Born in India to an English couple, his father was head of a museum there, when he was four-years-old he was taken to England by his parents and put into a school from which he did not leave until he was 16.
His father then took him back to India and he immediately became a reporter for an English newspaper there.
In that capacity he traveled widely, all over India, and even into Afghanistan, and wrote a poem about that terrible place, as well as a story titled “The Man Who Would Be King.”
He also wrote two “Jungle Books,” stories about Mowgli, the little Indian boy who was adopted by a wolf pack, and thousands of poems, the most famous of which is “If,” and he traveled all over the world, met and married an American woman by whom he had three children, two girls and a boy.
In “The Man Who Would Be King” he told of two Englishmen who traveled into Afghanistan, where one made himself king of the country until, on the occasion of being honored as such, something happened: he was approached by a native girl he thought was going to kiss him, instead, she bit him on the cheek, and when he bled, the people knew that he was not a god.
They cut off his head, put it in a sack, and gave it to his companion to take back to India. And he wrote a little poem about that savage country:
When wounded you lie on Afghanistan’s plains
And the women come out to carve up the remains,
Just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
And go to your death like a soldier.
It’s too bad that people, including our President, don't know about Kipling. He was very wise and traveled all over the world before his death.
In June 1929, our father took me and two of my two younger brothers to England and while there drove us down into Sussex where Kipling lived. It was a very big house, set back from the road, and my father had me go to the front door to ask whether Mr. Kipling was there. I did and the lady who came to the door replied that he was not there, but was up in London with his publisher.
In later years I returned several times to that house in Sussex which has now been made into a historical showplace.
When his only son was sixteen, he enlisted in the First World War and was killed in action in France.
It’s too bad that our leaders are unaware of Rudyard Kipling’s uncanny ability to see things as they really are and to tell it in such a dramatic way as he does.
I give a prize to each of my great-grandsons who memorize Kipling's poem "If!" It goes like this:
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream -- and not make dreams your master;
If you can think -- and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools;
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings -- nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run --
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And -- which is more -- you'll be a Man, my son!