Day 78 : Book Excerpt : The Folly of Fools

False historical narratives are lies we tell one another about our past. The usual goals are self-glorification and self-justification. Not only are we special, so are our actions and those of our ancestors. We do not act immorally, so we owe nothing to anyone. False historical narratives act like self-deceptions at the group level, insofar as many people believe the same falsehood. If a great majority of the population can be raised on the same false narrative, you have a powerful force available to achieve group unity. Of course, leaders can easily exploit this resource by coupling marching orders with the relevant illusion: German people have long been denied their rightful space, so Dass Deutsche Volk muss Lebensraum haben! (German people must have room in which to live!)—neighbors beware. Or the Jewish people have a divine right to Palestine because ancestors living in the general area some two thousand years ago wrote a book about it—non-Jewish occupants and neighbors better beware. Most people are unconscious of the deception that went into constructing the narrative they now accept as true. Nor are they usually aware of the emotional power of such narratives or that these may entrain long-term effects.

There is a deep contradiction within the study of history between ferreting out the truth regarding the past and constructing a false historical narrative about it. As we have seen in this book, we make up false narratives all the time, about our own behavior, about our relationships, about our larger groups. Creating one for one’s larger religion or nation only extends the canvas. Usually a few brave historians in every society try to tell the truth about the past—that the Japanese army ran a vast, forced system of sexual slavery in World War II, that the United States committed wholesale slaughter against Koreans during the Korean War and against Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians in the Vietnam War, that the Turkish government committed genocide against its successful subgroup of Armenians, that the Zionist conquerors of Palestine committed ethnic cleansing against some 700,000 Palestinians, that the United States has waged a long campaign of genocide and murder against American Indians, from the nation’s founding to the murder by proxy of more than a half million in the 1980s alone, not counting before or after, and it has sought through military means to determine the fate of the entire New World for well over a century. But most historians will tell only some version of the conventional, self-aggrandizing story, and most people in the relevant countries will not have heard of (or believed) the factual assertions I just made.

One noteworthy fact is that the younger the recipient of the knowledge, the greater the pressure to tell a false story. So we are apt to tell our children a heroic version of our past and reserve for our university students a more nuanced view. This of course strengthens the bias, since views learned early have special power and not everyone attends college, or studies history if they do. Fortunately, the young often appear naturally to resist parental and adult nonsense, so there is at least some tendency to resist and upgrade. Just the same, there are strong pressures on professional historians to come up with a positive story, in part to undergird what is taught more widely.

Make no mistake about it. People feel strongly about these matters. One person’s false historical narrative is another’s deeply personal group identity—and what right do you have commenting on my identity in the first place? Many Turkish people may well feel that I have slandered their country regarding its Armenian genocide, while I believe I have merely told the truth. The same may be true (though less strongly) for some Japanese people regarding their country’s practice of sexual slavery during World War II. Most Americans could hardly care less. So we wiped out the Amerindians—so what? So we repeatedly waged aggressive war on Mexico and stole nearly half their country. They probably deserved it. And, yes, since then we have fought a staggering series of wars ourselves and by proxies—even recently supporting genocide in such diverse places as Central America, Vietnam, Cambodia, and even East Timor, while blocking international action against it in Rwanda—but so the hell what? Only a left-wing nutcase would dwell on such minor details. Isn’t that what great powers do, and aren’t we the greatest?

Israel is no different from any other country or group in having its own false historical narrative, and Israel’s is especially important because it exacerbates a set of troubled international and intergroup relations. The narrative is also one that is accepted almost wholesale in the United States, the most powerful military nation in the world. As the old joke goes, why doesn’t Israel become the fifty-first state? Because then it would have only two senators. Again, feelings run high. Some regard as anti-Semitic any attack on the behavior of Israel (or its underlying narrative). I regard this as nonsense and follow instead what seem to me to be the best Israeli (and Arab) historians—and their (largely Jewish) American counterparts—in describing a false historical narrative used to expand Israel at a cost to its neighbors by waging regular war on them to seize land and water (with near-constant US support), all in the name of fighting terrorism, while using state terrorism as the chief weapon. The narrative inverts reality: Israel wants only peace with its Arab neighbors (from as early as 1928), who to this very day reject peace at every turn and seek the total destruction of Israel and its Jewish population.

~~The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life -by- Robert Trivers

Day 77 : Book Excerpt : The Bengal Delta: Ecology, State and Social Change

After conducting a year-long survey of landscape, possible routes and profitability, Macdonald Stephenson, a Scottish engineer, proposed the first Indian railway scheme in 1845. Stephenson’s ambitious scheme of ‘triangulating India with railway’ – at an estimated cost of about fifty million pounds – envisaged the creation of a vast railway network that would connect Kolkata, Delhi, Mumbai and Madras and other major towns in between. Doubt was cast on the practicality of such a huge project, but the debates that followed endorsed the necessity of railways in India. As far as the territorial breadth of the railways was concerned, both Stephenson and his early critics envisioned Kolkata as the eastern-most terminal of the future railway network in India. Regions east of Kolkata or eastern Bengal, along with Assam, were excluded from the purview of the scheme.

The disadvantages of excluding eastern Bengal from the initial railway projects were soon identified. A fifteen-page monograph, published in 1848 by one ‘Transit’, pointed to the relative merits of extending the railways into the Ganga valley. He strongly criticized Stephenson’s new East Indian Railway Company, which was to connect Kolkata to Bihar and then to run through the Doab region via the short but circuitous route of the Rajmahal Hills. Transit thought that the projected line ignored Bengal trade and would get ‘out of Bengal as fast as it could into the hills’. In insisting that the trade of Bengal should be considered in the future expansion of the railways in India, Transit appeared to have been informed by a wider vision of the water regime of the lower Ganga valley which provided the sole impetus for an extensive range of trade and commerce. Transit reminded the British and Indian capitalists:

The Ganges Valley is your manufactory – your trading ground – your source of wealth. I look not to towns, to provinces, to districts, or to individuals; I look not to transporting sepoys, or cannon, or gunpowder, or arms ... not to Manchester twist, or Welsh iron, or Swansea copper, or French brandy, or Burton ale; I look not to Purneah indigo, Patna opium, Benares sugar, or Chuppar saltpeter, Mirzapore cotton, or the grain of the chete; but, on the broad principle of the greatest benefit of the greatest number, I say, that by the Ganges you catch the whole.

