All posts filed under: Reformers Politics and the World

The STORY OF INDIA in 75 Independent Years

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Today is 15th August. It is a date with destiny. A total of 6 countries got Independence on this date in different years. You can say they were destined too. BahrainCongoThe Two KoreasLiechtenstein and my country, India. The largest and the most vibrant democracy in the world. A country that is diverse in every single sense. Geographically, Socially, Culturally, Linguistically. Since Colonial Rule, a nation of 1.3 Billion people will celebrate the fact that they have proven wrong every Western Commentator who predicted doom upon a young country in the late 1940s, all the way up to even 1970s. 75 Years ago at midnight India made tryst with destiny. An independent India was born. Drained and Divided but desperate to make on its own. How would one describe this journey of seven and a half decades? Its been a staggering, astonishing, colossal and a monumental journey this past 75 years. And no what foundations, morals a man or a country shows; it all boils down to ECONOMY The British crown looted 45 Trillion dollars from …

Leaves from a Jungle: The Life of Verrier Elwin living with the Gonds in Central India – I/II

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My co-travellers here on the Road to Nara, must already know and have experienced by now how much there is to absorb in India that is Bharat. Every state works like an organ. Each region in contrast to the other in food, language yet somehow bonded by sense and tradition. In my brief career as a traveller, I have desired not just to travel as much, but also to learn, research and document life of other travellers who once walked and measured this nation in a different light, time and dimension. The ones who somehow recorded the flow that once was; those happenings which can only be dreamt of today but can never again be touched. Also Read: How Jyoti Bhatt inspired the new age Travellers and Documentarians with his life? I was an NCC(National Cadet Corps, youth wing of Indian Armed Forces) Cadet during my university years and had a brief opportunity to rigorously walk throughout the Central Indian State of India, Madhya Pradesh for over a month. During one such walk on a …

Knowing Gandhi and Learning from Mahatma

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Today is Lal Bahadur Shastri’s birthday. The second Prime Minister of India, who was rather killed/poisoned on his visit to Tashkent in 1966. He had gone to sign a peace deal organised by the US and the USSR seminaries, UN security members with Pakistan’s Military Leader Ayub Khan after the war of 1965. The deal was signed in the evening as the Peace Pact failed. The next morning, he was found dead in his room. For days, months and years that commenced and kept passing by; it was less strange, rather maddening that no one ever asked for an inquiry, no one protested, no body looked for proofs or questioned the circumstances of his death. Death of the head of a nation state was accepted as mere fate. He was a sincere and a firm leader. He did not shy away from going into war with Pakistan in 1965, that was pushed on him merely a year later he took office; and only three years later, after Nehru’s historical blunder when China opened fire and …