the London look vs the Delhi look

Dehli to Delhi

Renaming the blog (again) after consideration that the intentional phonetic spelling of Dehli might be misconstrued as a mistake. Hmm. What we need here is a Hindi-English blog title...

A Dinosaur find in India

Holotypic caudal vertebra of Titanosaurus indicus in bottom, side, and front views (from Falconer 1868).

In 1828, Sir William Henry Sleeman (whose journals I have been reading and who is credited with helping to eradicate Thuggee cults in India), discovered remains of a dinosaur near Bara Simla hills. He was stationed at Jabalpur when he collected the specimens. These were eventually passed on to Henry Falconer (of the Geological Survey of India) in 1862 who measured and described the pieces but did not assign a name. As late as 1877, richard Lydekker used these three bones (pic) to form the basis of a new Taxon Titanosaurus indicus. 

You won't find it exhibited in any museum under this name, however, because the adjunct "indicus" was long since thrown out while the Titanosaurus taxon remains.

Read a lot more about the Titanosaurs and these findings here.

A walk through Limehouse

At long last, a website and project of immense historical and sociological interest for anyone following the history and peopling of London. The project tracing the Evolution of British Chinese Workforce is online.

Most interesting is the route the authors follow down and around Limehouse. So little remains of what was once a lively, thriving pre-war cosmopolitan community. This short montage of recent photographs (at the bottom of the page) attest to how much was lost and gives intriguing hints of tiny clues that still remain.

Could understanding the tangled web of this early history help today's Chinese community feel more rooted?

I'm certainly relieved to see more sources of information and authentic perspectives on life in old Limehouse. Other than the jaundiced writings of Thomas Burke (see previous post).

Brown faces in old limehouse

From Nights in London, Burke's overly colourful and lurid account of travels around pre-war London:

Each whispering house seems an abode of dread things. Each window seems filled with frightful eyes. Each corner, half-lit by a timid gas-jet, seems to harbour unholy features. 

A black man, with Oriental features, brushes against you. 

You collide with a creeping yellow man. He says something—it might be Chinese or Japanese or Philippinese jargon. 

A huge Hindoo shuffles, cat-like, against the shops.

At the mouth of Pennyfields is a cluster of Chinks. You may see at once that they dislike you. 

You are in Limehouse. The peacefulness seems to be that attendant upon underhand designs, and the twilight is that of people who love it because their deeds are evil.