Transit suggested that the resources of north-eastern India could be better served by connecting Kolkata by railway to the ‘nearest permanent spot’ on the bank of the lower Ganga Valley. He found the starting point of the Bengal Delta, where the Kosi river meets the Ganga near Malda, to be an ideal terminus for a railway from Kolkata. He argued that the whole accumulated trade of the Ganga valley, comprising an area of 150,000 square miles and containing a population of 40 million, was bound to pass through this ‘narrow neck’ of the country, not more than five miles in width.
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Other views, however, considered the Ganga as a competitor to the railway, and if the expansion of the railways in Bengal over the following decades is examined in relation to Transit’s scheme, it would appear that while the commercial importance of the Bengal Delta as pointed out by Transit was fully taken into consideration, there was a fundamental difference between his scheme and the railway projects that were actually carried out. Instead of engaging with the Ganga Delta via the ‘neck’, the railways entered its fluvial heart, and in consequence they began to con test rather than complement the water regimes of the delta. With a view to eventually connecting Kolkata with Dhaka, the first railway line was opened from Kolkata to the lower Ganga bank in Kushtia in September 1862. In 1871, this line was extended southward to the Goalundo bank of the Ganga. With its many branches extending along both banks of the lower Ganga, it came to be known as the Eastern Bengal Railway (EBR).

Between 1874 and 1879 the Northern Bengal State Railway, extending from Sara to Sirajganj, was constructed, with branches extending to Dinajpur in the west and Parbatipur in the east. In July 1884 the government acquired the EBR and in 1887 it was merged with the Northern Bengal State Railway. The entire Eastern Bengal Railway (the word ‘State’ was dropped in 1915) was situated on the west bank of the Brahmaputra river, with the single exception of the Bahadurabad-Dhaka-Narayanganj line. The first section of the Assam-Bengal Railway (ABR) was opened between Chittagong and Comilla in 1895. The line was constructed to meet the demands of the tea companies in Assam, which wanted railway facilities for the export of tea via the port of Chittagong. This line lay on the left bank of the Ganga and both banks of the Brahmaputra. It served the province of Assam, and the districts of Dhaka, Mymensingh, Chittagong, Noakhali and Comilla. In 1942, the ABR was taken over by the state and was merged with the EBR to form the Bengal and Assam Railway. The expansion of the railways was such that by 1933 Bengal had more railways by area than any province except the United Provinces.

~~The Bengal Delta: Ecology, State and Social Change, 1840-1943 -by- Iftekhuar Iqbal

Day 76 : Book Excerpt : Here’s Looking at Euclid

On the other hand, our approach to mathematics is very much influenced by culture. The selection of base ten, for example, was premised not on mathematical reasons but on physiological ones, the numbers of our fingers and toes. Language also shapes mathematical understanding in surprising ways. In the West, for example, we are held back by the words we have chosen to express numbers.

In almost all Western European languages, number words do not follow a regular pattern. In English we say twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three. But we don’t say tenty-one, tenty-two, tenty-three—we say eleven, twelve, thirteen. Eleven and twelve are unique constructions and even though thirteen is a combination of three and ten, the three part comes before the ten part—unlike twenty-three, in which the three part comes after the twenty part. Between ten and twenty, English is a mess.

In Chinese, Japanese and Korean, however, number words do follow a regular pattern. Eleven is written ten one. Twelve is ten two, and so on with ten three, ten four up to ten nine for 19. Twenty is two ten and 21 is two ten one. You pronounce numbers in all cases just as you see them written down. So what? Well, it does make a difference at a young age. Experiments have repeatedly shown that Asian children find it easier to learn to count than Europeans. In one study with Chinese and American four-and five-year-olds, the two nationalities performed similarly learning to count to 12, but the Chinese were about a year ahead with higher numbers. A regular system also makes arithmetic clearer to understand. A simple sum like 25 plus 32 when expressed as two ten five plus three ten two is one step closer to the answer already: five ten seven.
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We are also handicapped by how long it takes us to say numbers. In The Number Sense, Stanislas Dehaene writes down the list 4, 8, 5, 3, 9, 7, 6 and asks us to spend 20 seconds memorizing it. English speakers have a 50 percent chance of remembering the seven numbers correctly. By contrast, Mandarin Chinese speakers can memorize nine digits in this way. Dehaene says that this is because the number of digits we can hold in our heads at any one time is determined by how many we can say in a two-second loop. The Chinese words for one to nine are all concise single syllables: yi, er, san, si, wu, liu, qi, ba, jiu. They can be uttered in less than a quarter of a second each, so in a two-second span, a Chinese speaker can rattle through nine of them. English number words, by contrast, take just under a third of a second each to say (thanks to “seven,” with two syllables, and the extended syllable “three”), and so our limit in two seconds is seven. The record, however, goes to the Cantonese, whose digits are spoken with even more brevity. They can remember ten of them in a two-second period.

While Western languages seem to be working against any mathematical ease of understanding, in Japan, language is recruited as an ally. Words and phrases are modified in order to make their multiplication tables, called kuku, easier to learn. The tradition of these tables originated in ancient China, spreading to Japan around the eighth century. Ku in Japanese is nine, and the name comes from the fact that the tables used to begin at the end, with 9 × 9 = 81. Around 400 years ago they were changed so that the kuku now begins, “One one is one.”

The words of the kuku are simply:

One one is one
One two is two
One three is three . . .
This carries on to “One nine is nine,” and then the twos begin with:
Two one is two
Two two is four
And so on to nine nine is eighty-one.

So far, this seems very similar to the plain British style of reciting the times tables. In the kuku, however, whenever there are two ways to pronounce a word, the way that flows better is used. For example, the word for one can be in or ichi, and rather than starting the kuku with either in in or ichi ichi, the Japanese use the more sonorous combination in ichi. The word for eight is ha. Eight eights should be ha ha. Yet the line in the kuku for 8 × 8 is happa, since it rolls quicker off the tongue. The result is that the kuku is rather like a piece of poetry, or a nursery rhyme. When I visited an elementary school in Tokyo and watched a class of seven-and eight-year-olds practice their kuku, I was struck by how much it sounded like a rap—the phrases were syncopated and said with great animation. Certainly it bore no relation to how I remember reciting my times tables at school, which was with the metronomic delivery of a steam train going up a hill. Makiko Kondo, the teacher, said that she teaches her pupils kuku with an up-tempo rhythm because this makes it fun to learn. “First we get them to recite it, and only some time later do they come to understand the real meaning.” The poetry of the kuku seems to embed the times tables in Japanese brains. Japanese adults told me that they know, for example, that seven times seven is forty-nine not because they remember the math but because the music of “seven seven forty nine” sounds right.

