between the army and local communities were cut: Hindu and Muslim holy men were barred from blessing the sepoy regimental colours, and troops were stopped from participating in festival parades. As missionary presence grew, fears mounted that the Company was planning forcible conversion to Christianity.
All these sleights and apprehensions came to a head when sepoys in northern India rejected a new type of rifle cartridge, said to be greased with cow and/or pig fat. What turned a mutiny into a rebellion, however, was the Company’s crass behaviour towards local rulers in Oudh, Cawnpore and Jhansi, who all turned against the Company as the soldiers rose. Symbolically, the first act of the mutineers at Meerut was to march the 36 miles to Delhi to claim the puppet Emperor Bahadur Shah as their leader.

The war, known simply as the ‘Indian Mutiny’, lasted for almost two years, and was characterised by extreme savagery on both sides. When the Company retook Cawnpore, where rebel troops had slaughtered European women and children, captured sepoys were made to lick the blood from the floors before being hanged. The reconquest of Delhi by the Company’s troops was followed by systematic sacking, and the surviving inhabitants were turned out of its gates to starve. Bahadur’s two sons and grandson were killed in cold blood, and the old Mughal was stripped of his powers and sent into exile in Rangoon.

Yet the Company that had grown in a symbiotic relationship with the Mughal Empire could not long survive its passing. The uprising itself and the massacres of Europeans had generated a ferocious bloodlust in British society. Even the mild-mannered Charles Dickens declared that ‘I wish I were commander-in-chief in India [for] I would do my utmost to exterminate the Race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested.’ On 1 November 1858, a proclamation was read from every military cantonment in India: the East India Company was abolished and direct rule by Queen and Parliament was introduced. Firework displays followed the proclamation
The Company’s legacy was quickly erased. East India House was demolished in 1861. India was no longer ruled from a City boardroom, but from the imperial elegance of Whitehall.

‘Zakhm gardab gaya, lahu na thama’
(‘Though the wound is hidden, the blood does not cease to flow’)
Asadullah Khan Ghalib (1797–1869)
Many would argue that the Company was no worse and in some respects somewhat better than other conquerors and rulers of India. What sets the Company apart, however, was the remorseless logic of its eternal search for profit, whether through trade, through taxation or through war. The Company was not just any other ruler. As a commercial venture, it could not and did not show pity during the Bengal famine of 1769–1770. Shareholder interests came first when it dispossessed Bengal’s peasantry with its ‘permanent settlement’ of 1794. And the principles of laissez-faire ensured that its Governor-General would note the devastation of India’s weavers in the face of British imports, and then do absolutely nothing.

Many institutions have justifiably disappeared into the anonymity of history. But in a country like Britain that is so drenched in the culture of heritage, the public invisibility of the East India Company is suspicious. Perhaps a single Hindi word can now help to explain this selective memory, this very British reticence: loot.
Nick Robins and the interdisciplinary group PLATFORM have created a critical walk through the London sites and monuments of the East India Company. For more information telephone PLATFORM 00 44 (0)20 7403 3738, or e-mail
platform@….

Some of the images reproduced in this article, together with many more, also appear in the British Library online exhibition Trading Places: The East India Company and Asia 1600-1834.

