Category Archives: History

Life is beautiful

This is a story. A story of happiness. But not an easy one to tell.
That’s how it begins. Yes, I watched the movie yesterday. It’s as beautiful as the director is claiming life to be. I had seen it earlier also, but in pieces. Could not get to sit and watch it properly. This time I did. First half was candy floss. An air of mirth all around. The music was really lovely, particularly that of Venice version opera. Humor was really sharp and intelligent. It seems that in the English version, they have made the same Italian actors to speak, as their English was perfectly European or rather Italian, as we observed in Rome.

Second part begins with a whimper, though Guido tries his best to cover that, with extra ordinary capabilities, and he does succeed. Their child was like an innocent lamb, about to be butchered. He was speaking American English. After watching the movie, I was even more drawn towards the history of Germany, concentration camps, Jews etc.. And few days back I watched Sound of Music. So my state of mind was already oriented in this direction. On the top of that, I am reading this book Fire from the sun, which is about (at least from the chapters I have read ) cruelties inflicted by Maoists. So the whole air around me these days is full of the political history, wars , crimes and I am diving more and more to gain further insight in what actually happened. Moreover, I am staying in Austria which seems to me, a clone of Deutschland. The German I heard in the movie is quite familiar. After watching that movie, I could not resist myself from exploring the history further on Wikipedia . I learnt how the Jews and people of some other some other races and kinds were exterminated in the concentration camps.

Kids and old people were told that would be given shower and they were thrown into gas chambers. That was shameful.

While going to Milan, I met a French lady, who told that even France was also quite involved in such heinous crimes but they don’t accept this.

But what is nice is that people have today moved on in their lives, and not carrying the burden of history even now.

But I was surprised to learn that America wasn’t involved in such crimes against humanity. It along with Britain and Soviet, rather liberated people from the camps. Of course, it dropped bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and that brought us into nuclear age. But that was war and every country was it’s best to win over the other. And indeed America went too far in that attempt. But what Germans did was not war against a country , but a madness giving vent to their hatred for their hatred against people of different race.

London Blasts

Today was a day full of irony and stark contrasts. In the morning only i read aboout London’s victory in bidding for 2012 olympics and hardly 12 hrs later i read about these horrible London blasts. Actually, we human beings have become so much habitual of the casualities that we don’t take any tragedy seriously unless the number of casualities runs into thousands.

Photos courtesy BBC and The New York Times

The casualities were barely 33, till the time I am writing this blog, but this event has sent several important signals and lessons to be learnt. Firstly, we must notice that whole of the London is united in this hour of crisis. Even the politicians, whether from conservatives or democrats, all were pledging the to keep London united, and their first priority was to help the people reach to safety.Now compare this with the Indian scenario. Some 2-3 days back, Ayodhya was attacked. This became so big a matter, that on the BBC site, only news under the section ,’South Asia’ , was “More Ayodhya protests”. This was too much. I mean in our case, when hardly any casualty concerning any civilian was reported, and all the 6 terrorists have been gunned down, why this bruhaha now over such a petty matter. In India, whenever such thing happpens, first thing we hear form political leaders other than those beonging to treasury is that X should resign and Y should resign. I guess it’s high time that we the Indians should learn to behave in a matured manner and show the world that we are also united when it comes to the threat to the security of the nation is concerned rather than politicising the issues to make them the front page headlines of BBC.
Probably that’s why BBC doesn’t write much good things in the profile of India. It begins describing India by the word ,” a nuclear weapon state”. But in that case BBC is also discriminating. And strangest thing is that it gives a link for the national anthem of Pakistan on it’s profile page(that’s a different matter that it didn’t work , atleast I could’n’t open it), but not a link of Jana-gana-mana on the profile page of India.

But situation of london is really strange at the moment. In one hand , he’s carrying the victory of securing London as the venue for 2012 olympics, on the other hand, it has these blasts.

I really feel sorry for Mr. Blair, who’s concerned with , apart from these 2 issues, the G-8 summit also. There also, supporters of African nations are giving tough times to the leaders of highly developed nations, including Mr. Blair.

God bless London