~~Here’s Looking at Euclid -by- Alex Bellos

Day 75 : Book Excerpt : Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays

The death of Don Quixote in the last chapter is the climax of the entire book. I would challenge any reader, however tough and insensitive, to read these pages without shedding a tear. And yet, even at that crucial juncture, Cervantes is still pursuing his old obsession, and once again he finds the need to score a few more cheap points at the expense of some obscure books of chivalry. The intrusion of this futile polemic at that very moment is utterly anti-climactic—but then Cervantes has a perverse habit of ruining his own best effects, a practice that has infuriated many readers and critics (I shall return to this a little later). What I wish to underline here is simply this: it is bizarre to observe how a literary masterpiece which was to exert such universal appeal—transcending all barriers of language, culture and time—could, from the start, have been entirely predicated upon such a narrow, tedious and pointless literary quarrel. In order to appreciate fully the oddity of this situation, one should try to transpose it into modern terms: it is as if, for instance, Patrick White (let us say) were to have devoted his greatest creative effort to the single-minded debunking of some trash fiction published in Women’s Weekly or New Idea.

But this, in turn, raises an interesting question. A little while ago, out of the blue, I inadvertently caught some critical flak for venturing to suggest in a nationally broadcast lecture (among a few other heresies) the notion (quite banal in fact) that creative literature, inasmuch as it is artistically valid, can carry no message. This view is not new, by the way, and should be self-evident. Hemingway, whom I quoted, had expressed it best to a journalist who was questioning him on “the messages” of his novels. He very sensibly replied: “There are no messages in my novels. When I want to send a message, I go to the post office.”

Some critics reacted indignantly to my statement: “What? No messages in the masterpieces of world literature? And what about Dante’s Divine Comedy? What about Milton’s Paradise Lost?” Even more to the point, they could have added: “And what about Cervantes’s Don Quixote?”

Of course, many poets and novelists think that they have messages to communicate, and most of the time they passionately believe in the momentous significance of their messages. But quite frequently these messages are far less important than their authors originally assumed. Sometimes they prove to be actually mistaken, or downright silly or even obnoxious. And often, after a while, they become simply irrelevant, whereas the works themselves, if they have genuine literary merit, acquire a life of their own, revealing their true, long-lasting meaning to later generations; but of this deeper meaning, the author himself was hardly aware. Most of Dante’s most fervent readers today care very little for medieval theology; and virtually none of Don Quixote’s modern admirers have ever read—let alone heard the names of—most of the books of chivalry that Cervantes attacked with such fierce passion.

In fact, it is in this gap between the author’s conscious intention (which may be merely incidental) and the deeper meaning of his work that the critic can find the only legitimate ground on which to exert his craft. Chesterton put it well, in one of the introductions he wrote to Dickens’s novels:

The function of criticism, if it has a legitimate function at all, can only be one function—that of dealing with the subconscious part of the author’s mind which only the critic can express, and not with the conscious part of the author’s mind, which the author himself can express. Either criticism is no good at all (a very defensible position) or else criticism means saying about an author the very things that would have made him jump out of his boots.

~~Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays -by- Simon Leys

Day 74 : Book Excerpt : Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World

By 1246, Toregene had tightened her control of the empire and felt confident that she could orchestrate her son’s election. The deliberations and election of Guyuk transpired in private, limited to members of the Golden Family and important functionaries, but Toregene organized his installation as a major affair for foreign dignitaries as well as the Mongol people. Throughout the summer until the ceremony in August, foreign delegates arrived from the distant corners of the empire. Emirs, governors, and grandees jostled along the same roads beside princes and kings. The Seljuk sultan came from Turkey; representatives of the caliph of Baghdad also arrived, as well as two claimants to the throne of Georgia: David, the legitimate son of the late king, and David, the illegitimate son of the same king. The highest-ranking European delegate was Alexander Nevsky’s father, Grand Prince Yaroslav II Vsevolodovich of Vladimir and Suzdal, who died suspiciously just after dining with Toregene Khatun.

By happenstance, on July 22, 1246, in the midst of the massive gathering, the first envoy arrived at the Mongol court from western Europe. Friar Giovanni of Plano Carpini, a sixty-five-year-old cleric, who had been one of the disciples of Saint Francis of Assisi, arrived as the agent and spy for Pope Innocent IV, commissioned to find out as much as possible about these strange people who had threatened Europe. After leaving Lyons, France, at Easter of 1245, Carpini required nearly a year to cross Europe to the Mongol lines at Batu’s camp in Russia. Once in the Mongol transport system, however, Carpini covered approximately three thousand miles in a mere 106 days—an average of more than twenty-five miles on horseback each day for nearly three and a half months.

Because of the success of their military campaigns in Europe, the Mongols eagerly received Carpini in the mistaken belief that he was bringing the submission of the pope and all the people of western Europe, but his letter carried quite a different message. Pope Innocent IV offered the khan a pedantic synopsis of the life of Jesus and the main tenets of Christianity, all of which was probably well known to the khan through his Christian mother and his frequent attendance of religious services with her. Guyuk was likely a Christian himself; if not, he was certainly well disposed toward Christianity and relied heavily on Christian Mongols in his administration. The pope’s letter chastised the Mongols for invading Europe, ordering the khan to “desist entirely from assaults of this kind and especially from the persecution of Christians.” He demanded an explanation from the khan “to make fully known to us . . . what moved you to destroy other nations and what your intentions are for the future.” The letter informed the khan that God had delegated all earthly power to the pope in Rome, who was the only person authorized by God to speak for Him.

After the Mongol officials found out that Carpini brought no tribute and offered no submission, they mostly ignored him, but in a letter of November 1246 that still survives, Guyuk asked Innocent IV the obvious questions: How do you know whom God absolves and to whom He shows mercy? How do you know that God sanctions the words you speak? Guyuk pointed out that God had given the Mongols, not the pope, control of the world from the rising sun to the setting sun. God intended for the Mongols to spread his commandments and his laws through Genghis Khan’s Great Law. He then advised the pope to come to Karakorum with all of his princes in order to pay homage to the Mongol khan.

The first direct diplomatic contact between Europe and the Far East had degenerated into an exchange of comparative theology mixed with religious insults. Despite the extensive spiritual beliefs that the Mongols and Europeans shared in common, the opening relationship had been so negative and misguided that in future years, the entire base of shared religion would eventually erode. The Mongols continued for another generation to foster closer relations with Christian Europe, but in the end, they would have to abandon all such hope, and with it they would, in time, abandon Christianity entirely in favor of Buddhism and Islam.