http://www.opendemocracy.net/theme_7-corporations/article_904.jsp

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بارہ منٹ
ماحول گرم ہو گیا‘ ہم سب کے چہروں پر تناؤ تھا‘ پورے کمرے میں سراسیمگی پھیل رہی تھی‘ مجھے محسوس ہو رہا تھا سامنے بیٹھا شخص ابھی اٹھے گا اور چیخنے والے بدتمیز شخص کے منہ پر تھپڑ مار دے گا‘ ہمارے سامنے وہ شخص اٹھا لیکن تھپڑ مارنے کی بجائے باتھ روم میں گیا‘ وضو کیا‘جائے نماز اٹھائی اور دوسرے کمرے میں چلا گیا‘ ہم اسے شیشے کی دوسری طرف نماز پڑھتے دیکھ سکتے تھے‘ غصے میں تلملاتے شخص نے پانی کے
تین گلاس چڑھائے اور کسی سے ٹیلی فون پر بات کرنے لگا‘ وہ جوں جوں بات کرتا جا رہا تھا اس کا ٹمپریچر نیچے آتا جارہا تھا‘ فون بند ہوا تو اس نے شرمندگی سے ہماری طرف دیکھا اور معذرت خواہانہ لہجے میں بولا
”میں معافی چاہتا ہوں‘ میرے ایجنٹ نے مجھے غلط بتایا تھا‘ میری فائل واقعی یہاں سے پاس ہو گئی تھی‘ میں نے نادانی میں بیگ صاحب سے زیادتی کر دی‘ میں بہت شرمندہ ہوں“ ہم نے شیشے کی دوسری طرف دیکھا‘ بیگ صاحب نہایت خشوع وخضوع سے نماز پڑھ رہے تھے‘ ہم خاموشی سے کبھی تلملاتے شخص کو دیکھنے لگتے اور کبھی نماز پڑھتے بیگ صاحب کو‘ بیگ صاحب نے نماز ختم کی‘ جائے نماز لپیٹی اور درود شریف پڑھتے پڑھتے کمرے میں واپس آ گئے‘ جائے نماز رکھی اور تلملاتے شخص کی طرف دیکھ کر اطمینان سے بولے ”میرے بھائی آپ جا کر تحقیقات کر لیں‘ میں نے واقعی آپ کی فائل بھجوا دی تھی‘ آپ کو اگر فائل نہ ملے تو آپ ایک دو دن میں واپس آ جائیں‘ ہم دونوں مل کر تلاش کریں گے“ وہ شخص روہانسا ہو گیا اور سر جھکا کر بولا ”بیگ صاحب! میں آپ سے معافی چاہتا ہوں‘ آپ درست فرما رہے تھے‘ میرے ایجنٹ نے میرے ساتھ جھوٹ بولا تھا“ بیگ صاحب اٹھے‘ تلملاتے شخص کو گلے لگایا اور تھپکی دے کر رخصت کر دیا‘ وہ شخص شکریہ ادا کرتا کرتا گاڑی میں بیٹھ گیا۔میں اس تمام صورت حال کو حیرت سے دیکھ رہا تھا‘ میں نے تلملاتے شخص کے جانے
کے بعد بیگ صاحب سے پوچھا ”سر آپ کو اس شخص کی گالیوں‘ بدکلامی اور بدتمیزی پر غصہ کیوں نہیں آیا“ وہ مسکرا کر بولے ”آپ کو کس نے بتایا مجھے غصہ نہیں آیا‘ میں غصے سے کھول رہا تھا“ میں نے عرض کیا ”لیکن آپ نے اس کا اظہار نہیں کیا جبکہ آپ سچے اور وہ شخص جھوٹا تھا“ وہ مسکرا کر بولے ”کیونکہ میں غصے کی کیمسٹری کو سمجھتا ہوں اور جو شخص اس کیمسٹری کو سمجھتا ہو وہ بڑی آسانی سے غصہ کنٹرول کر سکتا ہے“ میں نے پوچھا ”سر غصے کی کیمسٹری کیا ہے؟“

وہ مسکرا کر بولے ”ہمارے اندر سولہ کیمیکلز ہیں‘ یہ کیمیکلز ہمارے جذبات‘ ہمارے ایموشن بناتے ہیں‘ ہمارے ایموشن ہمارے موڈز طے کرتے ہیں اور یہ موڈز ہماری پرسنیلٹی بنتے ہیں“ میں خاموشی سے ان کی طرف دیکھتا رہا‘ وہ بولے ”ہمارے ہر ایموشن کا دورانیہ 12 منٹ ہوتا ہے“ میں نے پوچھا ”مثلا“ وہ بولے ”مثلاًغصہ ایک جذبہ ہے‘ یہ جذبہ کیمیکل ری ایکشن سے پیدا ہوتا ہے‘مثلاً ہمارے جسم نے انسولین نہیں بنائی یا یہ ضرورت سے کم تھی‘ ہم نے ضرورت سے زیادہ نمک کھا لیا‘
ہماری نیند پوری نہیں ہوئی یا پھر ہم خالی پیٹ گھر سے باہر آ گئے‘ اس کا کیا نتیجہ نکلے گا؟ہمارے اندر کیمیکل ری ایکشن ہو گا‘ یہ ری ایکشن ہمارا بلڈ پریشر بڑھا دے گا اور یہ بلڈ پریشر ہمارے اندر غصے کا جذبہ پیدا کر دے گا‘ ہم بھڑک اٹھیں گے لیکن ہماری یہ بھڑکن صرف 12 منٹ طویل ہو گی‘ ہمارا جسم 12 منٹ بعد غصے کو بجھانے والے کیمیکل پیدا کر ے گا اور یوں ہم اگلے 15منٹوں میں کول ڈاؤن ہو جائیں گے چنانچہ ہم اگر غصے کے بارہ منٹوں کو مینج کرنا سیکھ لیں تو پھر ہم غصے کی تباہ کاریوں سے بچ جائیں گے“

