Mae'r thirio o'r cyd-dweud, rwy'n gwrs i'n ddweud yma, rwy'n gweithio'r ffastau. Rwy'n gweithio'n Rybechiru, rwy'n gyfrifio'r dyfodol. Rwy'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'r ddweud, Corting India, Ynglyn Mwglydd India i fynd i'r orygiadau i'r Nandini Dass a Soni Sing. Rwy'n gweithio, ac rwy'n gweithio'n gweithio, wrth gwrs, rwy'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio, ac rwy'n gweithio'n werth tspor auta chain. Mae'r ddweud o wybodaeth, rydw i, gweithio'r gweithio gwaith a bwynt iawn. Rydw i'n gwneud am hyn sydd gael ym mwyaf o'r panelist. Ffoe ychydig o ymddych chi'n dod a'u cyfrifio'r ar y cwmno i gweithio'r hyn sydd hender. Yn cyfrifio yma o'ch cyfrifio yn ymdwbl, ac mae'r cyfrifio i'r cyfrifio. Fawr, drwy'n cael ei wneud ar y cyfrifio. Mae'n sylwc. Ac mae'n dweud y gallwch yn online, rwy'n meddwl i ddigon nhw'n meddwl gan y Einstein. Mae'n meddwl i'r tâg rejoiceu sydd i'r Bookstore Brytys Aelbi Cymru. Mae'r fathau sydd y dyfodol yma yn Ystrydd Gall Chesnidog... ... yn ddiddordei i'r eicol, etwatio a fydd ei wneud o'ch meddwl i'r meddwl am ystrydd. Dyma'r eich rymes i'r meddwl i ddiddordei'r meddwl, nid y gallwch yn eu fwy o pwysig. Mae'r dweud. Mae'r dweud, Sunny Singh. Sunny is a Professor of Creative Writing and Inclusion in the Arts at London Metropolitan University and an expert on Bollywood. She's the founder of the Jalak Prize, first awarded in March 2017 and its sister award, the Jalak Children's and Young Adult Prize, which was founded in 2021, which celebrates books by British or British resident writers of colour. She's the author of the critically-acclaimed novels and award-winning novel Nanny's Book of Suicides with Krishna's Eyes and Hotel Arcadia. She's recently completed a selection of stories linked by the theme of war and a personal study of the Indian film industry titled A Bollywood State of Mind, which is coming in October this year. Nandini Das, we have another Professor here. Nandini Das is the Professor of Early Modern English, English Literature and Culture and a Fellow of Exeter College at the University of Oxford. She's a scholar of Renaissance literature, travel, migration and cross-cultural encounters and has published widely on these topics and published widely on these topics. Her works include, I had to check the pronunciation of this, so forgive me if I mispronounce it again, Robert Green's Planet of Machia, yes, Renaissance Romance, the Transformation of English Pro's Fiction 1570-1620 and her latest book, Caught in India, England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire, which she's here to talk to us about today. Sunny Nandini, over to you. Thank you, and thank you for being here. Before I kick off, I can't recommend this book highly enough. So please go get it when you leave. And I promise you that's not just a sales pitch. I spent much of the last few weeks reading it and going back and taking notes. And I will be reading it again quite soon. So it is really quite a necessary book. It's a very important book and it fills a gap in our understanding of the period, both for India and for Britain, that I think is not only needed right now for multiple reasons, but also quite urgent. So Nandini, thank you for being here. I didn't even have to bribe her to say that. We're going to talk about the bribes later. I'm not talking about it now. But you said something earlier when we were preparing or we were sitting in the green room about how it's nearly a decade's work. And I think I want to start off with that. Tell us, because this book is so incredibly researched. There's so much archival material in there. I think every page I was making a note of like, I didn't know that. Oh, wow. And there are all these points of extraordinary bits of information that you've woven together. So tell us about this 10-year research project. Well, it started off as a conversation, as books quite often do. It started off as a conversation between myself and a senior colleague in the US who wanted to invite me to do an essay on something of my choice about encounters between cultures in the 16th and 17th century. And I was knee-deep in writing my previous book at that point, which was very much about European intellectual history. And I thought, well, I'll do something that is slightly lighter, maybe, and I can do it quickly. So I started off by writing an article about that painting. It's called The Emperor Jahangir referring a Sufi shake to kings. And if you notice in the corner over there, that grumpy face pearing out at us, that's the face of a man who's been waiting far too long for a bus, isn't it? That, we suspect, is a copy from a portrait of James I. We know that Thomas Roe, the first English ambassador to India, had taken multiple portraits with him. And that man in the red turban in the corner is the artist. We know that because he's holding a painting in his hand. He's called Busser One. And he copied James's grumpy face into this particular painting where the Mughal Emperor turns his face away. So the article was all about imitation European ideas and Islamic and Asian ideas of what in Latin among Thomas Roe's contemporaries would be known as imitatio, and how this is both a competition but also an act of hospitality. When you're imitating something, you're welcoming it into your own space.  So I worked on that for ages. And then there was a moment where over the lockdown, again, not a good decision. I'm not putting this across very well here. This is a string of terrible decisions, really. Over the lockdown, I decided, well, what better time than to do something that is really terribly archive heavy when you can't go to the archives. But I had done a lot of work on Thomas Roe's journal, and we might talk about the journals themselves later already. So I had a wealth of, thankfully, transcriptions and photographs that I could pour over and the help of multiple friends who very generously, when the lockdown lifted, would come in and take lots more photos for me. And that's all that went into that doorstopper for book. And you've nicely opened to my next question, which is, let's talk about Thomas Roe. Not just his journals, which are extensive and quite interesting, and at times amusing. I think it might be a quite sort of thing. Really? There's that moment of that hapless Englishman sort of straight out of the Indiana Jones movie where it's like, really, you don't know what you're doing, are you? But tell us about Thomas Roe and tell us about his ambassador, but more importantly, his journals, because I think that's one of the key resources we have. It is. I suppose to understand who Roe is, it's kind of useful to think of our mental kind of map in terms of timeline. So if you think about England in the 16th and 17th centuries, the people who come to our mind are Elizabeth I and James I. Across the oceans in India, in Mughal India, so northern India and a bit of central India, although the Mughals are still trying to make inroads there, the direct contemporaries among the monarchs is Akbar the Great and Emperor Jahangir. So Elizabeth I and Akbar the Great, who really establishes the Mughal Empire are direct contemporaries and then their successes. Similarly, Roe is someone who comes to the English court in the very last years of Elizabeth I's reign and he's one of those very typical mixtures, actually, among the new courtiers of the period. So on his father's side, he comes from very solid mercantile stock. So he has a string of Lord Mayor's of London among his father's family on that side of the family tree. And then his father, who's the third son, dies quite young, his mother remarries, into the Glitzir courtly circle. So that's where the glamour and glitz in his life comes from and he's really ambitious. Also by the point when he starts kind of hobnobbing with the Great and the Powerful in England is also quite cash-strained. And that has, you'll realise that this thing about tight wallets is a recurrent theme throughout the book in a way. So Roe is desperate to earn some money. So are the English merchants and they have a big problem on their hands because of course Elizabeth's straightened relationship with continental Europe meant that English trade had suffered. The one thing that English did really well was produce excellent wool. But all of a sudden the taxes on doing business with Europe, continental Europe had gone up. So the recurrent conversation among the trading merchants was a vent for our English wool. Where can we find an alternative market? Now let's face it, perhaps Northern India in the summer was not the right place to go to for that. But there was another reason which is the luxury goods market. England was very keen on eastern luxuries and till this point they were going through a third party, the Venetians and the Italians, through the land routes into the Ottoman Empire and then they would get all this fancy stuff that would all come back to London and be sold in the great shops of London. But they wanted an alternative cheaper route and East India Company was very keen on doing that. They were also very keen on sending someone they could depend on and the man was Thomas Roe. This young man, very promising, very keen would do his work and he would do his paperwork, faithfully. Yes, he's extremely keen on noting every possible interaction, every possible. It's quite marvellous that the level of detail he puts in there. It is. I had such a fabulous time just within, well not within this building exactly, just across the courtyard in the British Library looking at his journal, the manuscript copy, where he writes down everything.  The East India Company was quite kind of deliberate about insisting that their employees do their paperwork and have everything noted down. If you've ever grumbled about filing an expense receipt, have sympathy for Thomas Roe, who had to note down everything. But that is wonderful for us as historians. We know exactly what he spent his money on. Very true. I found that there are the parallels. I will not go in there perhaps because I shall say too much but the idea of not having access to European markets makes a little too close. Maybe that Empire 2.0 dream wasn't entirely unfounded. Back to your writing because you'd been working all of this and then somehow you decided to pull this book together. Now what struck me is that of course there's much of Roe in there but it's way beyond that. What it tries and I think very, very, you know, accomplishes very well and quite comprehensively is to give us an insight into what's happening in both these places. And I think sometimes when in this country, especially when people say, oh, we have shared history. It's a very dodgy way of phrasing, you know, a long history of murder and looting and so on. But I think here there is something really special going on because this is in a way a shared history because this embassy changes both Britain and India in ways that is not expected at the time. It's not even imaginable at the time. Talk us through that part because I found that so insightful and so fascinating. Oh, that's such a lovely question, Sonny. So one of my frustrations to some extent about our current historical narratives about British empire or the history of empire partly is to do with the fact that it goes to the bit where the empire actually exists in India and in Asia. And that means quite often this early period. So Roe goes out in 1614-15. This early period gets covered very quickly if it even appears before you go to Clive and the rest of that very familiar story. So partly I was interested in excavating that. But in doing that, one of the things that always fascinates me about cross-cultural contact in any given moment is the mechanisms of that contact. We quite often think about first meetings happening almost in a vacuum. But the thing is, first meetings are never entirely new. They're always framed by our assumptions, our preconceptions. So one of the things that I really wanted to excavate from Roe's side and from the English side was the kind of lenses through which he was looking at this court that he was encountering. The Mughal court is immensely powerful. This annual revenue is about ten times the national revenue of England in this period. It's huge in some ways. So what does a man do when he