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Incredible collection of essays that makes me want to read more of Orwell’s non-fiction. The last three are the most pertinent to the current political and social atmosphere w.r.t. the threats to freedom in general, and freedom of thought in particular. I loved “Boys’ Weeklies”, a dissection of popular pulp magazines and how they instill a particular world view in their readers: “boys at certain ages find it necessary to read about Martians, death-rays, grizzly bears and gangsters. They get what they are looking for, but they get it wrapped up in the illusions which their future employers think suitable for them”. The essay was written during a time when conservatives controlled British publishing, so the literal message may not be applicable, but the concept is. The political affiliation and medium have both changed over the last 80 years, but the technique remains the same.

This collection of 14 essays by Orwell can be divided into 3 categories: 1. Memoirs (Such Such were the joys, Shooting an elephant, Marrakech, Looking back on Spanish War, Why I Write) 2. Critiques of people or novels and in one case, well, country(Charles Dickens, Donald McGill, Rudyard Kipling, Inside the Whale,England your England, Reflections on Gandhi) 3. Misc: One essay on Boy's weekly and one on English Language. 


Memoirs are all very interesting. Essay on English language is excellent, so is the one on Gandhi. However, critiques of Charles Dickens, Donald McGill and Rudyard Kipling didn't held any interest for me, while Boy's Weekly and England your England are seriously dated (though the latter does explain Brexit in a way, when Orwell says, "The insularity of the English, their refusal to take foreigners seriously, is a folly that has to be paid for very heavily from time to time.")


Some highlights from a few essays I particularly liked are:


1. Such, such were the joys: This is a memoir by Orwell of his school days. He starts by describing the dread of wetting his bed after arrival to the boarding school (in those days, it was considered a deliberate act and child was beaten up). "Sin was not necessarily something that you did, it might be something that happened to you". Poor Orwell took the lesson that he was in a world where it was not possible for him to be good. He describes the snobbish-ness of kids there and how even teachers were biased towards one with rich parents. The school's focus was exams and not learning. Corporal punishments, making kids guilty of wasting teachers time and parents money and doom that awaits them if they don't do well in exams was the system. His sickness was blamed on his overeating, students were given hot water bath only once a week and dealt with bad and less food (and they used to steal some more) and hard bed. "Your home might be far from perfect but at least it was a place ruled by love rather than fear". 

2. Shooting an elephant: A memoir by Orwell of an incident in Lower Burma when he was a sub divisional police officer there. He faced dislike of his colonial subjects despite himself despising imperialism. One day he received a call that an elephant is ravaging the bazaar and had even killed a person. He gets an elephant rifle, but by the time he reaches, elephant had calmed down. However a huge crowd had gathered behind him anticipating some action and to loot the by products of a dead elephant. Orwell didn't want to shoot the elephant, but eventually succumbed to crowd's wishes. He says, "when the white man turns tyrant, it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a soft of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalised figure of a sahib." "The older men said I was right, the younger men said it was a damn shame to shoot an elephant for killing a coolie, because an elephant was worth more than any damn Coringhee coolie."

3. Politics and the English language: Orwell suggests that 2 problems with current English language usage are: Staleness of imagery and lack of precision. Manifestation of these problems: a. Worn out metaphors with no evocative power b. Using phrases instead of direct verbs c. Pretentious words and foreign phrases d. Vague and meaningless words. He suggests that the foolishness of our thoughts and inaccuracies of the language are mutually reinforcing, saying that: "It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts." 

4. Reflections on Gandhi: "In judging a man like Gandhi one seems instinctively to apply high standards, so that some of his virtues have passed almost unnoticed" It seems Orwell was suggesting that Gandhi was almost a Saint but Orwell doesn't prescribe humans to be saints ("that the average human being is a failed saint...it is doubtful whether this is true. Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings"). He further states,"The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals." He also suggests that Gandhi wouldn't have survived in a totalitarian regime with no free press and right to assembly. 

5. Marrakech: Orwell reflects on poverty of Marrakech here and paints a sorry portrait of the same. "In a tropical landscape, one's eyes take in everything except the human beings. He is the same color as the earth and a great deal less interesting to look at. Hence where the human beings have brown skins, their poverty is simply not noticed. One gets infuriated by overloading of donkeys but not from old women carrying a huge load of firewoods, noticeable only due to fire-woods moving.


Orwell also gave some memorable quotes in his essays: 

"Even hypocrisy is a powerful safeguard!"

"The struggle of the working class is like the growth of a plant. The plant is blind and stupid, but it knows enough to keep pushing upwards towards the light, and it will do this in the face of endless discouragements."

"The intelligentsia are the people who squeal loudest against Fascism, and yet a respectable proportion of them collapse into defeatism when the pinch comes."

"When I think of antiquity, the detail that frightens me is that those hundreds of millions of slaves on whose backs civilization rested generation after generation have left behind them no record whatever. We do not even know their names."

"One of the effects of safe and civilized life is an immense oversensitiveness which makes all the primary emotions seem somewhat disgusting."

"As far as the mass of the people go, the extraordinary swings of opinion which occur nowadays, the emotions which can be turned on and off like a tap, are the result of newspaper and radio hypnosis."

Best essay is politics and the English language. The main idea being decay of language due to jargon. People using complicated phrases and word that in essence mean nothing.