میں نے عرض کیا ”کیا یہ نسخہ صرف غصے تک محدود ہے“ وہ مسکرا کر بولے ”جی نہیں‘ ہمارے چھ بیسک ایموشنز ہیں‘ غصہ‘ خوف‘ نفرت‘ حیرت‘ لطف(انجوائے) اور اداسی‘ ان تمام ایموشنز کی عمر صرف بارہ منٹ ہو تی ہے‘ ہمیں صرف بارہ منٹ کیلئے خوف آتا ہے‘ ہم صرف 12 منٹ قہقہے لگاتے ہیں‘ ہم صرف بارہ منٹ اداس ہوتے ہیں‘ ہمیں نفرت بھی صرف بارہ منٹ کیلئے ہوتی ہے‘ ہمیں بارہ منٹ غصہ آتا ہے اور ہم پر حیرت کا غلبہ بھی صرف 12 منٹ رہتا ہے‘

ہمارا جسم بارہ منٹ بعد ہمارے ہر جذبے کو نارمل کر دیتا ہے“ میں نے عرض کیا ”لیکن میں اکثر لوگوں کو سارا سارا دن غصے‘ اداسی‘ نفرت اور خوف کے عالم میں دیکھتا ہوں‘ یہ سارا دن نارمل نہیں ہوتے“ وہ مسکرا کر بولے ”آپ ان جذبوں کو آگ کی طرح دیکھیں‘ آپ کے سامنے آگ پڑی ہے‘ آپ اگر اس آگ پر تھوڑا تھوڑا تیل ڈالتے رہیں گے‘ آپ اگر اس پر خشک لکڑیاں رکھتے رہیں گے تو کیا ہو گا؟ یہ آگ پھیلتی چلی جائے گی‘ یہ بھڑکتی رہے گی‘

ہم میں سے زیادہ تر لوگ اپنے جذبات کو بجھانے کی بجائے ان پر تیل اور لکڑیاں ڈالنے لگتے ہیں چنانچہ وہ جذبہ جس نے 12 منٹ میں نارمل ہو جانا تھا وہ دو دو‘ تین تین دن تک وسیع ہو جاتا ہے‘ ہم اگر دو تین دن میں بھی نہ سنبھلیں تو وہ جذبہ ہمارا طویل موڈ بن جاتا ہے اور یہ موڈ ہماری شخصیت‘ ہماری پرسنیلٹی بن جاتا ہے یوں لوگ ہمیں غصیل خان‘ اللہ دتہ اداس‘ ملک خوفزدہ‘ نفرت شاہ‘ میاں قہقہہ صاحب اور حیرت شاہ کہنا شروع کر دیتے ہیں“ وہ رکے اور پھر بولے ”آپ نے کبھی غور کیا ہم میں سے بے شمار لوگوں کے چہروں پر ہر وقت حیرت‘ ہنسی‘ نفرت‘ خوف‘ اداسی یا پھر غصہ کیوں نظر آتا ہے؟

وجہ صاف ظاہر ہے‘ جذبے نے بارہ منٹ کیلئے ان کے چہرے پر دستک دی لیکن انہوں نے اسے واپس نہیں جانے دیا اور یوں وہ جذبہ حیرت ہو‘ قہقہہ ہو‘ نفرت ہو‘ خوف ہو‘ اداسی ہو یا پھر غصہ ہو وہ ان کی شخصیت بن گیا‘ وہ ان کے چہرے پر ہمیشہ ہمیشہ کیلئے درج ہو گیا‘ یہ لوگ اگر وہ بارہ منٹ مینج کر لیتے تو یہ عمر بھر کی خرابی سے بچ جاتے‘ یہ کسی ایک جذبے کے غلام نہ بنتے‘ یہ اس کے ہاتھوں بلیک میل نہ ہوتے“ میں نے عرض کیا ”اور کیا محبت جذبہ نہیں ہوتا“ فوراً جواب دیا ”محبت اور شہوت دراصل لطف کے والدین ہیں‘ یہ جذبہ بھی صرف بارہ منٹ کا ہوتا ہے‘

