India Unbound - pg. 7

Although our family was apolitical, dinnertime conversation would often veer around to politics. My grandfather used to get impatient with people who did not realize that the Japanese posed a bigger threat. My uncle would retort that we were already under alien rule, and who was to say one foreigner was better than another? My mother would add that we should be neutral in a conflict that did not concern us. My uncle confessed that he had secretly enjoyed Britain's discomfort in the East. He had applauded the successive fall of Hong Kong, the Philippines, then Malaya and Indochina. He was amazed at the speed of the Japanese advance. It meant that the colonial empires were flimsy structures built on pillars of rotting clay.