~~Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World -by- Jack Weatherford

Day 73 : Book Excerpt : Doomed Queens

Alexandra was born in 1872 to Alice, Grand Duchess of Hesse and the daughter of Queen Victoria. As a small child, Alexandra was nicknamed Sunny because of her happy temperament. However, the little German princess was transformed into a somber six-year-old after her mother’s sudden death from diphtheria. Cupid made up for this in 1894 when she wed Nicholas II, the tsar of Russia, after a long courtship; though they loved each other madly, Alexandra’s religious beliefs made her a reluctant convert to the Russian Orthodox Church. The new tsarina’s generous dowry included hemophilia—a curse that became apparent only at the birth of her fifth child and only son, Alexei, heir to the Russian throne.

Though hemophilia occurred as a spontaneous mutation in Queen Victoria’s family, inbreeding made the disease rife among the royals. This incurable blood disorder was particularly cruel because it was carried by females, who would remain blissfully unaware of their genetic predilection until a son was born suffering from the disease; most hemophiliacs were male. In those pre–DNA test days, there was no way to know who carried the mutation. Its effects were also unpredictable—a simple bruise could bring on a near-fatal hemorrhage.

Three days after Alexei’s birth, what remained of his umbilical cord began to seep blood. This was the first of many near-death episodes for the young tsarevich. His disease transformed the Romanov family into a closely knit unit whose defining modus operandi was to protect Alexei from harm. They surrounded him with a cushy blanket of secrecy—no one wanted the world to know that the next tsar of Russia was a hemophiliac.

It was Alexandra’s desperate search for a cure that led her to Rasputin, the Elmer Gantry on steroids of tsarist Russia.

Rasputin has been called the mad monk, a miracle worker, a charlatan, a devil, and a lothario. All of these allegations are true—he was a hornet’s nest of contradictions. He styled himself a starets, or spiritual healer of peasant origin, yet he had a superhuman thirst for alcohol and a talent for getting under the ladies’ petticoats. He stank like a goat, had pockmarked skin, yet dressed luxuriously. Rasputin’s most noted feature was his intense gray eyes, which he used to hypnotize his subjects. Prince Felix Yussupov wrote of a healing session, “I gradually slipped into a drowsy state, as though a powerful narcotic had been administered to me. All I could see was Rasputin’s glittering eyes.” Many women who came to him for spiritual advice soon found themselves in his putrid embrace; he whispered to them, “You think I am polluting you, but I am not. I am purifying you.”

Rasputin arrived in Alexandra’s life during Alexei’s most severe bleeding episode. Though doctors had written the boy off as worm food, the starets said a few prayers and assured the tsarina that her son would survive. And he did—everyone considered it a miracle. After this, it was a matter of time before Alexandra convinced herself that Alexei would die without Rasputin. The starets soon insinuated himself into every aspect of royal life.

When Russia was forced into war with Germany, Tsar Nicholas was called to the front. Alexandra remained at home with Alexei—and Rasputin. Desperate to help her husband, she consulted the starets for political advice. Government officials were hired and fired willy-nilly, based on whether Rasputin liked them. Unaware of Alexei’s disease, people could not comprehend why Rasputin was accorded so much power. Believing the worst, they gossiped that the tsarina had wild orgies with him, that she was using him to destroy Russia. When Alexandra’s interference led to governmental chaos, they brought up her German heritage and accused her of spying for the enemy. Pained by these charges, the tsarina protested, “Twenty years have I spent in Russia…. All my heart is bound to this country….”

Rasputin’s influence could not continue. To save Russia—so they thought—several of the tsar’s relatives, one of whom was Prince Yussupov, lured Rasputin to dinner on New Year’s Eve, 1916. The starets was as tenacious in death as he was in life. To kill him, the aristocrats poisoned and shot him—still he lived. Finally, they threw Rasputin into the Neva to drown.

Rasputin must have had intimations of his death. He wrote Nicholas several days before his murder, “I feel that I shall leave life before January 1…. if it was your relations who have wrought my death then no one in the family, that is to say, none of your children or relations, will remain alive for more than two years. They will be killed by the Russian people.”

Rasputin’s prediction proved to be all too accurate. Despite the best intentions of Rasputin’s assassins, peasants viewed the mad monk’s murder as an attack upon one of their own. It inflamed class tensions to revolutionary levels, encouraged by food shortages due to the war and a harsh winter. Hoping to protect his country and family, Nicholas abdicated in 1917. But it mattered little—Alexandra and the rest of her family were imprisoned and executed by firing squad in 1918.

~~Doomed Queens -by- Kris Waldherr

Day 72 : Book Excerpt : Delirious Delhi

We had very little business inside Lutyens’ Delhi, but we traveled fairly frequently to Chanakyapuri, just to its west. Chanakyapuri is not technically attributable to Lutyens, but it is almost identical in its spirit of exclusion. It boasts more embassies and swanky hotels than we could visit in a week of lounge-hopping and ambassador-fêting. Dinner in this neighborhood costs more than the guy who drives us there earns in a month. At the entrance to each hotel, a huge valet in full Rajasthani costume—complete with champion mustache—waits for the guard at the gate to dutifully certify that our taxi’s undercarriage is free of bombs so he can open the car door for us. To make it past this bouncer, an Indian has to have the clothes, the car and the mannerisms to certify a certain level of status; for foreigners, as our autorickshaw drops us off in dusty sandals and sweaty T-shirts, all we have to do is be white.

Jenny and I periodically patronized these bastions of exclusivity, we admit. The income we earned in Delhi—which would have made us barely middle class in New York—put us in the highest tiers of Indian society, and we have a weakness for wine that isn’t stored in the hot recesses of a state-run liquor store that caters primarily to on-duty autorickshaw drivers. Still, it wasn’t entirely possible to enjoy our $50 Japanese yakitori on the same day we’d pay Shilpa, our bungalow’s sweeper, $6 for her full month of work.

We learned the importance of going into both Lutyens’s Delhi or Chanakyapuri with a pre-planned exit strategy. On the Sunday night that our friend Penny invited us for drinks at the Canadian embassy, we’d stumble back onto Indian soil to the starkest reminder that everyone in this area could afford their own car: no empty autorickshaws were cruising around looking for fares. So silent were those nighttime streets that we heard an autorickshaw approaching from a half-mile away, a little lawnmower engine slowly puttering up the vast expanse of road. Our hopes rose, visions of our pillows tickled our sleepy minds, but then the dark shape in the back seat told us that this autorickshaw was occupied, and that we were best off walking to India Gate to find a lift.
Ah, India Gate! The one location in Lutyens’s Delhi that defied Lutyens’ best intentions.
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An Arc de Triomphe-style monument designed to commemorate those who died in service of the British Indian Army, this contribution to the Empire’s eternal grandeur has been appropriated by men, women and children as a place to gather when the sun goes down.