آپ اگر اس کی بھٹی میں نئی لکڑیاں نہ ڈالیں تو یہ بھی بارہ منٹ میں ختم ہو جاتا ہے لیکن ہم بے وقوف لوگ اسے زلف یار میں باندھ کر گلے میں لٹکا لیتے ہیں اور یوں مجنوں بن کر ذلیل ہوتے ہیں‘ ہم انسان اگر اسی طرح بارہ منٹ بھی گزار لیں تو ہم گناہ‘ جرم اور ذلت سے بچ جائیں لیکن ہم یہ نہیں کر پاتے اور یوں ہم سنگسار ہوتے ہیں‘ قتل ہوتے ہیں‘ جیلیں بھگتتے ہیں اور ذلیل ہوتے ہیں‘ ہم سب بارہ منٹ کے قیدی ہیں‘ ہم اگر کسی نہ کسی طرح یہ قید گزار لیں تو ہم لمبی قید سے بچ جاتے ہیں ورنہ یہ 12 منٹ ہمیں کہیں کا نہیں چھوڑتے“۔

میں نے ان سے عرض کیا ”آپ یہ بارہ منٹ کیسے مینج کرتے ہیں“ وہ مسکرا کر بولے ”میں نے ابھی آپ کے سامنے اس کا مظاہرہ کیا‘ وہ صاحب غصے میں اندر داخل ہوئے‘ مجھ سے اپنی فائل مانگی‘ میں نے انہیں بتایا میں آپ کی فائل پر دستخط کر کے واپس بھجوا چکا ہوں لیکن یہ نہیں مانے‘ انہوں نے مجھ پر جھوٹ اور غلط بیانی کا الزام بھی لگایا اور مجھے ماں بہن کی گالیاں بھی دیں‘ میرے تن من میں آگ لگ گئی لیکن میں کیونکہ جانتا تھا میری یہ صورتحال صرف 12 منٹ رہے گی چنانچہ میں چپ چاپ اٹھا‘

وضو کیا اور نماز پڑھنی شروع کر دی‘ میرے اس عمل پر 20 منٹ خرچ ہوئے‘ ان 20 منٹوں میں میرا غصہ بھی ختم ہو گیا اور وہ صاحب بھی حقیقت پر پہنچ گئے‘ میں اگر نماز نہ پڑھتا تو میں انہیں جواب دیتا‘ ہمارے درمیان تلخ کلامی ہوتی‘ لوگ کام چھوڑ کر اکٹھے ہو جاتے‘ہمارے درمیان ہاتھا پائی ہو جاتی‘ میں اس کا سر پھاڑ دیتا یا یہ مجھے نقصان پہنچا دیتا لیکن اس سارے فساد کا آخر میں کیا نتیجہ نکلتا؟ پتہ چلتا ہم دونوں بے وقوف تھے‘ ہم سارا دن اپنا کان چیک کئے بغیر کتے کے پیچھے بھاگتے رہے چنانچہ میں نے جائے نماز پر بیٹھ کر وہ بارہ منٹ گزار لئے اور یوں میں‘ وہ اور یہ سارا دفتر ڈیزاسٹر سے بچ گیا‘ ہم سب کا دن اور عزت محفوظ ہو گئی“

میں نے پوچھا ”کیا آپ غصے میں ہر بار نماز پڑھتے ہیں“ وہ بولے ”ہرگز نہیں‘ میں جب بھی کسی جذبے کے غلبے میں آتا ہوں تو میں سب سے پہلے اپنا منہ بند کر لیتا ہوں‘ میں زبان سے ایک لفظ نہیں بولتا‘ میں قہقہہ لگاتے ہوئے بھی بات نہیں کرتا‘ میں صرف ہنستا ہوں اور ہنستے ہنستے کوئی دوسرا کام شروع کر دیتا ہوں‘ میں خوف‘ غصے‘ اداسی اور لطف کے حملے میں واک کیلئے چلا جاتا ہوں‘ غسل کرلیتا ہوں‘ وضو کرتا ہوں‘ 20 منٹ کیلئے چپ کا روزہ رکھ لیتا ہوں‘ استغفار کی تسبیح کرتا ہوں‘

