A decade after the Lord Babington blog

The falsely crafted quotation from an address attributed to Lord Macaulay. It never happened.

That Lord Macauley quote

The longevity of my blog would as a matter of interest suggest a celebratory review of something I have written before, and none more signifies that than a blog I wrote exactly 10 years ago.

As usual, it was written as a simple opinion piece about erroneous quotations of antiquity attributed to someone which on closer scrutiny revealed that the quote was first fabricated and definitely not spoken by the person or at the location it was said to have been relayed.

Blog - Opinion: Lord Macauley did not address the British Parliament in 1835 (18-05-2013)

That did not stop people wanting something manifestly wrong in content, person, or place to be true and they gathered on my blog to both defend the indefensible and assert sentimentality over objectivity. At one time, it felt like a backstreet brawl in some Indian city where many were about to come to some serious harm. Heck! I was even threatened, on my own blog, just because I had an opinion.

Battles and ratings

I never took the blog down, because that would be wrong, but I did at certain times close the blog to comments when nationalistic elements decided my blog was a place to vent their historical grievances and those that did not align with my polite commentary guidelines, I removed for the simple reason that if you want to engage in conversation or debate, you do that with respect and courtesy.

However, in that decade besides the over 36,400 views of the blog and 42 comments that put it at the all-time high ranking of interactions with my blog, it is interesting to see how the relationship between the British Empire of the 19^th Century where India was the crown jewel has changed within the first quarter of the 21^st Century.

Fortunes and history

The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is of Indian heritage in Rishi Sunak and India surpassed the UK to become the fifth largest economy in the world, having been the 11^th just a decade ago.

If one can manage a dig at the Tories who have been in government since May 2010, they have superintended a managed decline of the UK economy how they even are thought the party of business escapes me. [World Economic Forum: India surpasses UK economy]

Maybe, and just maybe, the Indian nationalists that camped on my blog a decade ago can take some consolation from this change in fortunes, but one can think they would be insatiable in their quest to prove a point. Meanwhile, my blog can sometimes be a battlefield, I just inadvertently provided ammunition too.