It’s an inspiring sight. And it’s a side of India whose existence the Western media hadn’t prepared us to expect. From all the news reports and documentaries we’d seen about India, we were anticipating only extremes: pious thousands bathing at sunrise at the Varanasi ghats; dazzling rainbows of saris drying in the wind; heart-wrenching poverty, blindingly modern malls, catastrophically overcrowded trains. All these images of India are cliché in the West. But what we never expected—because our media had never suggested it existed—were the simple, everyday pleasures of an evening at India Gate: ice cream vendors, laughing kids, strolling newlyweds, teenage boys pretending not to notice teenage girls, aunties glaring at teenage boys, happy parents, kite flyers, toy peddlers, snack sellers, and every other complement to the Indian nuclear family.
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Most stray dogs are ragged and haggard, with patchy fur and the vacant look of the perennially hunted. An exception was the gang of three who lived outside our building: Bruno, Signal and Snoopy, who were stray in name only. They’d been adopted by our neighbor Anya, a single woman in her thirties who lived in her late grandfather’s flat on the floor below ours. The only difference between being “adopted” and “owned” was that they weren’t allowed inside the building at night. The three were fussed over and fed far too much. Fat from their lavish life, they spent their days napping, waddling from one nap to another, and biting the tires of passing cars. By night, though, the envy of strays who actually had to work for a living meant that their territory was constantly being encroached. So their vocal cords got the workout their scavenging muscles never did, inevitably right below our bedroom window.

But nighttime was serene as compared to morning, starting at sunrise with the mosque, followed closely by car horns and bicycle bells and paellawallahs. After that came less delicious sounds, like the pigeons who had regular sex on our air conditioner, their claws scratching the metal surface of the window unit, the male cooing pigeon poetry while desperately flapping himself into the mounting position. Or like the workers at the ICICI Bank depository across the street who dropped metal boxes out of armoured cars and threw other boxes inside, their hollow booms observed by a dozen guards who stood around fingering ancient rifles. The sweepers then joined the chorus, pushing a day’s accumulation of dust into the gutters so that passing cars and passers-by throughout the day would kick it up to coat the sidewalks and driveways, ensuring the sweepers would have something to sweep again the next morning.

~~Delirious Delhi -by- Dave Prager

Day 71 : Book Excerpt : Cleopatra The Great

Following the couple’s return to Alexandria after their cruise south, Caesar began preparations for his return to Rome where Pompeius’ sons were still at large and their supporters growing in strength. Although his failure to return immediately after the Alexandrian War was criticised by those in Rome who blamed his protracted stay on Cleopatra, accused of ensnaring the noble Roman with her feminine wiles, factors beyond even his control had been at play, from the onslaught of the Alexandrians to the onset of unfavourable coastal winds which made sailing hazardous for several months, and all of which he described himself in his own accounts. Caesar had therefore used the winter and spring of 48-47 BC to maximise support in the East, replacing an uncooperative regime with a loyal ally and guaranteeing himself a potential heir, a steady cash flow and a reliable source of grain for the people of Rome, whose backing would be vital if he was to push his policies through the Senate.

To ensure Cleopatra’s safety and maintain her position, he left three legions in Alexandria under the reliable command of his favourite freedman, Rufio. Their presence would also demonstrate to his critics back in Rome that he had made Egypt a Roman protectorate. Not only that, it would offset any suggestion of seizing the country and simply making it a province, something which Caesar would certainly have done had he not been romantically involved with its persuasive monarch.

Although theoretically Cleopatra still ruled alongside her remaining half-brother Ptolemy XIV and had the twelve-year-old firmly under her control, her half-sister Arsinoe IV was still causing problems. By declaring herself monarch in Cleopatra’s place when the Alexandrians were besieging the palace she had committed a treasonable act which Cleopatra would not forget. Yet, rather than imprison her in Alexandria as a focus of potential resistance, or risk the backlash that her execution would cause, it was decided that Caesar should take Arsinoe back to Rome as his prisoner.

Having presumably said their farewells in private, the heavily pregnant monarch in her golden carrying chair must have accompanied him in procession the short distance from the palace to the Great Harbour keen to demonstrate their alliance in the full glare of the Alexandrian public. Perhaps they clasped each other’s right hands in the formal gesture of farewell, as Caesar finally boarded ship and left Egypt. The occasion surely affected Cleopatra. Since him had given her her throne, her heir and indeed her life, she decided to create a suitably impressive monument to honour him — the Caesar-eum which in Greek was ‘Kaisaros Epibaterios’, ‘Embarking Caesar’, hinting at its inspiration.

Sailing out of Alexandria’s Great Harbour past the palaces, the Pharos and the colossus of Isis, Caesar did not go straight back to Rome. Needing to shore up Jewish support for his forthcoming struggles against Pompeius’ sons, he sailed along the coast to Acre to reward Pompeius’ former supporters Antipatros and Hyrcanus for their valuable help in the Alexandrian War. As Rome’s representative, he confirmed their regime, excused them all tribute, allowed them to rebuild Jerusalem and gave them the port of Joppa (Jaffa) which Cleopatra had wanted herself as part of her plans to regain the Ptolemies’ former territories. Caesar had instead restored Cyprus to her, and the revenues from that island allowed her to relax the heavy taxes she had been forced to impose at the beginning of her reign in order to keep Egypt afloat.

With the economy gaining ground and Roman troops available for military support if needed, Cleopatra was in an increasingly secure position as she finally prepared to give birth to her first child on 23 June 47 BC. Yet a pharaoh in labour was no everyday occurrence. Her own life and that of her successor were of such paramount importance to the future of the country that the birth would have been accompanied by every form of protection that the gods of Egypt and the rest of the ancient world could bestow. Isis the Great Mother was repeatedly invoked along with Hathor — her classical equivalents Greek Aphrodite and Caesar’s own ancestor the Roman Venus. Artemis was another vital member of the divine birth team. As the ‘Reliever of the birth pangs of women’ and revered as Artemis ‘Polymastica’ (meaning ‘the Many Breasted’), Artemis had left her own great temple in Ephesus to attend Alexander’s birth in Macedonia. She was linked to the Greek goddess Eileithyia, and portrayed like Isis with a torch to help mother and child in the darkness. The combined Artemis-Eileithyia declared, ‘I have brought forth the new-born baby at the tenth orbit of the moon — fit light for the deed that is consummated’.