اپنی والدہ یا اپنے بچوں کو فون کرتا ہوں‘ اپنے کمرے‘ اپنی میز کی صفائی شروع کر دیتا ہوں‘ اپنا بیگ کھول کر بیٹھ جاتا ہوں‘ اپنے کان اور آنکھیں بند کر کے لیٹ جاتا ہوں یا پھر اٹھ کر نماز پڑھ لیتا ہوں یوں بارہ منٹ گزر جاتے ہیں‘ طوفان ٹل جاتا ہے‘ میری عقل ٹھکانے پر آ جاتی ہے اور میں فیصلے کے قابل ہو جاتا ہوں“ وہ خاموش ہو گئے‘ میں نے عرض کیا ”اور اگر آپ کو یہ تمام سہولتیں حاصل نہ ہوں تو آپ کیا کرتے ہیں“ وہ رکے‘ چند لمحے سوچا اور بولے ”آسمان گر جائے یا پھر زمین پھٹ جائے‘ میں منہ نہیں کھولتا‘

میں خاموش رہتا ہوں اور آپ یقین کیجئے سونامی خواہ کتنا ہی بڑا کیوں نہ ہو وہ میری خاموشی کا مقابلہ نہیں کر سکتا‘ وہ بہرحال پسپا ہو جاتاہے‘ آپ بھی خاموش رہ کر زندگی کے تمام طوفانوں کو شکست دے سکتے ہیں“
__._,_.___

Turbo blaster aquaponic…Murray Halam

Posted on by smilysimple

Aqglenn@olomanagardens.com says:
August 7, 2015 at 7:03 pm
This answer is from Glenn regarding the turbo blaster.
Okay, I will get on that.
Question? Do you have a copy of my Patent Book that has the Turbo Blaster in it?
That is where pumped water is sent thru a pipe and compressed air is added?
The short version, in words is, pump the water to the desired height, plus two feet, and release the water into a larger pipe.
So if I am pumping water, regardless if it is pumped by mechanical pump, airlift or a combination,(turbo blaster), we are pumping water up the interior pipe, say a 1.25 inch pipe that is mounted or installed inside a 4 inch pipe. The water comes out the one inch pipe, falls down and fills the four inch pipe. at the bottom, you have a four inch tee fitting that was plumbed with a two inch to 1/25 reducer at the bottom, and a side fitting of 2 inch for removing the stored water in the 4 inch vertical pipe (normally reduced down to a hose male fitting to accept a garden hose.
Now the pump sends the water up the 1.25 inch pipe to say 12 feet and the four inch pipe is 14 to 15 feet tall, the water fills the 4 inch pipe, and you remove the water out the garden hose on demand.
For every foot of height in the stored water, you achieve 1/2 psi. So at 12 foot of storage, you have 6 psi. You can wash the car or take a great shower with that stored water.
It gets interesting when you see the four inch pipe, laying on the ground, hurricane or storm passes, they come out, pull on a pulley mounted in a tree, and haul the empty (pipe in a pipe – tankless tower up into a tree, and then turn on the pump, send water up into the center pipe, and fill the four inch pipe, they then have gravity induced water pressure that can supply the entire farm water, up to 12 foot high (or whatever height they hauled the contraption up to.
I normally mount the four inch pipe to a building or light pole, or 4 by four. Never lost one to a storm.
I like to fill with a airlift pump, because as the water fills up, and clears the 12 foot high center pipe, and the water fills ABOVE the 12 foot exit, it can only fill about another two feet and stops filling! It automatically stops because the 24 inches of water ABOVE the 12 foot exit, causes increase resistance to the air water mixture.
That way my four inch pipe never overfills! And when I use water, automatically starts filling again.
When using a mechanical pump, we usually install a “overflow pipe” that routes the overflow water back to the fish tank.
We are doing the tankless tower in installation, where building a storage tank is just not possible, lack of funding, permit required, landlord or liability issues.
The tankless tower is filled with fish water directly from he fish tank or better after a swirl filter and radial filter have remove MOST of the solids.
That way we have less solids in the garden hose.
It is called “detached aquaponics” . They fill the fish tank with clean well water at night, then run the pump all night to filter the water thru the bio-filter that turns the ammonia to nitrogen, and then pump the water up in the tankless tower in the morning, and then water the veggie (in the ground conventional) garden with the enhanced “fish water”. No more hauling buckets of water around the garden, the pressured fish water can travel hundreds of feet and garden hoses are then uses.
Thus more fish are kept in a fish tank than normal, because they will be doing up to a 50 percent water change. The garden that gets enhanced fish water will far exceed a garden simply water with well water.
Detached Aquaponics (DA) is the future for many “in the ground” farmers who are starting aquaponic systems. It greatly expands the value of the fish water.
Our American Thanksgiving story is the American Indians teaching the pilgrims to put a dead fish under each corn plant. Now we just water with fish water and then eat the fish for dinner!
I will get to work on the drawings for you this morning.
Glenn
Reply
Franklin says:
August 10, 2015 at 6:50 am
Filtering the water that goes to the earth grown crops may be unnecessary. The only thing I can think that would be a problem with fish waste in the hose would be clogging or hydrogen sulfide production in the anaerobic environment. One answer to both would be to run air through the hose when not in use. I guess if you are using emitters of some kind, clogging would be more of an issue.
Reply
Franklin says:
August 8, 2015 at 4:56 pm
This sounds great. There may be no real need for passing the fishwater through a biological filter. Most plants show a preference for ammonium and ammonia that are present in raw fish water. The end product of biological filters is nitrate that is not as favored by plants. One notable exception is water hyacinth that thrives on nitrate. Some fish hatcheries use continuous flow through systems rather than the traditional “batch” method of periodic water changes. Some discus farmers do 200% water changes per day. It may be more efficient to simply pass water through the fish tanks so that a predetermined % is collected for irrigation. The continuous flow method avoids the peaks and valleys of nitrate in the water that stress fish. Mechanical removal of solids may be all the filtration needed.

