End of Che’s dream
In the closing lines of The Motorcycle Diaries, Che Guevara writes: I steel my body, ready to do battle, and prepare myself to be a sacred space within which the bestial howl of the triumphant...
View ArticleSuch a Long Journey and India
Why Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey is a must-read for the Mumbaikar (and indeed for anyone interested in post independence Indian history) On eating beef And a time also arrived when Gustad...
View ArticleIn the Fullness of Time – Random clippings from three books
There are three different books that I am currently reading – Romila Thapar’s Early India, Michel Danino’s The Lost River and JRR Tolkein’s The Hobbit (part of my periodic pilgrimage to middle earth)....
View ArticleLaughter and Forgetting
Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is a set of stories cum essays which explore the two words in the title. In communist Czechoslovakia, “forgetting” was a political activity. It was...
View ArticleThe Great Patriotic War
For the Soviet Union, the Great Patriotic War caused more casualties than any other combatant country. Via Metafilter, I came across this repository of memoirs of Soviet soldiers. Sapezhnikov Alexei...
View ArticleOn Independence and parts thereof
Over the long Independence Day weekend, there were a number of interesting pieces that one came across. There are these two pieces by Vikram Doctor which give completely different takes. The first one...
View ArticleOf Resistance and Genocide
I had bookmarked two links which I wanted to blog about at a convenient date. Though they are already dated, I suppose such themes as they convey are never go out of vogue for a historian. Nancy Wake,...
View ArticleAction Figures from Russia
The legendary Lyudmila Pavlichenko snuffed out the lives of 309 Germans during the Stalingrad seige. Lyudmila Pavlichenko Woody Guthrie wrote a song as a tribute for her I’d hate to drop in a parachute...
View ArticleAung San Suu Kyi
June 16, 2012 at Oslo: A positive aspect of living in isolation was that I had ample time in which to ruminate over the meaning of words and precepts that I had known and accepted all my life. As a...
View ArticleThe Death of Nehru
Yesterday, India survived (and done quite well for itself though things can always be better) 49 years of the post-Nehru era. At 2 p.m. local time today 460,000,000 people in this country that has been...
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