Word: shame
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...years ago, when the Gujarati community of Ahmedabad rioted against Nehru's plan to submerge them in a huge, new state dominated by the Marathas, Desai-a Gujarati himself-first tried to shame the rioters into submission by staging a public fast in the Gandhian tradition. When that failed, Desai ordered the police into action. They opened fire on the mobs, injuring at least 100 people...
...money out of it. I'm not getting a farthing out of it. Why the hell should I let myself be bullied around and kicked around by you? We [in England] do as we choose and we just don't take it bloody lying down. Your shame is on your own head, and I don't know what we're trying to sell. I didn't bother to look up what your sister has done or who your father was. I don't even know if you had a father or if you know...
...hold of one medal candidate. Thorn gets permission to escort him, and whomever else he finds worthy of the medal, back to the rear-area encampment at Cordura. Next day he watches his old regiment clatter through a last cavalry charge, and with judgment perhaps clouded by shame, picks the four most spectacular performers of the battle to receive the medal. With his five picked soldiers and a saddle-toughened woman prisoner of war, he begins the long ride to Cordura...
Disillusion sets in almost with the first broiling Mexican sunrise. Thorn's first hero, a boy browbeaten into memorizing the Old Testament by an evangelist father, says in shame and confusion that he outshot 30 Villistas because "the Lord took hold of me" (actually he hates his father and loathes religion). Another makes it apparent that he charged an almost impregnable position alone because he thought it would look good on his record. A foolish, dull-eyed boy vaulted a gate and opened it under hailing fire because he was too stupid to imagine being shot...
...every woman of child-bearing age in the village, including the most repellent and chaste, turns out to be pregnant. There are, naturally, cases of attempted suicide and abortion and indignant husbands and shame-stricken spinsters. What seems to be an outbreak of mass parthenogenesis has raised problems of theological, scientific and political interest. This is nothing to what happens when the village doctor has his busy days and the little strangers prove to be stranger than is customary even in science fiction. The fathers, it is now clear, came from outer space, and left no forwarding address...