Work sheet tutorial

Posted on by smilysimple

 

 

A worksheet or sheet is a single page in a file created with an electronic spreadsheet program such as Excel or Google Spreadsheets. A workbook is the name given to an Excel file and contains one or more worksheets. The term spreadsheet is often used to refer to a workbook, when, as mentioned, it more correctly refers to the computer program itself.

So, strictly speaking, when you open an electronic spreadsheet program it loads an empty workbook file consisting of one or more blank worksheets for you to use.

 

Worksheet Details
A worksheet is used to store, manipulate, and display data.

The basic storage unit for data in a worksheet is the rectangular-shaped cells arranged in a grid pattern in every worksheet.

Individual cells of data are identified and organized using the vertical column letters and horizontal row numbers of a worksheet which create a cell reference – such as A1, D15, or Z467.

Worksheet specifications for current versions of Excel include:

1,048,576 rows per worksheet;
16,384 columns per worksheet;
17,179,869,184 cells per worksheet;
by default, each new file contains only one worksheet;
the number of sheets per file is limited only by the amount of memory available on the computer.
For Google Spreadsheets:

there is a maximum of 256 columns per sheet;
the maximum number of cells for all worksheets in a file is 400,000;
the current default number of worksheets for new files is one;
there is a maximum of 200 worksheets per spreadsheet file.
Worksheet Names
In both Excel and Google Spreadsheets, each worksheet has a name. By default, the worksheets are named Sheet1, Sheet2, Sheet3 and so on, but these can easily be changed.

Worksheet Numbers
By default, since Excel 2013, there is only worksheet per new Excel workbook, but this default value can be changed.

 

To do so:

Click on the File menu;
Click on Options in the menu to open the Excel Options dialog box;
In the When creating new workbooks section in the right pane of the dialog box, increase the value next to Include this many sheets:
Click on OK to complete the change and close the dialog box.
Note: the default number of sheets in a Google Spreadsheets file is one, and this cannot be changed.

Workbook Details
Additional worksheets can be added to a workbook using the using the context menu or the Add Sheet icon (plus sign) next to the current sheet tabs as seen in the image above;
It is possible to delete or to hide individual worksheets in a workbook;
It is also possible to rename individual worksheets and to change worksheet tab colors to make it easier to identify individual sheets in a workbook using the context menu;
Changing from one worksheet to another in a workbook can be done by clicking on the sheet tab at the bottom of the screen;
In Excel, the following shortcut key combinations can also be used to switch between worksheets:
Ctrl + PgUp (page up) – move to the right
Ctrl + PgDn (page down) – move to the left
For Google Spreadsheets, the shortcut key combinations to switch between worksheets are:
Ctrl + Shift + PgUp – move to the right
Ctrl + Shift + PgDn – move to the left

CITE

 

Norman Vincent Peele epositive thinking

Posted on by smilysimple

After the second Republican debate, when it appeared Donald Trump’s lead was finally starting to slip, and Carly Fiorina and Marco Rubio were gaining traction, Trump himself, in typical fashion, appeared to only see positive signs. He told Fox News’ Sean Hannity that only the polls (Time, Drudge Report, Newsmax) that showed him having picked up support mattered because they represented “the people who vote.” The happy talk was relentless: After speakers at the Emmy Awards on Sept. 20 ridiculed him, Trump told Politico that the evening had been “amazing.” More recently, Trump berated a news photographer who dared to take pictures of empty seats at one of his rallies, insisting his events were as packed as ever.