lands in Surat and makes his way to Ajmer and looks at the grandeur of this court? What kind of lenses does he use? So that was one aspect, I think, where that parallel comes in. But for me the other really important thing was that sometimes when we are thinking about these grand histories of empire we think of them in the abstract, as abstract concepts and machinery. We think of the East India Company as this huge corporation and the ordinary people, the everyday lives, get lost within that. Particularly the everyday lives of people who only appear in historical fragments. Because let's face it, you can't whip out an entire book out of half a line in a court record perhaps. But the thing is, those people were there and their lives were touched by what happened perhaps across the seas somewhere else. So for me there are glimmers of those figures which I really wanted to accommodate. Right from people like Eleanor Rho, the woman who falls in love with Thomas Rho and marries him two months before he has to leave for India. So there are characters like that, but on the other hand there are other characters like Rho's interpreter, a man called Jadu, or Jadu perhaps, we don't know how his name might have been pronounced. Who interprets for Thomas Rho and for the East India Company we suspect for about 12 years almost and he comes up in little exchanges. We know little glimpses of him. We know that he wasn't ever happy with the salary he got. In fact he was drastically underpaid. Again we come back to money. We know that there was a moment where his son got married and he needed to take leave. And for me I find those really important as well as those huge movements of ships and huge profits and the grand narratives of colonial movement and violence. So this book is to some extent, in fact to a large extent, not simply the story of Rho but of all those lives. You've just opened up a question that I was going to ask you afterwards but I might as well ask you now. That name Jadu stayed with me and not only because of the Bollywood movie Extraterrestrial is called Jadu but it means magic. And I kept wondering, is that a name that he's given? Is that a pseudonym? Is that something that he's, you know, because it's a very strange name but there's something really lovely and quite magical about it. Did you have any sense of what that may be with anything else that you didn't put in the book that might give us a sense of who he is? That's really interesting. I was fascinated with Jadu and I spent far too long, I think, trying to track him down to some extent because of exactly those questions. Now, Jadu in Hindi means magic. There's a possibility that it could be Jadu which is a name of Vishnu so that gives us a different angle into him. He might be from the Hindu mercantile community in Surat where Roe and the East India Company settled for quite a long time but we don't really know much about him apart from those traces and in that sense I think for me people like him become in some ways symbols of that wider picture of quite interesting negotiations that were going on in this period which is not, which is very different actually from the later colonial governance structures and relationships within that. Roe's relationship with Jadu or Jadu is very different from the master-servant relationships that happened later on because Roe is so dependent on him. He's terrible at languages and he does not want to learn Persian so he's entirely dependent on this Indian man to get his point across. There's a moment where Jadu, as ever, goes off in a huff. He asks for a raise, he doesn't get a raise partly because Roe himself is broke. Roe doesn't want to admit that to him because, you know, slightly awkward but so Jadu leaves him and goes away and as the universe would have it the very next week Roe gets a rare chance to talk to the emperor while the emperor is out and about and you have that moment in his diaries where he's going, if only I had my Jadu with me I could have said something apart from the broken bits of Persian and then the emperor laughed at me and I don't know whether he just thought I was hilarious or he was laughing at me or with me it's all just terrible, going terribly. There's something so interesting about this figure about the translator and I kept thinking of course of other not only English attempts to make contact but also European attempts and the role of the translator in that and of course we think of people like Malenche in Mexico who is deeply reviled by the Mexicans for having played a part in the colonisation and the destruction of the Aztec empire but here it's a very strange space that Jadu or Jadu occupies and the reason that we're coming up with two translations is because there isn't a diacritical mark to figure out how this word is pronounced but I think what struck me while I was reading it is that we get some glimpse of that but there are even smaller glimpses of lives that we don't often talk about curiously enough given that Elizabeth is on the throne here the women on both sides. That's right and children of course and people whose lives are going to be transformed not just in that moment but for generations centuries onwards are not really visible or talked about or told and you've somehow managed to find these little glimmers so tell us about this because this was really fascinating for me how you found these little traces. Well for me the most striking point you know when you're writing a book quite often you come to a point where you suddenly despite the fact that you've got a looming deadline and you have an increasing tendency to question your decision to write the book in the first place you suddenly come to a moment where you think actually this is not half bad I'm glad I'm doing this here and now for me one of those moments was pouring over an early 16th century map of London and there's a moment in around 1614, 1615 where I was trying to make a case in a very early chapter about the ways in which English voyagers and English global encounters were intricately interconnected so their agency, their kind of travels to North America their travels to the Spice Islands Indonesia basically and their travels in Asia and the Middle East to the Ottoman empires are all very very closely linked both in terms of material but also in terms of people and I don't mean just people who are going out of England but the people who are coming in so that moment in late 1614, 15 early 1616 in England is a moment where there's a man from western Africa called Corey again we don't know what the original pronunciation of his name would have been whether he was called Corey at all but that's what the English called him one particular English ship which had kind of stopped near his village kidnapped him and brought him back with them to London to Philpert Lane in the city where the East India Company had their headquarters at the time and he became one of their kind of examples their kind of PR tools essentially except that Corey was homesick and he wanted to go home so his is one of the very early voices we have of people from western Africa who have spoken voices we hear in historical records and it's a voice which says Corey go home and that's all we hear about him and I found that hugely moving for myself but then you start triangulating and within about five miles of where Corey was there was another woman who had been brought in by Virginia Company East India Company is doing its own little PR Virginia Company would also be doing its own little PR and the woman this time a woman who's brought in is a name that is much more familiar to all of us Pocahontas so there's Pocahontas there's Corey the Saldanian and then there's an Indian woman so stepping back in the story a little bit and she goes to India to the Mughal court before Thomas Roe, a man called William Hawkins a chancer and an adventurer and a slightly tricky figure he gets married off by the Mughal Emperor Jahangir to an Armenian Christian woman called Mariam Begham so for that glimpse for those Englishmen walking the streets of London in around 1615 within about five miles of them would have been a man from Western Africa a very equally homesick woman from Mughal India and a woman from Northern America with them living and breathing the same air and I think it's hugely important to acknowledge that and bring that into the story of cultural encounters of the emergence of imperial and colonial ambition but also in the stories of engagement with the wider world that England was going through in this period and of course that opens up a whole Pandora's box around erotic and sexual encounters as well and what that may entail for not just the people involved but of course us who all trace our lineages back in different ways to indirectly or indirectly to the same these people I want to shift a little bit and I want to just talk about your writing and the reason I want to talk about it because I think a lot of us who work in academia or work in writing books or do anything found the lockdown immensely disorientating and here you were you produced a book and an enormous incredibly information fact insightful book how this is me looking and this is my cheat sheet I'm going to use these ideas It's amazing what having an editor who makes pointed calls reminding you of deadlines can do but seriously I think it's partly because it's a story that I wanted to tell it's also significantly due to the enormous patience of one's family and that cannot be said enough particularly since said family is present in this crowd but apart from that I think it's also because it's a story that was absolutely crying out for the telling and having the journals not only rose journal which we've talked about a little bit his daily records but then from the other side it's very rare that you get multiple almost day to day accounts of a series of events that you can juxtapose against each other and to my shock and horror I realised that I was actually using Excel spreadsheets that was traumatic that realisation and liking that experience but it is one of those cases where you could see what was happening on a given day and there is something I think particularly wonderful about being able to drill down to a single day in a distant past juxtapose two very different voices the voice of a dysentri stuck exhausted Englishman in the heat of Ajmer who refuses to wear anything but English wool in August and the voice of the Mughal Emperor Jahangir who is tracking the progress of the nesting of his pet cranes and keeping a day to day deeply interesting naturalists kind of account of the way that nesting process works and there was something really wonderful about it so I think it's entirely thanks to that material to some extent and of course Jahangir is wearing muslins the lightest and most glorious of muslins for him, not in August There's a moment where one of the East India Company factors or merchants writes back saying we've brought a lot of wool and you've kept sending us more wool this is the moment where you stop sending us any more wool I have to say just this book is in addition to being a doorstop insightful informative is also a lot of fun there's lots of these brilliant moments where you suddenly feel that maybe 1600s people weren't that different in their concepts I'm so glad you said that because that's the kind of experience I kept coming across reading these records so there's one moment where an East India Company man writes back to the company in London and he says well you know this business with wool not quite working out you've asked me to find rarities in India I've just tasted the most wonderful thing they have a fruit called a mango and what they do is that they dry it and then you can keep it for longer do you think that would sell if I managed to send you some of that and that moment of a man enjoying and discovering the delights of dried mango is such a human moment that it's utterly wonderful I think it's quite funny that you picked that particular moment because I've been working in a collection of short stories and one of the things I found in my research was some of the Sikh soldiers who were serving in Europe would often carry dried mango with them he was not wrong and in fact I had to build it into a short story because it was