I am back in Brussels. Accurately speaking, I am in Leuven. I arrived at Brussels airport this morning from Mumbai (Jet Airways). It was overcast and 10 degrees Celsius on arrival at 7:30 AM. Quite a change from 35+ degrees C in Mumbai. Tomorrow is the start of a road trip to Marseilles and Nice for three days. Cheers.
Month: April 2014
The Indian Constitution – Part 1
So far I have asked around 10,000 Indians if they have read the Indian Constitution. Not one of them admitted to having read it. A few say yes initially but when probed a bit admit that they haven’t really read the whole thing. Some claim to have read the preamble. That is like saying that they have seen the movie merely because they have seen the ad in the newspaper or have had lunch because they checked out the lunch menu.
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A New Kind of Test
TIME has a brief piece on an interesting change in what the SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) tests. “Students will no longer be rewarded for the rote memorization of semi-obscure definitions. Instead, the words that the SAT will highlight in vocabulary questions will be “high utility” words that students are likely to encounter in life and reading beyond those four hours in the testing location. Even the most studied students won’t be able to breeze through vocab sections, matching a word with definition B by reflex; they’ll have to read and gather from the passage exactly what a word means.”
Happy Bengali New Year
Who Killed Indians at Jallianwala Bagh?
Today is the anniversary of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919.
The Jallianwala Bagh massacre, also known as the Amritsar massacre, was a seminal event in the British rule of India. On 13 April 1919, a crowd of non-violent protesters, along with Baishakhi pilgrims, had gathered in the Jallianwala Bagh garden in Amritsar, Punjab to protest the arrest of two leaders despite a curfew which had been recently declared. On the orders of Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer, the army fired on the crowd for ten minutes, directing their bullets largely towards the few open gates through which people were trying to run out. The dead numbered between 370 and 1,000, or possibly more. [Wiki.]
The picture on the left shows the narrow passage to Jallianwala Bagh Garden through which the shooting was conducted. The question is: who killed those hundreds of Indians — men, women and little children — in cold blood at the orders of Gen Dyer? They were Indians. Indians killed Indians mercilessly, in cold blood. They always do. Indians kill Indians and help foreigners rule India. Here’s some evidence that you must read to understand that point.
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