charlie in dallas

I’m bound for Texas,
Bound for Texas,
Bound for Texas land.

To hear the moo and rattle,
Of snakes and cattle,

I’m bound for Texas land,

I’ll sing her a song,
At the end of the day,
A song that will drive all our cares away,
I’ll sing out (in) the prairie,
The blue starry skies,
And the stars shining bright in her eyes,

I’m bound for Texas,
Bound for Texas,
Bound for Texas land.

To hear the moo and rattle,
Of snakes and cattle,

I’m bound for Texas land,

I’m tried of the city,
Of smoke stack and steel,
I’m tried of the grind,
Of the factory wheel,
I’m spreading my wings,
And I’m ready to fly,
To the land of the wide open sky,

I’ll save up my money,
And look for a wife,
A wife who be true,
And a pal for life,
I’ll build her a home,
And a room for a child,
With the roses, around growing wild,

I’m bound for Texas land,

some days ago someone asked me why India's attitude toward Britain wasn't like that of the colonized for the imperialist. there was no antagonism, no hard feelings. i don't think i explained it well. all that came to my mind was "its more like a parent-child relationship, you mean?". its actually quite like that but of a child now far outgrown her parent, distant in emotions and attachments, and one who doesn't think of or visit her parent too often. and yet in lil manners realizes how her parent's grooming has created her.

even today speaking english in this country, in the tea versus the coffee; i sometimes feel British. in the arguments - for the usage of 'queue' against the word 'line'; in my difficulty to understand 'aunt' pronounced as 'ant'...

Naipaul, in describing his first visit to India explains this so much better. in the India of the 50-60s where the British-ness must have been so much fresher:

"They coexist; the society only pretends to be colonial; and for this reason its absurdities are at once apparent. Its mimicry is both less and more than a colonial mimicry. It is the special mimicry of an old country which has been without a native aristocracy for a thousand years and has learned to make room for outsiders, but only at the top. The mimicry changes, the inner world remains constant: this is the secret of survival. And so it happens that, to one whole area of India, a late seventeenth-century traveller like Ovington remains in many ways a reliable guide. Yesterday the mimicry was Mogul; tomorrow it might be Russian or American; today it is English.

Mimicry might be too harsh a word for what appears so comprehensive and profound: buildings, railways, a system of administration, the intellectual discipline of the civil servant and the economist. Schizophrenia might better explain the scientist who, before taking up his appointment, consults the astrologer for an auspicious day. But mimicry must be used because so much has been acquired that the schizophrenia is often concealed; because so much of what is seen remains simple mimicry, incongruous and absurd; and because no people, by their varied physical endowments, are as capable of mimicry as the Indians. The Indian army officer is at a first meeting a complete English army officer. He even manages to look English; his gait and bearing are English; his mannerisms his tastes in drink are English; his slang is English. In the Indian setting this Indian English mimicry is like fantasy. It is an undiminishing absurdity; and it is only slowly that one formulates what was sensed from the first day; this is a mimicry not of England, a real country, but of the fairytale land of Anglo-India, of clubs and sahibs and syces and bearers. It is as if an entire society has fallen for a casual confidence trickster. Casual because the trickster has gone away, losing interest in his joke, but leaving the Anglo-Indians flocking to the churches of Calcutta on a Sunday morning to assert the alien faith, more or less abandoned in its country of origin; leaving Freddy crying, 'Just bung your coat down there Andy;' leaving the officer exclaiming, 'I say, by Jove! I feel rather bushed.' Leaving 'civil lines', 'cantonments', leaving people 'going off to the hills': magic words now fully possessed, now spoken as of right, in what is now at last Indian Anglo-India, where smartness can be found in the cosy proletarian trivialities of Woman's Own and the Daily Mirror and where Mrs Hauksbee, a Millamant of the suburbs, is still the arbiter of elegance.

But room has been left at the top, and out of this mimicry a new aristocracy is being essayed, not of politicians or civil servants, but of the business executives of foreign, mostly British, firms. To them, the box-wallahs as they are called, have gone the privileges India reserves for the foreign and conquering; ..."

i wonder who we are aping now... as google underlines my spelling which was correct in the old English dictionaries...