this amazing moment of carrying dried mango which is you know it happens it's important I know that we will be moving towards audience questions so there will be time but I actually want to ask you something about memory and the role of memory I think historians I think always struggle with it because memory in itself tends to be quite slippery and it slides and slips and it lides and yet it continues and it perseveres and it's resilient and it's transformative in different ways and how does that play out and I want to connect it back to some of these ideas that you said about cross cultural encounters these first meetings how does memory play out in these spaces in these strange encounters not just the mango can there be a memory of a mango but really beyond the facetiousness I really want to ask you because it's something that you it's a through thread the idea of memory and how it continues to impact us now would you let us know about it for me I think it's not only a through thread in this book but it's part of the methodology behind the book in the sense that one of the things that I really wanted to excavate is the way in which certain assumptions and certain narratives about India and about the Mughals and the Mughal Empire develops and the long shadow that leaves for the next couple of centuries or even longer within British perceptions of India particularly as the British begin to consolidate their power in South Asia and one of the things that keep cropping up for historians in historical debates about these early years when historians have looked at Thomas Rose journals is his response for instance to the very powerful female presences at the court particularly to Jahangir's favourite 20th wife Nur Jahan had just been crowned Empress alongside him Nur Jahan is immensely powerful Thomas Rose feels very strongly about Nur Jahan's influence on Jahangir so he creates this image in his journal about a kind of Mughal male effeminacy that allows the Mughal Emperor to be driven by women to be heckled by women and he imagines this kind of he in fact uses this phrase of a pit of vipers in the harem who are negotiating and machinating if you take it in isolation it seems a particularly strong reaction but in some ways I suppose for me as someone who had specialised for a long time on 16th and 17th century English cultural history and literature the thing that fascinated me was the very clear resonances it sets up with public discourse around James I in England and his relationship with his wife Anna of Denmark for instance they had a fraught relationship Anna herself had an alternative court that was set up around her so in some ways what I was keen to excavate is what happens when you have to decode a different political or social structure what tools do you use in order to open that particular can of worms usually what happens is the tool you use is memory you use the framework you have so for Rho his constant emphasis on the monarch being open to manipulation in India taken in a vacuum is a judgement on the Mughal Empire and on the Mughal Emperor taken alongside the discourse around and the deep anxiety around royal scandals in early 17th century London it becomes something completely different it becomes an anxiety about political power about tyranny about the way in which in England at that same time the parliament for instance was negotiating with the monarch so I think for me that becomes the through thread in a way that kind of constant juxtaposition of what was happening in England when Rho left what the letters that he was getting and the way in which those crop up as resonances in his engagement with this completely different court it's quite interesting because I don't think he ever manages to see the Mughal court for itself he's constantly interpreting everything and I think if you know the other side then you keep going oh you silly man I wanted to shake him and go bring something go talk to somebody there's so much you're missing but I think that sort of lack of understanding or lost in translation however we want to I don't know whether it's even lost in translation sometimes I think it's quite deliberate on his part so you get the sense where there is a moment of understanding or connection or whatever you might call it a moment with an aging court here at the Mughal court at one point he has that moment with Jahangir himself but at the same time there is a deep weight I think and deep anxiety about his own powerlessness and the powerlessness of the English which he's constantly trying to balance by negating the power of the Mughal court there's a wonderful moment where he sits through of gifts being presented to Jahangir which includes things like 30 elephants with platters of gold coins on their backs and there is Ro himself saying I don't really have a good gift for Jahangir for his birthday this time so I looked into what I had and I've got a couple of miniatures I put it in a pretty box and hopefully that'll do so he does that he explains all of that and then he puts in a throwaway comment which says well it's all very ostentatious and it's a bit like a rich merchant's wife in Shoreditch displaying her fancy velvet slippers in the same cupboard as her fancy new Chinese porcelain isn't it so you have that kind of tension which is both deliberate and sometimes subconscious perhaps hoping to cut things down to a place where you can engage with it I think it's just too big for him I think one of the words you use the costing of the long shadow of these narratives we're in a very strange moment because just as I was reading this book the news has come out that the Mughals have been removed that may be a little too extreme but they've been definitely whittled away from the Indian curriculum and I think that's such a bizarre thing to do with any kind of history but I think it also made me realise just how much of our anxieties around the past are about today and the future rather than the past but here is a strange problem what happens when we remove the memory because it's not as if removing the Mughals from the curriculum will remove the Mughals from history and yet there is this very strange process of trying to create a narrative I think that comes down to some extent to perhaps an increasing perception that history somehow has a limited capacity it's like a little box and you can only pack this much in to it and if you have to put something in, something else has to go out and we think of a complete understanding being somehow confused with erasure which is not the case and that happens in discourses around our understanding of Mughal history it happens around our discourses of understanding of British history of English history I think what I hope Caught in India helps to show is that actually history is pretty capacious perhaps more than we give it credit for there are multiple voices within it and erasing some of them simply leaves a lacunae in our understanding of language history in any sense it just makes us less capable of understanding what the past was and that is always a sad thing to be aiming towards a limitation of knowledge I think so in most of these cases I think recovery and extension and enrichment is probably what as historians and as scholars we need to be aiming towards rather than this limiting of the lens I completely agree I also think that this book goes a long ways in deepening and widening our understanding of both Britain and India in that period so I think it would be a shame that if we try to limit it and put it in a box we should have lots of questions I've just been given the sign that we should be moving towards them I'm going to try and go through this with the iPad as well as you know, hands in the crowd so I believe there's a mic that goes around, ah perfect there is a mic and there's a hand right there the gentleman blue shirt I will try and take as many questions as possible Thank you, that was fascinating Could you tell us a bit more about the Indian sources that you were comparing the journal and the English records with where are they, what are they? So the major source that I was using to juxtapose with Thomas Rose Journal was Jahangir's memoirs, day to day memoirs The Jahangir Nama, he starts writing it fairly early in his reign, he continues it for a fairly long period before it gets handed over and in a way he's copying the example of his great grandfather, the founder of the Mughal Empire, Babur in doing it and it's an astonishing literary text I think, it's very rare that we get the voice, unmediated voice of a Mughal monarch in exactly or monarch or sovereign of any country in exactly the same way, but alongside that I had multiple other sources, I was particularly drawn to recovering where I could voices of ordinary people outside the courtly circles so sometimes that happens through there's a wonderful early example of autobiography called the Adha Katanaq the Half-Life Story by a merchant who's a direct contemporary of Roe and Jahangir so that gives us glimpses into someone who's very much on the margins of power, observing these otherwise what sounds like two malters changes at court but there are multiple other Sanskrit epics various Dohe by Abdullah Rahim who is one of Jahangir's courtiers who writes wonderfully and wittily and sharply about the terrible balancing act that one has to do as an intellectual and a politician in any political scenario so all of that comes into this particular narrative I think I'm just going to try and take a couple of questions from here partly because this one's really interesting were there any particular protocols for greeting and presenting representatives of a new country for the first time I assume this is for the Mughal court and did they have to observe any particular preparations for homage to the attack at the court? Oh, that's such a wonderful question and the short answer is yes, many but in that sense the Mughal court is no different from say the Ottoman court or indeed from James I's court diplomatic tussles about how many times you doff your hat and whether you doff it at all is always always a critical point, a sticking point Rho adopts that as a part of his diplomatic tussle with the Mughals and that is particularly fascinating I spent a lot of time juxtaposing what he was doing and in a way when 19th century editors of Rho took his journal and those early days where he's thinking about decoding Mughal diplomatic procedure they interpreted as this is an Englishman being terribly English and look how strong he is and strong minded he will bow for nobody but interestingly the kind of terms of phrases he uses the kind of negotiations he uses are lifted straight from the notebook of the great bugbear of the English in this period the Spanish ambassador Gondomar who is the man you would love to hate if you were a 17th century early 17th century Englishman in London in this period but he was also great at these diplomatic power plays and Rho who had been on the corners of James I's court watching this Spanish man essentially twirl the court around his little finger uses exactly the same tricks when he goes to Soorat I know there were, oh there are two questions here so I think maybe first in the back and then yes and then I'm keeping an eye oh hi you have to excuse me I'm not like a very educated person in regards to Mughal India but I am like a new history teacher and I'm actually teaching this to my year 7s and currently our like enquiry our historical enquiry is you know how significant was Nora Jahan in regards to Mughal India and we're comparing her to for example the Tudors and women in the UK at the time so in regards to I'm hoping you can help me help educate these kids because I have no clue what I'm doing right now I really don't I'm just 26 years old I'm just lying my way through it but this will really really help me just understand more so obviously we're going at this point where we're concentrating on the women especially Nora Jahan so in your opinion how influential was she and how influential were women in the courts and economically compared to the UK at the time that is a wonderful question I think thank you for asking that so I would probably start by comparing some of the preconceptions people have about women within Islamic worlds and women in Tudor