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naveens

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I'm 41 and in the same place. It's been 2 months since I quit and frankly the decision was a bit of relief. Thanks for sharing and hang in there.

It was evil exploitation by definition and by reality. There were some benefits I give you that, chief among them is bringing the masses to the democratic political mainstream (speaking only about India; this did not happen in most of Africa) Mother country? Investment? Show me that place in history where capital flowed in to a colony.

>2. When the Brits found India, it was fragmented into several different princedoms and cities. To say that it was in any sense united is misleading - before the Brits got there and for a time while the Brits were there, wars between neighboring sultanates and empires were commonplace.

What do you think happened between when they landed and when they left? They landed as traders; they took sides between the warring kingdoms and sultanates for access to markets. They just played on the differences for their own gains - divide and rule. Read about the Partition of Bengal. This was the modus operandi of the empire everywhere: hindu v muslims in India, catholics v protestants in Ireland, muslims v jews in Palestine.

>When they left, they left a united India. Those are just cold hard facts that cannot be argued with - India may have been politically united in 300BC, but it sure as hell wasn't in 1700. At the bitter end, if the Brits had really, really wanted to leave India divided, it would not have been a difficult thing to accomplish.

Well they did not try to leave it united. The British never had direct control over all of India. Many regions were under direct rule, many still under princes. It was the Indian political will, after independence (and after the India-Pakistan partition), which united India in to a whole. India did not become a Republic until 1950.

The British don't deserve the sole or even major credit for the cultural changes you talk about. Reformers like Rajaram Mohan Roy, Vivekananda, Gandhi, Ambedkar deserve most of the credit. Cultural changes can not simply be forced by external forces. The British just wanted to organize the Indian society the way they idealized so that they could reap the surplus.

The India of today would be unrecognizable from British India. Many former British colonies in Africa continue to be only slightly better than Somalia. You are giving the Raj too much credit.

I think Netbeans is not getting the font settings from GNOME. From what I can see from the panel, GNOME uses slight font hinting here. But the Netbeans window uses full hinting.

The fix would be to roll our own matching ~/.fonts.conf or /etc/fonts/local.conf for all the non-GNOME applications.