The past 250 years has seen a tsunami of revolutions – the American, the French, the Chinese and imitating them, the Cuban. Their waves swept across the world, impacting us today and, as Chairman Mao Zedong has predicted, they will affect tomorrow’s history. This year, friends of America celebrate its first 250 years; its detractors
Last week’s article (I Spy, with…) elicited a number of interesting responses. One reader revealed that, in the 1960s, he had worked with John Cairncross – the fifth member of the Cambridge Five. Cairncross had come to Karachi from FAO in Rome, as part of a Harvard Advisory Group to work with Pakistan’s Planning Commission.
This is not an obituary. Far from it. It is a tribute to someone who is completing the first hundred years of a crowded, productive life. Syed Babar Ali was born on 30 June 1926. For the past few weeks, numerous relatives, friends, business associates and educationists have joined in celebrating his centenary. Eleven years
Recent events have given a new twist to history. A Chicago-born Pontiff from Rome has publicly rebuked an American Christian crusader. Normally, popes issue insipid encyclicals or harmless homilies. In 1968, for example, Pope Paul VI issued ‘Of Human Life’ – a justification of the Catholic Church’s opposition to methods of birth control. (One sceptic
WILL the world see another Nuremberg Trial? Or is accountability only for the history books? In 1946, an International Military Tribunal representing the victorious Allied powers (the US, UK, USSR and France) passed judgement at Nuremberg on 24 Nazi acolytes of Hitler. They included Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess and Joachim von Ribbentrop. At the Potsdam
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Only a man with Napoleon’s vision would have seen the potential of linking the Mediterranean with the Red Sea by digging a canal. During his campaign in Egypt (1798–1801), Napoleon saw a commercial advantage in shortening the trade route to India. A miscalculation by his engineers caused him to abandon the project. Sixty years later,
THE British Raj has been a long time dying. One vestige — the restaurant Veeraswamy — established 100 years ago in London’s Regent Street, is threatened with closure. Before 1947, visiting Indian aristocracy patronised it. it catered also for ‘India-returns’ — a sentimental breed of white Britishers who wished to recall imperial aromas. The restaurant
The First World has Davos, the Middle World has United Nations conferences, and the Third World has LitFests. Davos, UN moots and LitFests serve as a Speaker’s Corner where academics, intellectuals, politicians (serving and retired), movers and shakers collect to ventilate their opinions. Much carbon dioxide is emitted, much ‘sound and fury’ released, but all
Political doctrines, like public buildings, are often named after persons. The United States boasts the Lincoln memorial, the J. Edgar Hoover Building, even Washington D.C. itself. America’s very name owes its origins to the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci (1454 – 1512). Had the cartographer Martin Waldseemüller not appropriated the name America for his map of
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