England we talk a lot about Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots, Mary Tudor all of those powerful figures but here's the thing if you think about legal rights of women if you happen to be a woman in 16th, 17th century England you were technically and legally a femme cuvette, a covered woman covered essentially by the male presences around you either by your father or by your husband so your economic power only came to the forefront as an independent individual if you were fortunate enough to be widowed and that does happen because the plague unfortunately took away many of the men first so the printing world and there's a lot of research around this at the moment the printing world in early modern England is run oddly enough by a lot of women in this period who are still publishing under the names of their dead husbands in Islamic law women could retain a portion of wealth under their own name and a lot of women did this is not to say that women who followed Islam had endless freedom, we know that did not happen either in Tudor England, Protestant England or in Mughal India but it did mean that people like Noor Jahan were not alone in handling and being able to kind of manage huge amounts of resources Jahangir's mother herself ran one of the biggest ships of in Mughal trade in fact it's a huge ship and the Portuguese get into great trouble with the Mughals at one point because they capture that particular ship and their trade licenses are almost immediately withdrawn so I think it would be really useful perhaps and interesting for your students to think about just those economic assumptions we make or larger assumptions we make about women's lives and then to see where Noor Jahan sits within that one of the things that I had great fun doing in the book is juxtaposing images of Noor Jahan a portrait of Noor Jahan with a portrait of Anna of Denmark changed the first of England's wife Noor Jahan has shown kind of cleaning her and holding her rifle she was a great hunter, a great sharpshooter and Jahangir is inordinately proud of her there are repeated instances in his memoirs where he writes about how wonderful Noor Jahan was at hunting James the first? Not quite he is not pleased in fact with a large part of his court he was not pleased of this newfangled fashion that women had of wearing high hats that made them look taller for instance Anna of Denmark has her portrait painted wearing, guess what and she positions her arm in a way which makes it very clear that this is a solitary portrait it's a portrait that could not be hung next to a portrait of her husband so that juxtaposition might be an interesting one visual things always work really well I think if you want to get a point across That's just interesting the shade that was going on there so you kind of might have half answered my question because I work on the Ottoman Empire and the minute you started talking about the influence of Noor Jahan I thought ooh Horem Sultan, Sultanate of Women and I wondered if this was maybe part of a larger phenomena within the Mughal Empire kind of like we have in the Ottoman Empire where you actually had this maybe string or collection of very politically influential women who had a type of influence maybe over the governing of the empire that some people might have been very concerned about Yes I think again there is very clearly a resonance there not simply with the Ottomans but also perhaps with the Safavids in Persia, modern day Iran and in each of these cases I think partly the problem is because of certain historical assumptions that are made from the 18th century onwards about the Horem being actually quite a different kind of place from what it really was the Horem structure was not simply about sexual licentiousness or essentially about a sovereign having a lot of women that has beckoned call it was a city within a city in each of these empires and it was a city within a city most importantly governed largely by the women themselves and I think that parallel is really interesting because of course the other unspoken thing in this huge global network is the close network between those three Islamic superpowers essentially in this period I know that we've got lots of hands but I know that the lady there in the blue has been through you've had your hand up for quite a while I'm sorry about that. I'm trying to get as many people as I can. I should give shorter answers Hopefully this is a very quick question I find it very interesting that you've chosen this particular piece because I don't know a lot about India but everything I've read about the origin of the empire doesn't have this story it doesn't have that. My question is you've chosen it very well why do you think not many people have chosen to write about this particular part because it doesn't fit the narrative of empire very very simply see I'm following my ruler for short answer there Ro does not get much success that's the thing and this story of waiting in a queue for the attention of an emperor who is studiously ignoring you does not fit that story of a great empire where the sun never sets I know that we've got two questions and I know that we've had a hand up there was a gentleman there with the dog and then there's a hand up here that I'd like to just come to as well but go ahead please Thank you that was a very insightful conversation so contrary to Django's reign down south there was Deccan sultanates as well was there any interaction between them and the English or was there an ambassador from England? No there wasn't at that point because the Portuguese were focusing on the south at this particular point and the Dutch so there are moments where Ro has meetings with his Dutch contemporary and his Dutch counterpart and he writes about the Dutch going down to Masulipatam for instance and he is aware to some extent about the possibilities in southern India he's aware of other political structures but let's face it England at this point is a very very small power within south Asia so they had to focus their energies somewhere they were already cash constrained constrained in terms of people so they thought they would put their focus on northern India particularly on the Mughal Empire in fact the East India Company was very unwilling to take Ro's advice which now in hindsight sounds actually something terribly kind of prescient in some ways of going to Bengal which is what they'd end up doing later on they simply the East India Company in England decided that was too far to go their resources just wouldn't stretch and I think we've got time for one last question so Do you hear me? Hi very interesting session so far thank you very much and I haven't read the book and I'm looking forward to reading it soon actually you answered the question partially but I was really curious to know so Sir Thomas Ro I mean I was curious to know as to how was he perceived I mean you mentioned that the Jahangir Nama was one of your sources from what I can remember I don't think he was mentioned much in that it was a footnote in history the fact that he and the English expression went there at that point of time but I'm curious to see from your research how was he perceived both in India at that point of time and how was he perceived here in England because I know there's a painting of him approaching the court in the houses of parliament I think there's a painting out there so I suspect all of that is fairly recent but at that point of time how was he perceived you were very generous and kind in saying that he might have been a footnote in the Indian accounts he does not appear in fact none of the English appear in Jahangir's accounts there are wonderful moments where Roe expends 10 pages on a meeting his had with the emperor the emperor talks about Hindi poems about trapping the bee within a lotus flower and the English ambassador doesn't appear and that is a telling example of I suppose an indication of the really marginal role that the English played for the Mughals the western European forces they recognized were the Portuguese they were quite interested in these newcomers because they knew that the Portuguese naval power was a threat and they were quite deliberately I argue in the book both Nur Jahan and Curram the later Shah Jahan were playing the Portuguese and the English against each other in their negotiations throughout this period something that Roe did not realize the mural you talk about again is something that I talk about in the book Roe enters English historiography around the late 19th early 20th century so that mural was commissioned in 1925 it's just after the first world war Britain decides that it needs to have something that should I say it? make Britain great again and they commissioned the series of murals in the houses of parliament and Roe is one of the features there interestingly however the person who paints it Rothstein is himself a second generation immigrant and I loved this moment where I discovered that his father had come over to England guess what to deal in wool I'm going to quote Riz Ahmad and say immigrants we get things done well thank you for that I do have one question that was sent in that I just want to know because it's a very short answer it may not actually apply to your period but it's a good one what's the weirdest thing that the British stole from Mughal India I have to ask that oh goodness you know in this particular period perhaps the weirdest thing is the do piasa okay you have to explain that so this is the thing there was something that is inordinately long and it's taking a long time during the lockdown you get distracted so I got distracted by recipes there's a lot of talk about food Roe suffers from dysentery throughout history he sits through numerous banquets where there are 60 courses sailing past in front of me in front of him and the poor man is just sitting there but I one of the things that keep cropping up in these descriptions by Roe and by his contemporaries is this dish that they all adore and they say it's a dish of meat and onions and then only one account by Roe's chaplain Edward Terry actually allowed me to identify what it is where he says he found out how this was cooked and you get the sense that their own cook would probably somehow get this recipe and he says they call it the do piasa so there you have it do piasa is my vote that wasn't something I would have thought of thank you so much please get the book it's really lots of fun that was really loud thank you Nandini and Sonny fascinating discussion as Sonny said the book is on sale outside and if you would like to have a copy signed please purchase one first and then there will be a little cue and Nandini sat on a table ready to sign also I just want to take this opportunity to thank the sign language interpreters who have done a fantastic job thank you thanks everyone


