Anyway. Been reading "An Imperial Progress". Its an account of the British Empire, starting with its origins. And I get quite shocked every now and then. Usuallyy when the author is talking about India.
I mean, school history always talks about our glorious past, our great emperors and our honorable soldiers and all that.
Now this author is a Briton, who naturally has no compulsion to dress up the truth with adjectives like honor and glory and justice and whatever whatever whatever. Atleast, not Our truth - Truth has become highly subjective! He is highly irreverent about anything thats not British!
We have only read about an honourble Bahadur Shah Zafar, a Brave Ranjith Singh, A loyal Mangal Pandey, and so on and so forth.
SO its quite difficult facing up to Ranjith Singh being described as a "shrewd drunk", Bahadur Shah being tortured by his screeching harridan-wives, Mangal Pandey acting like a crazed lunatic.
A good friend of mine., Meet, once had a signature for his mailbox- "History is what the historians write". How true that is! I try to think of what history would be saying if Hitler had won the Second World War, instead of the Allies- Maybe the world at large would be congratulating the Fuhrer on protecting the innocents of the world. whatever.
An extension of this, of course, with George Orwell's 1984. Winston creates and recreates history each day. Thats one of the best books I've read. And one of the few books no one has anything bad to say about. Its more chilling than the best of Roald Dahl's stories. Because you can identify wiht it so much!
Does the Internet act as a balancer here? The main problem so long, has been the fact that we are so easily guided by media. and these are controlled by select cliques. In case of the internet, the world becomes like a global market place. Everybody's opinion matters. Similar to the way the stock exchange functions. In this case, the director of traffic on the net will becomge powerful - will google become the king maker, then? :). theres no fact depressing enough, that you cannot add anoter facet to it, to make it worse!! :).
Incidentally, the best book I have read about the holocaust is... "The Holocaust" by graham greene. It beautifully traces the lives of two people- one, a sane, jew-friendly German, the other, an intelligent German Jew; How the former gets converted to the Nazi cause, how the latter becomes increasingly militant, before finally escaping to Israel. Great book. Read it nearly 10 years ago, and still remember most of it!
The greatest book about the creation of the jewish state, IMHO, ofcourse, is "Oh Jerusalem" by Dominique Lapierre and Philip Collins.
Try 'em out, if you havent already!
posted by Aish @ 12:35 PM
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