~~Cleopatra The Great -by- Dr. Joann Fletcher

Day 70 : Book Excerpt : The Power of Tantra

As most modern scholars agree, the term Tantra (or “Tantrism” or “Tantricism”) does not refer to a singular, monolithic, or neatly defined category. Rather, this is an extremely messy and ambiguous term used to refer to a “bewilderingly diverse array of esoteric precepts and practices attested across much of South, Inner and East Asia from the sixth century down to the present day.” Indeed, it covers a huge range of diverse texts, traditions, and ritual practices that spread throughout the Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain communities of India, China, Japan Tibet, Pakistan, Mongolia, and parts of Southeast Asia; and it is reflected in a wide variety of different sects and schools, such as the Pāñcarātra, Sahajiyā, Pāśupata, Kāpālika, Kaula, Krama, Trika, Śākta, Nātha Siddha, Śrīvidyā and Paścimāmnāya. As André Padoux and others have argued, the abstract category of “Tantrism”—as singular, unified “ism”—is itself a relatively recent invention, and in large part the creation of Orientalist scholars and Hindu reformers writing in the nineteenth century:

Tantrism is a protean phenomenon, so complex and elusive that it is practically impossible to define it.Tantrism is, to a large extent, a “category of discourse in the West,” and not, strictly speaking, an Indian one. As a category, Tantrism is not…an entity in the minds of those inside. It is a category in the minds of observers from outside…The term Tantrism was coined by Western Indologists of the latter part of the nineteenth century whose knowledge of India was limited…Neither in traditional India nor in Sanskrit texts is there a term for Tantrism; no description or definition of such a category is to be found anywhere.

Derived from the root tan, “to spread” or “to stretch,” the term tantra has been used since Vedic times in a huge variety of different ways, signifying everything from a loom or weaving machine, to a system of philosophy, to a drug or remedy. For example, in texts like the Kālikā Purāṇa—the most important Assamese text from the tenth to the eleventh centuries that I will use extensively in this book—tantra has a very mundane meaning: typically it means any rite or form of worship of a particular deity, such as the worship of the goddess Kāmākhyā or Vaiṣṇavī (kāmākhyā tantra, vaiṣṇavī tantra, and so on). Most commonly tantra simply means a kind of text—but one that may or may not contain the sort of tantalizing and titillating things we normally associate with “Tantra” today.

In the course of my own research in northeast India between 2000 and 2008, I interviewed hundreds of priests, devotees, gurus, and holy men and received more or less as many different answers to the question “what is Tantra?” For example, at Kāmākhyā temple in 2004, I interviewed two priests and asked for their definitions of “Tantra.” The first priest laughed and tried to explain how difficult it is to define such a complex term, but then said: “Tantra is essentially mantra—the power of sound and vibration that we use to worship the goddess.” Immediately, however, the second priest interrupted, saying, “No, no. That’s not Tantra. Tantra comes from tan and man; tan means the ‘body’ and man means the ‘mind’. So Tantra is mind and body together, the whole human being in spiritual practice.” Finally, overhearing our conversation, another (non-Tantric) sādhu from Tripura came over and decided to offer his opinion on the subject. Like many non-Tantric sādhus, he had a very low opinion of Tantra, which he dismissed as a very bad, unclean (khārāp, aśuddha) thing, mostly associated with phony magic tricks to dupe the ignorant. To illustrate his point, he pulled something out of his bag that looked like dried grass. He placed a few blades of the stuff in his mouth and said, “I’ll show you ‘Tantra.’” Once the blades were wet from his saliva, they began to wave and wiggle around. He smiled and laughed gleefully “This is your ‘Tantra,” he snickered, meaning that Tantra is little more than silly mumbo-jumbo and trickery. In sum, the meanings of Tantra, even at a single site like Kāmākhyā, are not only remarkably varied but often contradictory and reflective of a complex series of historical transformations.

~~The Power of Tantra -by- Hugh B. Urban

Day 69 : Book Excerpt : The Taming of The Demons: Violence and Liberation in Tibetan Buddhism

The Rudra myth revels in a litany of violent imagery: in its account of the wild and bloodthirsty lifetimes that precede Rudra’s final birth, in how the newborn demon eats his dead mother’s flesh, in the details of his hideous visage, in the carnage and the disease he wreaks upon the world, in the descriptions of his vile palace, and in the conflagration of monstrous violence that ends his terrible reign. We are supposed to be repulsed by this dreadful demon and the bloody imagery intended to reflect the horrors of his evil ways. Yet the myth’s violence is not entirely one-sided, for the compassionate buddha also appears in the same demonic form and is equally vile in his own horrific manner. He too has massive wings, nine hideous heads, and eighteen hands bearing an array of terrifying implements. He too is crawling with spiders, scorpions, and snakes. He too breathes fire and tramples beings beneath his feet. Surely we are not meant to be repulsed by the buddha as well. There must be more to this violent imagery than meets the eye; it must not be just for the purpose of portraying evil. That the buddha shares Rudra’s terrifying aspect should give us pause.

Indeed, the myth itself states that a superficial understanding of the tantras was precisely what led Rudra to his evil and destructive end. During his previous life as Black Liberator, while studying the tantric teachings of uninhibited spontaneity, the demon-to-be took literally the words of his master, Invincible Youth, and thereby misunderstood their deeper meaning. His fixation on literal readings and surface appearances drew him into a downward spiral of egotism in which nothing else mattered. “Though he wore the outward costume of an excellent [monk],” the myth relates, “he followed a path of evil-hearted beings.” Whereas his servant, on the other hand, “despite his outward appearance as one of low rank, remained on the path to ascertaining the excellent mind.” In therealm of the tantras and their antinomian teachings, one must proceed carefully. Appearances may not be what they seem.

Early Western condemnations of Tibetan Buddhism as bloody demonolatry, such as those of L. Austine Waddell, were driven in large part by scholars’ own violent reactions against precisely the kind of imagery that fills the Rudra myth. Despite the strength of such visceral negative responses, however, the Rudra myth suggests that some forms of violence may be more complex. The extreme reactions that violence often engenders can obscure its nobler features. The superficial appearance of tantric violence, we are told, can mask a supremely compassionate intention. This chapter investigates the nature of this concealment, this disjuncture between the unsettling appearance of Buddhist violence and its hidden pacific intention. How can violence be both destructive and compassionate? How have Buddhists distinguished compassionate violence, this supremely dangerous form of virtuous activity, from its evil twin, the demonic violence we all fear and loathe? This chapter explores these questions, all the while attempting to remain open to the ambiguities that are inherent to violence.