in particular that you've seen because I know people at home sometimes end up wanting to you know on the example for business of cement end up wanting to go to you know those those I want to say shady hardware places that you find you know in townships or in areas where they kind of sell cement you see things like it's a brand you've never seen and it's like 20 rounds cheaper back than if you go to any of the major retail stores and we all know that that's just a red flag waiting to happen perhaps just talk to us about the rising cost of building material and you know they fit that that ultimately has on property development based on on the cost if you remember most of the items you mentioned they are either imported or certain parts of it are imported and if we talk primarily of the COVID period what we've seen is supply shortages due to whatever other reason may be you know everyone else claims COVID and lockdowns and what is essentially happens is they then use this to push the price up and unfortunately it's it's a case of supply and demand so when there's too little cement with a lot of demand that's what pushes the price up but what they then forget to do is when the demand slot starts to drop and the supply you know starts to be or the pressure starts to release they don't drop that price again and I think from that perspective prices are always going to be going up I mean we're not going to see a case where you know cement was was 80 round and it's back to 50 and those days are long gone you know everyone everyone all businesses are under pressure so from a supplier being a hardware these guys these guys need to make a profit to survive you know it all starts where they have to pay their employees because their employees also add to that cost so when you look at the business not the one you were talking about you know the spousal shop in the in the township that's why they can drop that price but if you look at our established hardware outlets I mean there's there's not a big variance in terms of price especially cement you know you get a bag and the variance would be a rand I mean I can't even say too rand because it's hardly too rand so from a cost perspective material across the board is subject to inflation when fuel goes up everything else goes up supply when supplies under constraints the price goes up those are just normal things I think you have to budget for it and you know if you've got a hundred rand to spend you need to spend less than a hundred rand you need to want less than a hundred rand but oftentimes we'd we'd have a hundred rand but we'd want something for 200 and I think that's where the problem comes in so now you start going because now that spousal shop starts to look very attractive now and I mean consequently you'd start buying inferior products the building starts to be unsafe and I mean there's just dire consequences that come thereafter and I think when we when we look at some of those dire consequences I notice one of those things that nobody wants to deal with and I think sometimes people are not honest about how they get themselves there you know I like this idea of if you if you've got a hundred rand uh spend almost in your head only only one things that are 90 rand or that come to 90 rand because you're going to find that that that 10 rand is going to creep in uh somehow so you almost want to expectation manage yourself and your budget uh with not putting too much pressure on us because the moment you end up having you know uh needs that are over that hundred rand as you say you that that's puzzle shop starts looking uh very attractive and and the reality is just the consequences of buying in stores like that is that it is inferior products and you are going to feel it you know there's almost no uh there's there's almost every guarantee that you're going to feel it when you have bought um inferior products and and you know right I'm keen to hear from you when it comes to certain innovations then that we've seen in the industry and and it can be in the last year or even longer I think one of the things with the industry is that it's obviously we're always evolving but what have been some of the innovations that we've you know seen particularly uh in the construction sector I'd speak from our perspective in uh you know because that's that's where I'd have some input but um in general construction used to be very uh in paper face-to-face contact but since the pandemic let's say it was the worst thing for the construction industry because nobody could work you know we were off work for a while so that was putting all construction businesses under pressure but then what we've seen is that people are starting to innovate to see how they could still address this market with the constraints that were there so you'd find consumers need work to be done but because of the fear of COVID they were actually putting that work off which which was I mean it was realistic it was expected but then what we started doing from outside on efficiency we started doing our virtual consult and that's where we'd allow clients to book a consult because let's let's face it if you wanted your room to be painted you've got a problem you can't wait until lockdown's over so what we've then done we've given clients the ability to almost book a consult but a virtual consult so we'd consult like we basically consulting now thanks to technology our cameras are actually better than our eyes so you could show me anything I'd be able to give you advice based on what I'm seeing so that's one of the innovations that the pandemic has actually pushed us into and I think going from here I don't see the market going back to the archaic way of needing to physically see someone in your premises so the in-contact would definitely change and I mean what that allows us it just gives us access you would be able to address someone's needs that's like geographically dispersed we would be able to attend to someone in a different province you know they'd be able to get expertise from someone in a different location and I think if you look at that it then gives the customer or the consumer a better quality of service and the competition landscape is much better and and I think you know when we talk about innovations and the move to you know the virtual world we know that certain aspects have been absolutely amazing like one of the downsides to the world opening up is that we're back to sort of in-contact meetings and even having to navigate traffic all over again one of the big shocks to my system has actually been driving to clients with certain meetings right I think there are certain things where I know I have to be on site but having to drive to meetings I've even forgotten how we calculate you know the amount of time it takes you to drive to a place and factoring in actual traffic because you know one of the other perks of when we were in sort of strict lockdown was that there was almost no traffic and so recently it's been quite a shock to my system that I am driving in full-on traffic again and a trip that would sometimes you know only be 20 minutes 30 at max can sometimes even go up to being 50 minutes and so having to just plan differently definitely you know is one of those things that has been a bit of a pressure point on on my side you know right one of the things that I do want us to to look at when we come back because I want us to go for a quick break is talking all things residential construction you know and what some of the trends have been there we know that people have been doing quite a lot of work in their homes because of COVID you know we're stuck in our homes spending quite a bit of time we did see even people you know pulling up their sleeves doing some DIY projects but of course we know that certain things you shouldn't DIY and you need experts to come in to do in your home I want us to go for a quick break and when we come back we're going to continue this conversation of course want to see who that lucky winner is of the 500 rounds in cash that is up for grabs I see an elder Everton has dropped us a comment on Facebook saying looking stunning summer with green hearts thank you very much there and elder and we're going to go for that quick break let's see who the lucky winner is remember if you call your name you want to make sure that you drop us a message down here below to claim your price and that lucky winner this evening is the lucky winner of our competition 500 rounds up for grabs what was to see when I do hope that she is watching at home do drop us a message down here below to claim that 500 rounds that is in the money bag was to see where Sanela is the lucky winner this evening but as we continue our conversation talking construction industry trends in 2021 I'm in conversation with right if may of the CEO at efficiency and I want us to look at residential construction because it really is one of those things I know many people at home have one have either thought of venturing into in terms of working on their homes and some have already you know done it perhaps just take us through what are some of the you know trends that you're seeing with residential construction especially during this COVID period and some of the mistakes people are doing as they you know start off with residential projects I know as we lead up to the festive season some are actually starting now we see a lot of that activity you know during this period and some people want to make sure that their homes look amazing for the holiday season I know for example in townships we've been doing stuff around this period because we know in December there are also weddings and when people come over you know for the weddings the house must look amazing so what what are some of the trends and what are the mistakes people are making when it comes to you know residential construction one of the nice things I can't say let's take it 10 years ago we'd use a plan and that could be the basis for actually doing the building or whatever but what I have seen in in call it the past year or so lots of consumers are actually getting to a point where they do you know they go I'm sure you one of those that go on to Pinterest and Instagram and do like storyboards and stuff so that's I think that's one of the highlights of this this let's say the change they say this paradigm shift I'd say that's the highlight for me because what it does it actually creates a clear expectation on both parts so the consumer knows exactly what they want and so does the service provider or the contractor and I think once we we are aligned in terms of expectation and what we are supposed to deliver I think the problems that emanate there from are quite little a big problem comes in where the client wants a lot you know and they they have a picture in their mind and the contractor has a different picture or is unable to understand what the client wants and that's where you find these discrepancies major issue and I think and I I agree with you a lot of us now create our mood boards we've gone contrast we've gone private properties you know websites you'll get other homes and you know what the finishes in those homes are because we obviously even get able to you know get tours of the different properties so we really are slightly more empowered to say to a contractor this is the kind of stuff I'm looking for we're not kind of sitting back and waiting for them to give us everything but we have a really nice idea and we even have a visual representation of what that looks like which I think is absolutely important but then we're going to talk about the mistakes you I think you pointed out that one great thing that we do do and certainly the trend or the shift in trends from from what used to be but what are the mistakes that we're making because I really want viewers at home to to even sometimes before going into a project be aware of some of that mistakes other people are making so they don't make them I mean the one big one that we've we've been hopping on has been around being a penny pincher in in your you know in your construction project and this one we always just hop on even with any aspect of you know the property value chain is yes you must negotiate and and certain things are you know very well negotiable but you also need to realize the point at which you're now being a penny pincher as opposed to you know fair negotiation and that if you're going to cross that line to you know being the penny pincher something is going to ultimately you know be it's going to be at the cost of some things and you need to fundamentally understand that so besides people who are penny pinches and you know cheapskates what are some of the mistakes other mistakes that you know people at home typically make when it comes to construction and projects in in their respective homes I want to actually talk to your point about penny pinching so although we find the situation where people are quite tight first that I also think in their defense they don't know they don't have a benchmark so you know you'd want a dream home you'd see this dream home and you'd think 50 000 more than enough to build that dream home when in essence you need a million rent for example so I think because of the absence of that information that's where clients start to take the 50 000 want to build a castle when in essence you can't even build a garage to the castle so that's where we're finding a lot of issues and you know the client then tends to scale back in terms of material purchases they go to Zama spaza shop you know what I'm saying and then they get a service provider or let's call it an artisan that's that's not I wouldn't say qualified but they wouldn't take an artisan that has that ticks all the boxes that