Burmese Days

"Beauty is meaningless until it is shared."

"It is one of the tragedies of the half-educated that they develop late, when they are already committed to some wrong way of life."

"it is a corrupting thing to live one's real life in secret. One should live with the stream of life, not against it."

― George Orwell , Burmese Days

Burmese Days is the first novel by English writer George Orwell, published in 1934. Set in British Burma during the waning days of Empire, when Burma was ruled from Delhi as part of British India, it is "a portrait of the dark side of the British Raj." At the centre of the novel is John Flory, "the lone and lacking individual trapped within a bigger system that is undermining the better side of human nature." The novel describes "both indigenous corruption and imperial bigotry" in a society where, "after all, natives were natives-interesting, no doubt, but finally…an inferior people".

Burmese Days was first published "further afield," in the United States, because of concerns that it might be potentially libelous..