Kipling’s ‘The Gardener’

I went to our village Baptist church this Easter Sunday evening for ‘Songs of Praise’, a joint service. The minister, Sydneysider Steve Rodda, talked about Mary Magdalene, who asked a man she took to be the gardener where they had taken Jesus’s body. It’s one of the most touching moments in all the gospels.

Afterwards I talked to Steve about Rudyard Kipling’s story, ‘The Gardener’. It’s about a woman who goes in search of her nephew’s grave in Belgium after the end of the First World War.

A late work, it may be his finest, most poignant short story – Kipling lost his own son on the Western Front, of course. I re-read it often, as I did on my return home. Really, one has to go at it twice, maybe more often, to understand it more fully.

Here it is: http://www.greatwar.nl/books/gardener/gardener.html

 

East is East

I went yesterday to the annual lunch of the Kipling Society in London and it brought to mind one of his most famous/infamous poems. If there’s one thing that Asians, especially Indians, of my acquaintance know by Rudyard Kipling, it’s

Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,

And many know the next line of this verse

Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great judgement seat;

Clear evidence (if any were needed) of Kipling’s fundamental racism?

Yet very few seem to know the next two lines

But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth!

Puts a different complexion on it, doesn’t it? I think the most he might be accused of is sexism (a concept not articulated in 1889).

In effect, what Kipling is saying is: people think that major cultural differences are impossible to bridge, but in reality, when there is trust and respect, these differences are of no importance.

Of course, he was born in Bombay and Hindi was his initial language. One of my favourite books, regularly re-read, is Kim, a sort of love-letter to India and the Indians.

The Hero’s Journey

A wonderful version of the classic “hero’s journey” story is Rudyard Kipling’s “The White Seal”. One of the lesser noticed ones in The Jungle Book.

This is a paraphrase from the Kipling Society website:

“Kotick, a baby seal, is born amongst thousands of others on the beach at Novastosnah, on a distant northern island in the Bering Sea. He is unusual because he is white. As he grows up, he swims with his mother to the South Pacific, and back to the island at the end of the year. There he witnesses many seals being clubbed to death and skinned by Aleutian islanders. He resolves to look for a safe place for seals where there is no danger from men. He scours the world for such a place, and after many wanderings across thousands of miles of ocean, he finds one at last. He returns to Novastoshnah and, after many struggles, persuades thousands of the seals to follow him to the safe beaches where no man comes.”

So often the nature of the creative innovator is to go on long and lonely journeys in search of the Holy Grail, the breakthrough. And, having eventually found it, the greatest difficulty is usually in persuading colleagues that it’s real.

Taking care of creative heroes is a key priority for innovation leaders if you’re after breakthrough thinking.

You can read Kipling’s story here: http://www.authorama.com/jungle-book-7.html