they would have taken well was the budget in order so I think it just comes from the availability of information regarding that costing so what I would say if you're doing a big project the best thing would be to actually get the proper costing done you know before going in venturing going to buy material looking for quotes and contractors because let's face it if three contractors give a quote but all three contractors don't really ever sense you know that they desperately want this job everyone's going to cut the next one so Zama would think that look I'm getting a good deal when in essence once the contractor has the money he's already short to finish the project and that's where you know that's where chaos breaks loose so first thing to do get a proper costing look sometimes it costs a bit of money rather spend that small I would say this burst that small amount of money to get that information which would save you in the long run and I think that would allow you to get a much better return on your nights I it will save you on sleepless nights so you definitely want to make sure that you don't go to right each puzzle shop where you are you know working on your project that's quite a big thing that you need to always be careful of and you know that bill of quantities is so important because as you say people just don't have a concept of of the costing I think I am unfortunate I have a very good sense of what a lot of these things cost depending on the kind of property where you are the nature of the finishes how much you should you're looking at per square meter so you know that if you're looking at sort of very modern finishes sometimes it could even be you know it's it would typically be over 11,000 per square meter sometimes right because it also depends on the nature of the finishes that you want and those always just drive up the cost and but the reality is not many people at home are able to even wrap their head around you know you want to do something it's 80 square meters and if we're costing it at you know let's say 6,000 per square meter this is what it's going to be looking like and even that 6,000 per square meter I think it usually just shocks people right because you're just like listen and that's that's being on the prudent side uh and and because that's actually relatively low sometimes and they're thinking but it's just such a small you know little thing um and if it's you know if it's for example a 30 square um or a 60 square meter you're already looking at you know over 300,000 for for that costing per square meter and so sometimes people at home always just struggle to wrap their head around certain things and as you say end up going to a a right hems puzzle shop which of course as we're seeing earlier does cost you in the long run and sometimes it even costs you during the project uh because one of the things is when inferior products are used you see it from the get go and redoing work is not something nobody wants to do you know rather do it right the first time if it means you need to do your construction in phases and then so be it especially if you you don't have the time to kind of wait a long period of time to save up then rather you know do it in phases as much as possible and you know rave because i know that we're slowly going to be wrapping up i'm keen to hear from you you know some of the developments uh that efficiency has made uh throughout considering you know the pandemic when you already spoke to one of them with virtual consultations but how have you kind of gone and adapted um the way you do business because we already know covid isn't going anyway so and as much as the world kind of opens up we've also just fundamentally shifted in how we view things and um and how we do business well if i look at it i mean the virtual consults is one of the big things for us because that allowed us what we were finding during covid is that lots of clients were hesitant to allow us to come and do work i mean they needed the work done be residential commercial but because of the pandemic and because of the fear of the pandemic people were holding off on this so the virtual consults on our part was a definite leap in the right direction and this has seen that lots of uh clients that would have possibly not engaged with have started engaging with us and what we've also done speaking to your cost in no not the 6 000 random square meter to 11 000 we've actually built a tool where clients could go on and they could use that tool to you know take a dream house you choose a different level of finish and it'll give you a thumbs up it gives you a ballpark look i mean zama wants marble tiles worth 800 square meter i want 250 grand porcelain tiles so it's never going to cater to you 100 percent but it gives you a ballpark so you'd be able to know for my 80 square meter if i want moderate finishes i should be prepared for 400 000 for example so you know that 200 thousands not going to get you anywhere nearby and you wouldn't even try that exercise with 200 000 so those are the type of developments that we've started putting into place so that the consumer out there could get better information at their disposal because essentially that the consumer is what we require for the industry to to remain let's say to remain sustainable hmm and and rave before we wrap up this evening uh any forecasts in terms of trends for 2022 people are definitely going to be more virtual interest is just going to get better mood boards people are just qualifying home people that are working at home or that are not in construction becoming interior decorators not by qualification but by social media standing so it's exciting it's exciting and it's nice to deal with informed consumers you know so i do think that the the previous generation of construction service providers is going to need to shake it up because the consumers out there are informed and they know exactly what they want well rave that is where we're going to leave it at this evening thank you so much for joining us on the show thank you thank you and that is rave mayor who's the ceo at efficiency wrapping up there's the addition of the private property park cost with myself because i'm a don't want tomorrow speaking all things construction industry trends in 2021 and i see that we unfortunately did not have the winner claim their price we'll see what zanelle didn't claim that 500 rand so it goes into the money bag and we're going to have a thousand rands tomorrow evening and that is where i'm going to wrap it up this evening on the private property park cost my son was a mountain walk malo by the novel on your screens at 8 p.m i'm back tomorrow evening as we wrap up the week of course at 7 p.m until then hope you're staying home and staying safe


You finally made it to your bed. After a long day, the average mind producing 20 to 60,000 thoughts on an average day. What you may find is you finally lay down to rest and your mind is still active. And that's okay. In this meditation, we're gonna quiet the mind, be kind and accepting of ourselves and fall asleep peacefully with a feeling of content, with a feeling of gratitude, a feeling of self-acceptance. Because no matter how difficult your day was today, you made it here and you made it through. So feel free to get comfortable within your own space. You can lie on your side, your stomach, on your back and just lay and breathe. Because my friend, our thoughts become simple when the moment becomes simple and all you need to do in this moment is breathe. And listen, all your body and mind is asking from you right now is to rest and to be kind to yourself. Be kind to yourself and breathe and let this moment wash away all negative thoughts, thoughts that don't serve you. Any thought that tells you you don't deserve love is not a thought you need to welcome. A thought may enter your mind that puts you down and you need not listen. You are loved because you do love others. You are kind because you are kind to others. This is reality and these thoughts are true. Let the mind become simple, but the moment becomes simple. All you need to do is listen to my voice and breathe. If you feel alone at this moment, why don't we breathe together? Become in sync with each other at this very moment in time. Let's inhale through the nose and exhale through the mouth. Inhale through the nose and exhale through the mouth. Once more, inhale and exhale. Let your mind drift into space. Let your body absorb the mattress, give gravity a hug as it's working for us right now.  The muscles in your face smooth them out and relax them. Your jaw, eyebrows, cheeks, let it all relax. Be kind to yourself. Be kind to this moment. This moment is not happening to you. It's happening for you. Take it all in. Feel the weight of your body. Feel the air coming into your lungs. Feel your eyelids get heavier and in this moment you can feel your mind becoming quiet. Your mind knows it's time to rest and you know you did everything you could today. There is no going back. The sun will rise once again tomorrow. Now is the time for you. You may smile now. A soft smile knowing you are being kind to your body. A smile knowing that you are being kind and smile knowing that you have been kind to others. You can smile in that this moment is just for you as you fall deeper into relaxation from feeling comes over you. You realize that it's okay to love yourself and it's okay to love you for you. Feel at peace. You feel relaxed. Your body, my friend, sleep tight. Know you are kind.


Hi, what if I tell you that I'm not real? What if I tell you that you're looking at my doppelganger? My doppelganger knows me so well that it can give this lecture, record this lecture for you. It knows my past, it knows my present, it can forecast my future. By knowing me so well, it can effectively engage with me and help me to change my behavior to become a better version of myself. This doppelganger was trained using artificial intelligence, especially we call it personal AI. Now the real me, I'm an AI scientist and my research is focused on personal AI. My friends and family members think that my research is interesting because I'm doing something like science fiction. I'm trying to create a better version of myself. I'm trying to create a more powerful version of myself. And they think that this research could be highly impactful. Well, time is up. Thank you very much and time to say goodbye from my doppelganger.


Most Saturdays at this time we spend an exciting half-hour adventure and action with America's public hero number one hop along Cassidy Well, even two-fisted cowboys take summer vacations when they can and hoppy is no exception But hop along and topper will be back with us riding the CBS airtrails again four weeks from tonight September 22nd Get this and get it straight Crime is a suckers road and those who travel it wind up in the gut of the prison of the grave There's no other end They never learn From the pen of Raymond Chandler outstanding author of crime fiction comes his most famous character in the adventures of Philip Marlowe Now with Gerald Moore starred as Philip Marlowe, we bring you tonight's transcribe story air for G string There's nothing really wrong with a hot summer But if some sadist really wanted to bring out the worst in anybody particularly me after a steaming day All he has to do is expose me to air conditioning Take for instance the Broadview Hotel, which was on Olive Street in downtown L.A It ground out alternating currents of cold air from what could laughingly be called the lobby I'd revolved through the usual doors and stood squinting into the icy darkness When my eyes leveled off again, I made my way to the elevators Sinking into the deep pile carpeting after my hot and cold ankles By the time I reached room 972. I was in the first stages of a chill Yeah, our conditioning is a marvelous invention Guarantees the summer cold for life You're mr. Marlowe. That's right. That makes you mr. Allman, huh? Come on. I'm all man. Come in sure Yeah, you're nothing like I'd pictured you mr. Allman sit down, please mr. Marlowe Pictured me. I don't understand Well, all my life I'd heard about Philadelphia lawyers Somewhere along the line. I drew up a mental 8 by 10 of a Yeah, well, it doesn't matter. You just don't look the prototype