It occurs to me that most kids today, when they hear Gunga, they immediately think of the craptacular Star Wars character Jar-Jar Binks. Wasn't he a gungan? As I am thirty, all of the modern popular-culture points of reference are becoming harder and harder to keep up with. If I were fifteen again, I would probably know what species Jar-Jar was as if there were an instinctual part of my brain that focused solely on movie trivia such as this.
Yet, sadly, no. My title does not refer to the lovable Jar-Jar (insert irony here), instead it refers to a recent paper that I have finally completed about Rudyard Kipling. Author of Gunga Din, Kipling has been oppressing me with his short story "False Dawn" for the past several days. With space for only four pages, I attempted to argue how Kipling was critiquing the English colonists in India in an attempt to reform the empire and not reject it. Immediately, one can see that my paper was about as craptacular as Jar-Jar. Not that the idea is completely wrong-headed. With some tweaking of the logic, and extensive research, I could write a sufficiently decent paper with such thesis. What makes this work so craptacular is that I tried to argue that thesis in four pages. I could have used more time for revision of course, but I had none. I'm just glad it is, as I said in the title, done. While maybe not a full fledged miracle, I'm going to take this minor achievement as a blessing.