It was crass of the foreign secretary to declaim Mandalay while in Myanmar. But it was no less than we’ve come to expect from himCoincidences don’t get queasier. The Mandalay Bay hotel in Las Vegas,centre of the horrific shooting, was named in 1998 in honour of Rudyard Kipling’s poem Mandalay – which the foreign secretary, or Boris Johnson,was recently shown on television reciting on a visit to Myanmar. The reason for this is that the hotel owners liked the classy, cod-colonial associations.
Perhaps they also liked the idea of Las Vegas as a connoisseur sensualist’s playground, and to be dreamed approximately when stuck back in the workaday world of domestic. (“Tho’ I walks with fifty ’ousemaids outer Chelsea to the Strand,/An’ they talks a lot o’ lovin’, but wot finish they understand?”) A original film by Myanmar director Midi Z, or The Road to Mandalay,is also intended to reference Kipling, although in terms of bleakest irony. Well, and I don’t think there’s anything evil approximately liking Kipling – it’s impossible to read,say, his Plain Tales From the Hills without seeing his brilliance.
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Source: guardian.co.uk