Wilayat, Begum of Oudh
Is Wilayat an actual name or did this person actually announce herself as Province, Provincial Ruler of a province?
1: https://hamariweb.com/names/muslim/arabic/boy/wilayat-meaning_1228. So perhaps yes sometimes? But mostly for boys?
2:
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If the station master gave her any trouble, she threatened to kill herself by drinking snake venom.
Which wouldn't have worked, right?
4: pretty much everything has a D50 dose, no?
I guess you ingest crushed diamonds beforehand the question is academic.
I thought it was classier to have your Great Danes in a matte finish.
Just to spoil the ending for everyone:
My friend's name was not Prince Cyrus, or Prince Ali Raza, or Prince anything.
He was plain old Mickey Butt.
And I thought it couldn't be worse than Billy Ray.
"They believed their mother," he said, "because she was their mother."
Definitely not going to end well.
Wahida had worked for many years as a teacher, and barely spoke. She seemed to communicate by slapping people, hard, across the face.
I see my future.
I don't know. Slapping people sounds enjoyable.
I don't know. Slapping people sounds enjoyable.
Especially when you get an echo.
12, 13: I HAVE GOT A CAREER CHANGE SUGGESTION FOR YOU
I love how both the Indian government and the Western press, for decades, is all "these people are totally royalty, sure."
I'm thinking Indira admired her chutzpah and then everyone else forget about them.
Anyway, thanks for the link, Robot! I found in it more hilarity than sadness, which is one of the benefits of being a bad person.
This all seems to have taken place after royal/princely titles were fully de-officialized with the 26th Amendment?
It's nice that princes were considered in the amendment about vice presidents.
It is a completely wonderful piece of journalism. And, a final, exquisite touch, to end a story abut self-deception with the rhetorical question "What do you think happens if you lie to a reporter?"
They print the lie is what happens. What did you fucking think happens?
20: It seems one part of the problem was, they were claiming to be Muslim royalty in an area with a strong Muslim minority, and treating them like common beggars in the railway station would have caused riots.
I don't know. A little less with the orientalism, and the interior processes of the journalist, and a little more of the actual facts would have been ok. We don't know a goddamn thing about what this woman's parents and grandparents told her about the possibility that she's one of the descendants of the last (or next to last?) nawab, although it's not shocking that a mentally ill person might latch on to a thing like that. Not that anything actually matters, but whether or not she is one of the thousands of descendants of the nawab does seem to me to be relevant to the question whether she's an ill person misapplying a family story, versus a straight up grifter.
(They don't say, that I saw anyway, that her claim goes through her husband. In which case talking to her husband's relatives isn't going to produce anything.)
When I read this originally, my opinion was that she wasn't really getting much out of it if was grifting, so my conclusion was she that she was for real. Or crazy. Mostly, though, a textbook on decades of incurious reporting, it seems.
I get that it's easy to bash the NYT and reporters in general, but I want to take their side here.
The truth came out after Mickey Butt died, when the NYT reporter went through his papers and found that the money for their necessities was coming from an address in the UK. Until then, their story had been more or less internally consistent. Early on, the author acknowledges the gaps and the possibility that it was a fraud, but it would be almost impossible to disprove. A 19th century harem of hundreds? Mickey Butt was never Prince Cyrus, but people really did flagellate themselves because of his family in 1975, and he really did live in a ruined temple over it. It's a story whether or not it was fraud.
I hope no one ever used his story to say "and what happened to this particular family is why [the current government of India/the British Empire/Muslims/whatever] sucks." That would be bad journalism. But reporting on the facts of this weird family, well, I wrote and have read worse stories.
haven't read article but will shamelessly take opportunity to encourage everyone to watch ray's truly wonderful film the music room, and makes an excellent double bill with the first slot 1969's the guru, worth it for madhur jaffrey's scene stealing alone.
27. The appropriate slagging on reporters would be that the family went a long, long time without anyone checking out the places they lived before they made themselves famous. Lots of people in those places remembered them. Still, it's not something one can criticize the Indian government over. They appear to have acted fairly reasonably in a sketchy situation that brought in the ever-lurking animosity towards Muslims and Shia Muslims in particular, it seems. They are obviously distant relations of Emperor Norton, but a bit less sane.
I mean sure, I guess this story was sad, but only because Partition was sad, and mental illness is sad. It wasn't all that sad per se. It was weird, and kinda interesting in parts, but mostly it was very long. I guess what I'm saying is, three out of five stars. Read only if you have time to kill, for example if you're in a day-long mediation and your opposing counsel showed up totally unprepared so the mediator is gone for an hour at a time or longer trying to extract a counter from the other party.
I think all the best parts of the article are already excerpted in the post and in this thread.
That's why I didn't read it. I trust you all to point out the good parts.
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Is anyone else watching season 3 of The Crown? Episode 3 of season 3, 'Aberfan,' is just gut-wrenching, and absolutely devastating. Also: Richard Harrington as a Welsh coal miner is just what makes me want to watch, but he seems determined to take a back seat, to allow his role to be secondary to the actual tragedy, to the criminal negligence of which his character briefly, but effectively, speaks.
It seems to be getting a bit soapy after episode 3, though. And no, I'm not going to tell you who Camilla Shand first marries: no spoilers!
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Startled to see that the Begums of Oudh are still making news more than 150 years later.
I had no idea they were shi-ites, which shows a shaming level of religious illiteracy.
Are British people required to memorize the names of their conquered enemies or what?
This thread didn't reach 40 comments, but I don't want to step on a newer thread with something off-topic... yesterday when I went downstairs to make coffee I heard the carbon monoxide alarm going off in the basement. I can only assume someone is fucking with me, because the same thing happened almost exactly a year ago. (I realize this is a seasonal thing, but it was the Tuesday before Thanksgiving two years in a row.) Fortunately, someone from the gas company came and determined that it was much easier to fix - a slight leak in one pipe, in a badly ventilated space, results in a whole lot of CO. He fixed the pipe, I cut a hole in some insulation, so now it's better ventilated, we should be OK.
So far! Who knows, maybe we'll be spending next weekend in a hotel again!
Kind of related: Our water heater is leaking. This is not potentially fatal, but is inconvenient.