perhaps that's because I'm only a junior partner in the firm mr. Yeah, maybe that's it. You know, it's an odd thing about prototypes mr. Marlowe. They'll trick you Oh, for example, I've always had the idea that men in your Well, I'll call it a profession. That's nice of you that men in your profession always wore trench coats Yeah, well, let's cause Bogart looks so good in them. Yes Well about our business together I'll be here in Los Angeles a few days representing the firm in a number of ways But while I'm here, I hope to locate a man by the name of buff Ryan. Did you say that first name was buff? Yes, odd name, isn't it? Yeah, but that's beside the point This buff Ryan it seems has inherited a small amount of money from a maiden that who passed away some time ago in Philadelphia According to our information my firm is executor of her estate Mr. Ryan came west about a year ago and until approximately six months ago He could be reached at a wearing street address in care of a C8 Douglas But our correspondence to him there has been returned marked unknown at this address. That's the last record you have on him Yes, that's the last we've written to this C8 Douglas but receive no answer from him. I've called him since I arrived in town. There's been no answer Well, maybe they've both left town moved away. No, that's possible, of course But perhaps you'll find that out when you get to checking on mr. Ryan I see. Well, I'm to find him if I can and tell him about this inheritance, huh? By the way, how much is it five thousand dollars just about misleaders and tire estate misleaders sounds like a comment Full name. You may want that was Julie leader Julie leading I'm sorry. I can't show you a picture of mr. Ryan I'm expecting one to be sent out to me while I'm here expected that this morning is a matter of fact Yeah, well, maybe a description of him will do Have you ever seen him? No But we were able to find out that he's slightly less than six feet tall like brown hair straight Blue eyes wait about 180 pounds when he left Philadelphia a year ago No distinguishing marks about him according to our description Oh, yes, and uh, he's about 35 years old.  Oh, of course Yeah I've written it down for you with the phone number I've been calling I'll be handling most of my business affairs right here at the hotel mr. Milo I'll appreciate it if you'll check in occasionally. Let me know your progress. Oh sure. I'll be glad to say around three o'clock this afternoon Okay, tell you everything I know about then Yeah, but then it might not be a thing. I know your reputation. Mr. Milo. You'll find him. I'm sure I don't get me wrong It needs to be found I'll probably find him But I have missed you know It's why I should want to rock the confidence of a Philadelphia lawyer. I don't know Maybe it was because Martin Allman for all his conservative Brooks Brothers attire looked too much or not enough like what he was supposed to be Maybe it was because the east los angeles address he'd handed me for buff ryan was a cinch to be 30 degrees hotter It was too Wearing street was lined with gray little houses surrounded by small gray lawns that it would straggling gray trees The color scheme was the direct result of long years of constant neglect I knocked a long time on the door of the c.a. Douglas residence The porch was littered with old papers and assortment of throwaways and leaves The only response I got was from a scrawny cat also gray Who leaped up on the porch rail a spit and yowled at me I yowled back and walked off the porch in the general direction of my car That's when I noticed a smaller grayer house behind this one on the same lot And I thought I saw a curtain at the front window move slightly The cat dog my steps back to sea Oh, pardon me, but I'm trying to locate c.a. Douglas.  I don't know. I haven't seen mr. Douglas in quite a while. Oh You uh, you think he moved away Maybe I don't know How would I know I don't know Well, look, I'm I'm in kind of a hurry. I'm getting dressed to go to work. How long have you lived here? What difference does it make did you ever know a guy named buff Ryan? Of course not Why of course not why not just know listen? I don't know hardly anybody and I don't know you it Now it's the phone go away. Will you please mr? No, no, I don't think I will honey She was tall very blonde very good to look at A fresh blue house coat wrapped around just the way it should And even after I entered the spotless little living room the faint aura of her cologne lingered on I couldn't tell anything about the phone conversation. She was having the next room, but I could tell a lot about her by the several scantily clad pictures of her that greeted me from various points of the room Yeah, I could tell a lot about her Hey, what's the idea? You just can't walk in here. Do you want me to call the police?  I particularly like this sample where it says For buff darling my love blossom. Listen, mr. I got things to do so run along. How long have you known buff, honey? You think I'm kidding about calling the cops Well, I do it all right only Only what Only I'm I'm do downtown at work I Oh honest, mr. I'm not going to talk to you anymore. You got no right to ask me questions about anything And nothing says I got answer. That's right. That's right, honey. You sure don't now. Where's buff? I don't know. I'll drive you downtown and you can tell me all about it, huh? You're driving me nowhere, but out of my mind. Now. Look, I got good news for your boy. You'd want to see me get out Okay, blossom. Okay What time's your first show to a How did you know? Yeah, I read the papers And occasionally I've been known to contribute to the cultural progress of los angeles. You know Save the burlesque houses The pictures she'd autographed the buff have been propped up between my sugar bowl and the soul shake of the sunday morning before And the theatrical section of the sunday paper Yeah, I didn't recognize it with a house coat on And all the way back downtown I reflected on the advantages of being well read Well, I parked in a lot on a side street to the north end of skid row and stopped for lunch at a newspaper man's hangout nearby It was almost time for blossom's first show when I felt Fortified enough to walk along the street past the blank stairs of the winos and the dank air of the muscatel missions Blossoms flag flew above the marquee blossom the flower of burlesque How many please one, huh? There you are, sir. Thanks Say do you think I can get in to see blossom? I don't see how you can miss with buying the ticket and all No, no, no. I mean, I'd like to see her personally in a dressing room. I'd like to talk to her Well, I'm sure you have my permission whether or not to get blossoms is strictly between her and her moral fiber You know something you're not much help. You know something. I don't try to be I'll miss you With the purchase of every box of this delicious chocolate candy with the nuts Inside He wasn't going to make a killing exactly they weren't more than six guys in the place I wanted down the side isle to the door to one side of the stage and push through I found myself in a dark narrow catwalk of a hallway Show is going to be out front back. You guys can't come back here. Well, this guy did. Where can I find blossom? Uh out front about 10 minutes. I'll wait for her back here. Thanks. Look I can make myself clear if I wish you would your lighting system is very bad back here Lights out front where it counts Mack. Come on. Get out. Take it easy fellow. This is business. I don't like being pushed That can happen.  I'll get out front where you belong Now look, I don't know who you are. I can clear that up for you quick friend I'm the manager of this theater and I'll run along like he did. Where can we talk in your office? Why should I talk to you because I'm a booking agent. I want to talk to you about blossom She's booked. Okay. We'll talk about something else. Where's your office? The show's starting. We can't stay back here.  Sure. Sure. It's a class show Come on through this door Now then you're no booking agent. So what's on your mind blossom and what's your name blue george blue? Why Would it mean anything to you if I told you that buff friars aunt julie died in philadelphia? And left him 5 000 bucks Wouldn't mean a thing Wouldn't huh? No That's funny because you're the first one who'd fit the picture What picture? Slightly under six feet tall light brown hair straight blue eyes About 35 years old Way about 180 and what are you trying to prove that you can see me?  I think I will I also think I'll stick around and see blossom after her uh Performance I wouldn't do that far with you. I'd see the show and get out I don't want any trouble around here. I don't either And if you see buff before the show is over tell him i'm out front. Will you I said I don't want any trouble You're in a rut I walked down the aisle and lived backstage of course I'd already chartered Blossom's costume was less demure than her blue house coat It was a school of thought surrounding me that this was more effective Near the door.  I had a good look at a twisted face and a pair of watery blue eyes Backstage I waited for blossom's act to conclude It did In just a moment we'll return to the second act of philip marlowe But first Love that monday through friday night session of smiles Bula is back with haddie mcdaniel again starring as an over generous over anxious to be wed overweight damsel holding forth over cbs radio Starting this monday night listen for bula and the henderson family in a new season of delightful day-to-day doings Bula joins the fall parade of stars back to cbs radio on most of these stations beginning monday night Now with our star gerald more the second act of philip marlowe and tonight's story air for g string I couldn't have been out long About eight bars of imagination unless i'd missed a full chorus At some point i was fuzzly aware of being carried sack style somewhere Then being dropped not too gently under was said of the noisiest springs i'd ever heard This music lulled me for a while and then i heard a door slam And my head rolled off on the floor and broke Come on marlowe. You're not dead Is that official how'd you get in here anyway? You wouldn't believe me if i told you I hardly believe it myself. You're not supposed to be i know i know i know i know I've had that pointed out to me several times now Yeah, and i didn't think i told you my name Your wallet was on the floor i can read Oh, yeah, well good for you Who hit me and with what size sandbag? I don't know you never know anything do you listen mr. Marlowe you've been barging in all day where you're not wanted Why didn't you tell me buff was a wino? Hey look look that's what's left of my head, huh?   See your point Here Here's mine memory getting any better It's um clearing up a little thought it would Well, uh when he ain't here which he ain't right now.  Flop house three doors down or for two tritillies four doors down a saloon. Thank you Mother morris couldn't help me lovable old lush that she was And a penetrating search of the 25 cent bed she saw revealed a lot of things But no buff ryan Tillie's downstairs next door didn't look very promising at first but That was before i saw the twisted face with the watery blue eyes at the far end of the bar beside him the unofficial dean and philosopher of skid row jay fenton prentice I started told them but a cordon of wino surrounded me before i could reach him That's him prentice. That's the one yeah prentice. I'm the one Will you call the brothers here off make them breathe in another direction and let me talk the buff We're a close association here mr. Malo Outsiders are not well. Oh come on prentice. You know me well enough perhaps mr. Malo But we know each other better My associates and I My young friend buff here quite obviously does not wish to talk with you We are nearly respecting his wishes In our own way. Oh come on. Look, this is kaka. Maybe this isn't the place to say it, but you've inherited money buff That's all I came to tell you Your aunt julie I'm saying any more prentice. Don't let him get to me. I gotta get out of here. If you gentlemen will Resting mr.  There's a lawyer here from Philadelphia to see it He's at the broad view. Will you if I haven't said get in touch with it Listen to me The lawyer's name is martin alman.  