Is this guy for real? Or more to the point, could anyone really possess that much self-confidence? There has been no shortage of explanations—a huge inferiority complex, infantile narcissism, delusional thinking—for Trump’s undying self-assurance. But as I discovered when writing a book about Donald, his father, and his grandfather, if you want to understand what goes on underneath the blond comb-over, you’d do well to look back to two crucial events in the early 1950s.

Event No. 1 occurred in October 1952, when a book appeared called The Power Of Positive Thinking. Written by Dr. Norman Vincent Peale and translated into 15 languages, it remained on the New York Times best-seller list for 186 weeks and sold 5 million copies. Donald was only 6 years old at the time and didn’t read the book until much later, but it quickly became important in the large Queens household in which he grew up, and it would play a critical role in his future. His parents, Fred and Mary, felt an immediate affinity for Peale’s teachings. On Sundays, they drove into Manhattan to worship at Marble Collegiate Church, where Peale was the head pastor. Donald and both his sisters were married there, and funeral services for both Fred and Mary took place in the main sanctuary.

“I still remember [Peale’s] sermons,” Trump told the Iowa Family Leadership Summit in July. “You could listen to him all day long. And when you left the church, you were disappointed it was over. He was the greatest guy.” A month later, in the same news conference at which Trump tossed out Univision anchor Jorge Ramos, he again referred to Peale as his pastor and said he was “one of the greatest speakers” he’d ever seen.

Known as “God’s salesman,” Peale merged worldliness and godliness to produce an easy-to-follow theology that preached self-confidence as a life philosophy. Critics called him a con man, described his church as a cult, and said his simple-minded approach shut off genuine thinking or insight. But Peale’s outlook, promoted through his radio shows, newspaper columns and articles, and through Guideposts, his monthly digest of inspirational messages, fit perfectly into the Trump family culture of never hesitating to bend the rules, doing whatever it took to win, and never, ever giving up.

“Believe in yourself!” Peale’s book begins. “Have faith in your abilities!” He then outlines 10 rules to overcome “inadequacy attitudes” and “build up confidence in your powers.” Rule one: “formulate and staple indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding,” “hold this picture tenaciously,” and always refer to it “no matter how badly things seem to be going at the moment.”

Subsequent rules tell the reader to avoid “fear thoughts,” “never think of yourself as failing,” summon up a positive thought whenever “a negative thought concerning your personal powers comes to mind,” “depreciate every so-called obstacle,” and “make a true estimate of your own ability, then raise it 10 per cent.”

Peale’s philosophy fell on willing and eager ears in the Trump family. Long before this self-esteem guru codified his canon, Donald’s grandfather Friedrich used Peale-like confidence and tenacity to make the first Trump fortune during the Klondike gold rush. A few decades later, Donald’s father, Fred, deployed proto-Peale thinking to become a multimillionaire real estate developer in Brooklyn and Queens. And Donald Trump himself has cited Peale’s advice many times in his own career.

One notable example occurred in the mid-1980s, when Trump paid $9 million for a second-tier professional football team, the New Jersey Generals, which played in the spring off-season and belonged to the fledgling United States Football League. Trump immediately began pressuring the other team owners to switch the USFL to the prime fall season, which meant going head to head with the National Football League. Ultimately they agreed, and soon afterward the USFL was defunct—whereupon Trump filed a $1.3 billion federal antitrust lawsuit against the NFL, claiming it had plotted against the USFL and was a monopoly. The jury agreed that the NFL was a monopoly but awarded damages of only $1, which the judge then trebled for a grand total of 3 bucks.

The media saw this as a stunning defeat; by contrast, Trump, who had sunk $12 million into the USFL, channeled Peale, declaring “a moral victory.” He later expanded on this in his book The Art Of The Deal, insisting that he had been such a compelling witness and that his lawyer—the infamous Roy Cohn—had been so powerful a litigator that the jurors had simply taken pity on the NFL.

Then, in 1990, after splurging on a third casino, an airline, the world’s second-largest yacht and the Plaza Hotel, Trump found himself nearly a billion dollars in debt and the banks were threatening foreclosure. But after weeks of round-the-clock negotiations, he emerged relatively unscathed, and in a 2009 interview with Psychology Today he gave Peale’s book credit for his survival. Citing his father’s friendship with Peale and calling himself “a firm believer in the power of being positive,” he said, “what helped is I refused to give in to the negative circumstances and never lost faith in myself. I didn’t believe I was finished even when the newspapers were saying so.”