Violence, as Hannah Arendt has observed, is instrumental by nature. It is a means to an end and as such is neither good nor evil in itself. It is justifiable only in its end, in the purpose for which it is enacted. By means of violence, one may accomplish aims that are either positive or negative. Yet violence is not just any instrument; it is the ultimate of means, the activity of last resort in the Buddhist tantras. Its methods are dramatic, and its spectacular appearance can easily distract from and obscure its merely instrumental nature. The horror of violence thereby often seems gratuitous and fundamentally evil. In spite of its powerful appearance, though, violence remains merely a morally ambiguous means. The Rudra myth involves us in all these issues, in the tensions and the concealments that lie within violence itself, and it thereby provides an opportunity for us to investigate the Buddhist approach to violence in all its complexity.

COMPASSIONATE VIOLENCE IN THE SUTRAS

On the surface, killing is forbidden in Buddhism, as is clear from the very first precept to be observed by all Buddhist devotees (upasaka): to abstain from killing living beings (Skt. pratigahtad virati). Yet what this has meant in practice has not been as simple as it might seem. The idea that killing may sometimes be permissible within Buddhism appears in the tantras, but it is by no means unique to these works. Violent rituals multiplied dramatically with the emergence of the tantras from the seventh century onward, but already the earlier Mahayana sutras had made similar ethical allowances. Even certain non-Mahyna Abhidharma and Vinaya commentaries had left the door open for forms of killing that were not necessarily negative. Such early sources distinguished moral from immoral killing on the basis of the mental intention (cetan) that accompanied the act. Killing was only immoral if it was intentional, and conversely, unintentional killing did not break the first precept. As the Samantapsdik, a fifth-century collection of Pali commentaries on the Vinaya, explains: “The intention to kill as a result of which one produces the activity that cuts off [a being’s] life-faculty is called ’killing a living being’; ’the one who kills a living being’ should be understood as the person [who kills while] possessing that intention.”

~~The Taming of The Demons: Violence and Liberation in Tibetan Buddhism -by- Jacob P. Dalton

Day 68 : Book Excerpt : The Big Book of Pain

In the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, US Vice President Dick Cheney appeared on NBC news. In his statement he obliquely referred to the fact that the US would: ‘work the dark side, if you will. We have to spend time in the shadows’. Precisely what he may have meant by that is open to speculation, but undoubtedly a part of the dark side included what the CIA – in a master-stroke of obfuscation and double talk – now refers to as ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’. In a December 2004 memorandum the US Justice Department stated that such enhanced techniques as prolonged, forced standing; forcing prisoners to wear hoods; subjecting them to loud noises and deprivation of sleep, food and drink might be considered inhumane but did not constitute torture. That point might be argued by the victims of England’s seventeenth-century Witchfinder General, Matthew Hopkins, who were subjected to identical tortures to the point where they confessed to having engaged in intercourse with Satan himself. In an attempt to clarify the Justice Department’s memorandum – but without actually saying anything at all – spokesman Erik Amblin refused to specify what specific interrogation techniques might be cruel and degrading but would still not qualify as torture. He did say, however, that: ‘acting with the specific intent of causing prolonged mental harm’ would be illegal under US and international law. Does this mean that causing a prisoner to have a mental breakdown is acceptable if it was unintentional? Does everyone have the same tolerance to torture? If not, then do US interrogators call in a psychologist to determine each individual’s emotional and physical threshold to pain before torturing them?

In an eerie reflection of Heinrich Himmler’s order specifying limits on when and how much torture could be inflicted on prisoners, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld approved the use of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ on a single prisoner who was being held at the US military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, who was suspected of being involved in planning the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Once this genie was officially out of the bottle, and US interrogators realised that censure and punishment for inflicting torture were unlikely to be levelled against them, the practice quickly spread to US forces in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

In May 2004, pictures of American soldiers, inflicting a litany of torture and abuse on prisoners being held at the Abu Ghraib Correctional Facility near Baghdad, Iraq, appeared on almost every major television network in the world. Like something out of the Middle Ages we saw photos – taken by the perpetrators themselves – of prisoners being beaten, kicked and slapped; their bare feet being jumped on by soldiers in combat boots. In other pictures prisoners were stripped naked and arranged in decorative piles, forced to masturbate and simulate fellatio, dragged around on the end of a leash like dogs and threatened with unmuzzled, attack-trained dogs. When called to account for her troop’s acts, the General in charge of Abu Ghraib at the time of the incident, Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, insisted it was all the fault of ‘a few bad apples’. But was it? Or was it a case where the prisoners had been so dehumanised that no-one really cared how horribly they were abused? The ensuing investigation revealed that military interrogators came and went without even being asked to present identification. No authority figures checked on the prisoners’ status or well-being. To complicate matters even more, the prisoners and their guards did not speak the same language. Unless there was an interpreter present the guards had no way of knowing what the prisoners were saying. This in itself made the prisoners seem alien and suspicious.

What is certainly not open to speculation is the later testimony of American military policemen Chip Frederick and Ken Davis; both of whom served at Abu Ghraib at the time of the incident. Frederick stated: ‘It was clear that there was no accountability’, and Davis added:

    As soon as we’d have prisoners come in, sandbags instantly (went over) their head. They would flexicuff them; throw them down to the ground; some would be stripped. It was told to all of us, ‘they’re nothing but dogs’. You start looking at these people as less than human and you start doing things to them that you would never dream of.

~~The Big Book of Pain: Torture and Punishment Through History -by-Mark P Donnelly & Daniel Diehl

Day 67 : Book Excerpt : Masters of Command

Few generals have ever approached the battlefield as well armed in force and fraud as Hannibal. Few have ever pulled off greater feats of mobility. As with the wigs and disguises that he wore to foil assassins, Hannibal was full of tricks. But he was also a deadly battlefield puncher.

Hannibal’s army consisted of a varied mix of men and abilities. Indeed, one of his greatest achievements was turning them into a cohesive whole.

The Roman army in Hannibal’s day consisted of citizen-soldiers. Ordinary Roman males, most of them farmers, served their country as soldiers. Fighting beside them were soldiers from allied cities in Italy, most of whom were also citizen-soldiers.

Carthage’s army was totally different. Only some of the officers were Carthaginian; the troops represented other nationalities. Some were mercenaries but most had been recruited from the various peoples in North Africa and Spain under Carthaginian rule. Some were inexperienced but others had soldiered long enough to be considered professionals. Hannibal’s best troops were North Africans—Libyans and Numidians (today, Algerians). Next came the Spaniards, to whom he soon added northern Italian Celts. As infantrymen, the best of them—the Libyans—rivaled Rome’s famed legionaries, but they could not match their numbers. What gave Hannibal an edge was his horsemen and his ability to maneuver them. He used cavalry more successfully than any general since Alexander, a century earlier.