Let go of me.  It was three o'clock. I delivered my message from martin alman Buff could take it from there No, I may be wrong, but most guys like to inherit dough Still you can never tell with a wino The buff was as they say bonafide Martin alman was glad to see me. That was a nice change of pace I told him all I knew didn't take long. I'm afraid you've had quite a bad experience. Mr. Malo. I'm sorry I'm sorry too. Oh by the way This picture arrived special delivery from philadelphia about an hour ago Is uh, this the reluctant chap you tracked down. Let me see that Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's buff before muscatel Oh, you've done a fine job. Mr. Malo. I made your checkout for you. Thanks So you're gonna try to get in touch with buff yourself and perhaps and not personally of course You're certain that wearing street address the little house and back should reach him. Yeah. Yeah Or I suppose you could get in touch with him through blossom at the burlesque theater Well, we've done all we can for now Unfortunately, I've been called back to philadelphia. I'm taking your plane out in an hour What about buffing the inheritance? Well now that I know he can be reached. We'll mail it to him after all we can force it I'm not can we mr. Malo?  Allman Martin Allman seems satisfied that we've done our job So I left wishing someone would come up to me and tell me aunt. What's her name? It left me 5000 clams When I got back to my car I had it all figured how I'd go home and forget what Martin had called quite a bad experience One look inside my car told me it wasn't going to work out that way at all You weren't as long as I thought you'd be mr. Malo And you get here from skid row apprentice fly I always taxi how nice for you After you left tillies I felt a thinking mr. Malo quite a fall It occurred to me that perhaps You were telling buff the truth all the time. I was That's not important now. Is it? Oh, yes I should say it's quite important really You mustn't be too hard on buff mr. Malo He's like most men on the row He probably has his reasons for running Running from life perhaps running from himself or others Are you trying to tell me something apprentice now that would be presumptuous of me mr. Malo tempered justice with mercy That much I say to you I tell you buff Ryan is running and with reason If his reason interests you then I suggest you set about Finding out what it is Well, is there any reason why I should no No, there isn't but This much I do know He has left the row And he is running I saved jay frenton apprentice's taxi fare back to what he affectionately referred to as the row Yeah, he wouldn't have followed me if he hadn't wanted me to know something peculiar about buff And yet his odd code kept him from telling me himself And I knew that code well enough to know that it had something to do with the police Yeah, well, like I say, I'm a curious fellow. Oh now phil, um, is this a big time or small time crook this ryan? He's pretty small sergeant mooney if he is one Eleases no, not that I know of Well, we'll try ryan just for size, huh Buffs a crazy name. He's a crazy guy We'll have to look for it in the moniker file if we don't have it here Uh, uh, hold it here Uh, is your guy where oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's it. Let's see that one. Take it out of there. Yeah Let's see. Not much of a reckon suspect. I'm robbery charges dropped Suspect extortion charges problems wonder why they bothered to take his picture. I don't know aliases aliases Buff raglan bob Rutledge c.a. Doug C.a. Douglas Hello, what takes care of one question mark does it? Yeah, I take my word for it kid. It does I see Last question in connection with the slaying of julie leader fill it up. You Wait a minute Aunt julie holy smoke I knew I didn't like this martin allman. I didn't bother to check his record. I got the picture No wonder buff ran for me like the plague Martin had suckered me into setting buff up for the kill marlowe the finger man. That's great Now I got back to the theater and practically nothing flat yank blossom practically offstage shoved her into my control Like mad at the little gray house behind the little gray house Frontier said buff had left skid roll If he wasn't on wearing street, he might be anywhere including dead Martin was paying off a cab driver in front of the house Blossom cued me to the alley entrance and back Please god, please don't let anything happen to him. I'll crack now honey. We'll make it in time If you just let us in he's got to mr. Marlowe. He's my husband. Okay. Okay. Take it easy, baby Stand away from a blossom.  No buff.  I don't believe you marlowe. You're part of the deal Hey, what is this you should have listened to me buff? I'm sorry blossom. I had to he's all right.  No answer it.  I Was looking for a gentleman by the name of buff ryan. I'm an old friend of his I understood he lived here. Yes Yes, he does Is he at home now? Yes, won't you come in? Thank you Marlowe thank Kevin thank me. I got his gun. Are you all right? Never felt better You'll throw some water on your boy and get him in here. Maybe you'll talk now. Yeah Yeah, maybe I will Now buff darling, you're not hurt. Not any more honey I don't figure you I guess marlowe I thought you were on martin's team. I was at first when I thought the business about you inheriting the 5000 bucks was legitimate What's he got against you? I saw too much once about a year ago I saw martin kill julie leader I was the only one who saw it. I knew he'd give me the same thing if you ever got the chance He he can't do that now Kenny. Not if you'll talk when we get the law here buff. Why didn't you tell me? Silly question, honey Sure marlowe call the law It'll be almost a pleasure to talk So much for that buff and blossom are doing fine Every once in a while we sit in the third row and yell down in front Yeah, he's got a good job now And soon they'll have enough for the traditional vine covered respectability Oh, by the way He's taken a wearing brooks brothers type suits You know what? He looks just like a philadelphia lawyer How do you like that? The adventures of philip marlowe bringing you raymond chandler's most famous character starring jerald moore Are produced and transcribed by norman mcdonnell and written for radio by kathleen height Featured in the cast where jack moore's is buff ryan michael ann barrett has blossom and john stevensson as martin allman with sydney miller as mr. Balloo Norman field as jay fenton prentice grace landard as gloria b Sargent moony is played by jack crucian Gerald moore may currently be seen in the santana production saraco The special music for philip marlowe is composed by pierre garagank and conducted by wilbur hatch Be sure to listen next week at the same time when philip marlowe says This time she was lovely and i was engaged Engaged to help a beautiful shepherd who had a flock of trouble We found a lost sheep And something else she didn't know she lost This coming monday night keep the evening free because the great fall parade of stars and shows back to cbs radio will begin in earnest Enjoy suspense moving into monday evening raising the curtain with william holen in the leading role of a brand new spine tingler Enjoy lux radio theaters the mudlark starring iran dun and sir cedric hardwick Enjoy the bob hawk show back in business with three thousand dollars to start the season's quiz bang fun Yes, they're all coming back to cbs radio this monday night yours on most of the same cbs stations Today with the country rising to meet the challenge of aggression The red cross has been asked by the government to undertake tremendous tasks By giving generously to the red cross You will help mobilize for the defense of your families your community and the nation give as much as you can today Clarence casel speaking This is the cbs radio network


emails back and forth. I try to check my emails only twice a day and I have a system set up and I got this from a guy called Dave Allen's book, Getting Things Done. You can get an audio book off Amazon. Highly recommend that book. He says that you need to organize a way that people communicate with you throughout the day and vice versa into a simple structure. I've completely taken his advice and gone emails twice a day and let anybody know that I'm communicating with that if it's urgent, text me. If it's an emergency, almost like critical decision, call me. The end result is I don't get bothered anymore. It's great and I can just focus. Social media DMs once a day and then you have a power hour twice a day where if someone's available and they understand, it can go back and forth just like I am with someone right now.


I'm going to explain briefly a Russell's version of the correspondence theory of truth that he outlines in this chapter To understand this theory of truth, we kind of have to start with the you know the relevant objects In this truth. So the first, you know object. So to speak it is me, right? And then there's the world so what the correspondence theory of truth is going to do is it's going to have something to say about the beliefs of the Individual and what's real now Russell calls This the correspondence between belief and fact now belief is going to happen in the individual Fact is a way the world is he's not using the word fact the way that we use the word fact We use the word fact to mean something like What's proven right a belief that's proven? But for Russell a fact is not a belief at all a fact is a way the world is So this trash can being on top of the table. That's a fact Let's take a look and see what's going on inside my head So I'm looking at the trash can on the table and remember I'm not acquainted with the trash can or the table And I'm acquainted with sin-status, but that's probably you know diving into some other material Well, what's happening is we had the trash can on the table and what's happening in my head is that I have this belief the trash can is on top of The table now these three terms here These are all terms they constitute a belief Okay, so I had the belief and this is inside my head there's mean or that you the individual with the belief and There is the relation beliefs So what we have here is we have the subject. That's you We have the object that's that that's the belief and the object relation.  Although this theory might be a little unnecessarily complicated But the idea is it's complex as opposed to simple complex things have parts simple things don't So this complex hole has parts and the parts are constituents So you the belief and the believing You the belief in the believing even the even the relation there the subject the object and the relation they all form a complex hole Now the trash can on top of the table Not the belief mind you I want to talk about the fact here the fact of the trash can on top of the table This is also a complex hole. The trash can is a part of it The table is a part of it is a constituent of it and the relation on top of is another constituent So I've got one gets the one complex hole. That's me and I have another complex hole. That's the fact right or I should say the one complex hole me Believe in the belief that's one complex home and another complex hole That's the fact of the trash can be on top of the table and what exists between these two Another relation that exists between these two complex holes is the relation of correspondence Now for us for this correspondence theory of truth a belief is true Just in case. There's correspondents between the belief and the fact Just in cases correspondence between the belief and the fact so if the belief is true There's the belief, there's the fact and as a correspondence if the belief is false then The correspondence doesn't it doesn't exist or maybe the there's no correspondence. I should say if the belief is false Also, the belief still exists. There's still a fact, just not the fact that corresponds to the belief. And there's a lack of correspondence between the belief and the fact. So to kind of sum up, if a belief is true, then I've got the belief, I've got the fact, and I've got the correspondence. And if I've got the belief, and the fact, and the correspondence, then I have truth. And that's the correspondence theory of truth.