Event No. 2 in the early 1950s—and in the development of Donald’s personality and style—was the emergence of modern branding. At the dawn of the 20th century, most makers of consumer products focused only on selling as much as possible. But by mid-century, manufacturers of everything from laundry soap and baked beans to automobiles and airlines were taking their focus a few steps further: concentrating not just on how much rolled off the assembly line but on polishing and enhancing the aura and attractiveness of the product.

From now on, marketers would not simply tout how well a product performed. Instead, they would study how consumers felt about the maker of the product—and they would bend every effort toward making everything associated with that name as positive and compelling as possible.

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‘Look in the Mirror, Fat Boy’
By ELIZABETH F. RALPH
Fred Trump was an early branding enthusiast. At the 1939 World’s Fair, a futurist extravaganza for which the theme was “The World of Tomorrow,” a billboard for Trump Homes was a tutorial in the use of basic branding principles. Employing a striking modernist typeface for the name Trump, the billboard incorporates the fair’s eye-catching Theme Center pavilion with its iconic spire and sphere (known as the “trylon” and “perisphere”), tweaks the fair’s slogan to read “The Home Of Tomorrow,” and boasts of the homebuilder’s success (“6,000 People Live In Trump Homes”).

In the years that followed, increasingly assertive branding, now broadcast nationwide on television, would show up in every sphere of American life. By the early 1960s, when Fred Trump built a cluster of 23-story apartment buildings in Coney Island, the largest project in Brooklyn at the time, it seemed a matter of course that he would name the entire complex Trump Village—and that prospective buyers showed up in droves.

By all accounts, including his own, Donald Trump did poorly in the classroom in his early years. But he was an apt pupil of his father’s M.O., and he readily absorbed the importance of self-confidence and of branding. Both were on full display by the mid-1970s, when he took over his father’s real-estate holdings. His initial step was to ditch the pedestrian corporate IDs Fred had used when building in Brooklyn and Queens (for example Trump Village Construction Corp.) and to give the company the imposing name Trump Organization; his next step was to launch his first major project not on his father’s home turf but in the far more challenging environment of Manhattan.

The project was the makeover of a derelict old hotel, the Commodore, into a glitzy tourist magnet. The hotel was named the Grand Hyatt because of contractual obligations, but Trump, ever the Peale disciple, insisted on calling the main restaurant Trumpets and incorporated such signature touches as packing in the maximum number of floors to make the building seem taller (by conventional measure, the top floor would be the 26th, but at the Grand Hyatt it was the 34th) and claiming that the ballroom was the biggest in the city (it wasn’t).

With his next project, Trump Tower, Donald’s surname made its Fifth Avenue debut. Mounted over the main entrance and rendered in all-capital 3-foot-tall brass letters, it was so out of scale that Der Scutt, the building’s architect, joked that visitors to New York could read the name before their plane landed.

From then on, Donald Trump would put his name on everything he did, including high-rise buildings, casinos and a reality television series, The Apprentice. In 2014, he graced the facade of Trump Tower Chicago with his name in all-cap 20-foot letters—once again, grossly out of scale, but when Mayor Rahm Emanuel complained, Trump pointed to the fine-print approval included in contracts signed with city officials.

Over the years, as the public has walked by the buildings, gambled at the casinos and watched the TV show, the name has become ever more associated with overwhelming, gargantuan, and seemingly never-ending success. And in the process, Trump has created the armor-plated branding juggernaut, impervious to criticism, self-doubt, or self-reflection, which continues to roll over much of the Republican Party.

Whether or not Trump’s tireless self-advertisement will be enough to gain the Republican nomination, much less elect a president, is unknown. But it may well be that Trump will run into some of the same criticism as Peale himself later did. In an essay titled “Some Negative Thinking About Norman Vincent Peale,” a theologian from Yale University, William Lee Miller, wrote that Peale’s books had become “worse” since the original because “the rhetoric of the sermon has been replaced by the short, punchy sentences of the advertisement.”

Already it is clear that, thanks to Norman Vincent Peale and the magic of branding, Donald Trump is one of the most self-confident and most successful-seeming candidate the nation has ever seen. The question is whether the product will live up to the ad.
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Gwenda Blair is author of The Trumps: Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate and Donald Trump: The Candidate. She teaches at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Follow her at @gwendalblair.
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