"Ol' Blighty" is an affectionate term for "Britain". As I pack and get ready to head back to Ol' Blighty, i recall my fondness for the word blighty. Although it sounds very much like an infection a plant would get, Blighty has a much richer meaning than a rotting veg.
Long before the poets Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and songs of World War I popularized "Old Blighty" -- its roots derive from British India, from the Urdu/Hindi term "Bilayati" which means "foreigner".
For the first 30 years of my life in England i was treated as outsider, a foreigner in the country of my birth. When i first went to India all my relatives kept referring to me as "bilayatia" (30 years later they still do). I continue to be a "bilayati" in the past 20 years I have resided in America and Canada.
The Australians added the "Ol" to Ol Blighty to bear witness to the old country from whence they came. Perhaps if we all stop to uncover our ancestry far back enough we would discover that we are all foreigners and that there is nothing wrong with being foreign, that perhaps it is a necessary human (natural) condition?
As Walt Whitman once said "I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable".
Birds and beasts are not bound by national boundaries, why should we be so constrained and fathomable? As Whitman says further "I exist as I am, and that is enough."
Perhaps being a bilayati is our noblest blessing? Free to be ourselves, naked, unadorned, unburdened of the emotional shackles of nationalism. A calling to be who we are is perhaps something far more vast and essential than merely being defined by where or to whom we "belong"?
"This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England".
King Richard II
Act II Scene i
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