District Collector Quotes

In a little district west of Washington Square the streets have run crazy and broken themselves into small strips called "places." These "places" make strange angles and curves. One street crosses itself a time or two. An artist once discovered a valuable possibility in this street. Suppose a collector with a bill for paints, paper and canvas should, in traversing this route, suddenly meet himself coming back, without a cent having been paid on account!

Where do you think the term ‘count’ came from, anyway?” “Earth, I thought. A pre-atomic—late Roman, actually—term for a nobleman who ran a county. Or maybe the district was named after the rank.” “On Barrayar, it is in fact a contraction of the term ‘accountant.’ The first ’counts were Varadar Tau’s—an amazing bandit, you should read up on him sometime—Varadar Tau’s tax collectors.” “All this time I thought it was a military rank! Aping medieval history.” “Oh, the military part came immediately thereafter, the first time the old goons tried to shake down somebody who didn’t want to contribute. The rank acquired more glamour later.

Regions and Kings Eastern King Samrat Western King Suvrat Northern King Virat Southern King Bhoja King of middle country Raja   Important Ratnins/Officials in Later Vedic Period Purohita Chief Priest, in also sometimes referred to as Rashtragopa Senani Supreme Commander of army Vrajapati Officer-in-Charge of pasture land Jivagribha Police Officer Spasas/Dutas Spies who also sometimes worked as messengers Gramani Head of the village Kulapati Head of the family Madhyamasi Mediator on disputes Bhagadugha Revenue collector Sangrahitri Treasurer Mahishi Chief Queen Suta Charioteer and court minstrel Govikartana Keeper of games and forests Palagala Messenger Kshatri Chamberlain Akshavapa Accountant Sthapati Chief Justice Takshan Carpenter   Kingdoms in the Later Vedic Age Kingdom Location Gandhar Rawalpindi and Peshawar districts of Western Punjab Kekaya On the bank of River Beas, east of Gandhar kingdom Uttar Madra Kashmir Eastern Madra Near Kangra Southern Madra Near Amritsar Kushinagar Nothern region of modern Uttar Pradesh Panchal Bareilly, Badayun and Farrukhabad districts of modern Uttar Pradesh Kashi Modern Varanasi Koshal Faizabad region of today's Uttar Pradesh

Kesteven confided to us that he had heard whispers that Nazir Ahmed, a Pakistani who was the head of the WFP for this region, wanted the aid to go to Pakistan. Nazir Ahmed had copied our entire proposal and sent it to the Ambassador of Pakistan in Rome, advising him to simply substitute the names of cities – change Bombay to Lahore, Calcutta to Karachi and so on – and submit it as Pakistan’s proposal to the WFP. I was aware that Nazir Ahmed was deeply prejudiced against the Indian government. I remember that he had once asked me how a Christian like me could be designated Chairman of NDDB. I had replied: ‘Mr Ahmed, that is because India is not Pakistan. When your country attacked India, the Collector of Kutch district was a Christian, the IGP in Gujarat was a devout Muslim, the Home Secretary of Gujarat was a Christian and the Governor of Gujarat was a Muslim. That is India for you.

Should it happen, however, that separate collectors of internal revenue should be appointed under the federal government, the influence of the whole number would not bear a comparison with that of the multitude of State officers in the opposite scale. Within every district to which a federal collector would be allotted, there would not be less than thirty or forty, or even more, officers of different descriptions, and many of them persons of character and weight, whose influence would lie on the side of the State.

intense and accurate shelling by enemy ships of the line. * To the believers—and the terrified—it was natural to look for salvation from the storm inside one of the town’s forty churches or other edifices associated with God’s work on earth. This was especially true regarding Galveston’s Negro population, to whom religion was an elemental life-force and not a conveyance for social or sartorial prestige. Organized worship for the blacks of Galveston began in the 1840s on a three-shift basis; in the town’s then-only church the white masters gathered for service in the mornings, the slaves occupied the pews in the afternoons, exiting in time for the seignoral class to move back in for evening worship. According to an aged former slave known to all as “Auntie Ellen Roe,” it was her one-time master Gail Borden—chief customs collector, later city property agent and prime mover of a dairy fortune—who was responsible for creating separate-but-equal religious facilities on the island. Auntie Ellen recalled how the Bordens “trained her carefully as to body, mind and soul after buying her, at the age of seven, from cruel slave speculators who stole little children and sold them upon the block.” In 1851, Borden secured title to a lot on Broadway, near the booming business district, and helped collect donations for a new all-Negro church. Ellen Roe contributed the first dollar, painfully earned by reciting perfectly her Sunday-School lessons, in which she was strenuously coached by Mrs. Borden and later rewarded at the rate of twenty-five cents per recitation.

And since January I have been wearing four or five new pairs of pants a day, all of which will eventually take pride of place, when suitably soiled, in vending machines on the streets of Tokyo's most fashionable districts. My wife, of course, finds this turn of events ridiculous, but she will be laughing on the other side of her stupid face when the flyblown briefs she currently uses as dishcloths become priceless collector's items.

Ambassadors, collector of intelligence: "We must remember that the real object of foreign envoys is not only that they should convey messages from their governments, but, if we were to look deeply into their purpose, secret information like the exact position and condition of roads, paths, valleys, canals and tanks; wheter or not they are fit for the passage of troops and wheter fodder is available anywhere near them. They also seek to know something about the ruler of the country, the exact state of the army and its equipments; the feelings of the soldiers as well as of the common people; and all about the wealth of the subjects and the comparative populations of different districts. They try to penetrate into the working of the government of the country and to know whether the ministers are honest or dishonest and whether the generals are experienced or not." — Nizam al-Mulk Tusi Ambassadors, contributions to policy: "The contributions of a good ambassador are not limited to the persuasive articulation and skillful execution of ... policy, good or bad. What he (or she) reports and how he reports it; the astuteness of his recommendations; his willingness to take the initiative; the courage to disagree and explain why these and many other attributes can make a vital difference to the shaping of policy. How much depends on the good sense of his principals." — Elliot L. Richardson, 1983