Hannibal’s father, Hamilcar Barca, had learned how to win battles from Greek military experts. His method was to hold the enemy in the center while enveloping him on the wings and even the rear. It was not an easy maneuver to carry out but when accomplished it could be devastating. Hannibal, who learned these tactics from his father, carried them out brilliantly. Hannibal commanded both heavy and light cavalry. Together, these infantry could run rings around Roman cavalry. Hannibal’s cavalrymen were trained to fight in tandem with his infantrymen. Combined, they represented a deadly one-two punch. Because they were professionals, Hannibal’s men had the training to carry out maneuvers that Rome’s citizen-soldiers could only dream of. Meanwhile, his elephants would shield Hannibal’s infantry and terrify the enemy. The result would be state-of-the-art military science.

Hannibal’s army had certain advantages of command and experience. He had a fine corps of supporting generals. In Italy officers like Maharbal, son of Himilco; Hanno, son of Bomilcar; and one Hasdrubal (not Hannibal’s brother) would rip Roman armies to pieces. But Hannibal’s generals did not do well on their own without his guiding hand, starting with his two brothers, Mago and Hasdrubal. The one exception, Mottones, Hannibal’s hand-picked cavalry commander in Sicily, shone in battle but fell afoul of Carthaginian political in-fighting. He turned traitor and became a Roman citizen—and general!

As for the Carthaginian army, Polybius describes Hannibal’s men thus: they “had been trained in actual warfare constantly from their earliest youth, they had a general who had been brought up together with them and was accustomed from childhood to operations in the field, they had won many battles in Spain . . . . ”

Not that Hannibal could afford to ignore the deadly cohesion and steadfastness of the Roman legions! Unlike most of Rome’s opponents, however, he had a chance of beating Rome. A tactical giant, Hannibal reckoned that his superior generalship could defeat the Romans in battle and cause them enormous casualties. But he would have to move with devastating speed and overwhelming force. Otherwise, he might end up like Pyrrhus.

King Pyrrhus of Epirus invaded southern Italy in 280 B.C. A charismatic general like Hannibal, Pyrrhus too had a small but experienced army complete with cavalry and elephants. Unlike Hannibal, he even had many Italian allies. Pyrrhus won two major pitched battles against Rome but suffered such severe losses as to render them “Pyrrhic victories”—the term we still use today. More important, Rome refused to concede. Rome’s central Italian allies held steadfast and provided new troops, but Pyrrhus’s manpower was running out.

Furthermore, Rome won the support of a key ally from outside Italy. Ironically, it was Carthage that feared that Pyrrhus would invade its territory in Sicily. That indeed happened, but Pyrrhus did no better in Sicily than in Italy. Meanwhile, Rome pummeled his Italian allies, so Pyrrhus returned to help them, only to be defeated in battle. In 275, Pyrrhus went home, having accomplished nothing.

Hannibal risked a similar fate. In fact, he risked worse, because in Pyrrhus’s day, Rome had no fleet. Now it had a great navy, which meant that it could counterattack in Spain. Carthage did not have much of a navy of its own, having lost its fleet in the First Punic War.

In 218 B.C., Rome had 220 warships, while Carthage had only one hundred. But the numbers tell only part of the story. Since winning the First Punic War, Rome’s sailors had developed expertise and guts. Carthage’s sailors had stagnated. In 218 Carthage needed not only more ships but also a new and bolder naval culture. Its admirals included no Hannibals.

~~Masters of Command: Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar- The Genius of Command -by- Barry Strauss

Day 66 : Book Excerpt : Hello Bastar: The Untold Story of India's Maoist Movement

The Naxalbari movement might have failed but it inspired a whole generation of youth and served as an initiation to radical politics. In fact, the late '60s were heady days for the youth all across the world. In China a cultural revolution was in the offing. America was receiving a beating in Vietnam. On the streets of Kolkata, angry, restless youth were hurling crude bombs at police vans. Students from affluent families, studying in prestigious institutions were bidding goodbye to lucrative careers and going to the forests of Bihar and elsewhere to participate in the revolution. For such youth in India, Naxalbari became the shining light.
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The year trouble broke out in Srikakulam was the same as that of Naxalbari. On 31 October 1967, at a place called Levidi in the Parvatipuram agency area of the Srikakulam district, situated on the north-eastern tip of Andhra Pradesh, two peasants were shot dead by the goons of a landlord. Spread over 300 square miles, the area is inhabited by the Savaras, who live on the hill slopes and are popularly known as Girijans—hill people. As is the case with most of the tribal communities, the life of the Girijans too revolved around the jungle. They would eat whatever grew in the forest and also grow some crops through the method of shifting cultivation. But over the years, the Girijans had been trapped by moneylenders and were now absolutely in their grip. It so happened that the newly-implemented national forest law had made it difficult for the tribal communities to sustain themselves through forest produce. The forest officials made life hell for them by not allowing them to even cut a branch from a tree. Since British times any transfer of land in tribal areas could happen between tribals only. But in independent India, the rich landlords and moneylenders, who had influence among the political class, had managed to fleece the poor tribals and usurp large tracts of their land.

In the '50s a few Communist teachers began working among the Savaras and the Jatapu tribals. Prominent among them was Vempatapu Satyanarayana, a charismatic leader. To get a foothold among the tribal community, he had married two tribal women—one each from the Savara and Jatapu tribes. Along with Adibatla Kailasam (the duo was popularly known as Satyam-Kailasam) the two formed the Girijan Sangam. On 31 October 1967, a group of Girijans was going to attend a conference called by Satyam-Kailasam to discuss their strategy in the wake of large-scale arrests of the tribals by the police. On their way, they were confronted by landlords at Levidi village. Two Girijans, Koranna and Manganna were killed in gunfire.

That is when events took a different turn in Srikakulam. Satyam and Kailasam decided to organise tribals into squads and undertake selected action against 'class enemies'. Armed with bows, arrows and spears and other traditional weapons, the squads attacked moneylenders and landlords, occupied their land forcibly and harvested it themselves. When the police arrived, they took the side of the landlords, further alienating the tribals. In fact, the role of the police follows a more or less similar pattern even decades later: in the 1984 Sikh pogrom, in communal riots in Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat and elsewhere.

But despite this, in Srikakulam, the guerillas managed to work out a better deal for the tribals. The landlords were coerced into increasing the wages of workers, and sharecroppers would now get a two-third share of the crop.
In 1968, all those accused of being involved in the murder of Koranna and Manganna were acquitted. This further strengthened the belief of the tribals that they should not expect anything from the State and that an armed struggle was the only way to make things work. Before this judgement, the guerilla leadership was not fully ready for armed struggle. A Srikakulam veteran later recalled how many police constables had initially offered them weapons like rifles to fight. But they wouldn't take them. So much so that when a guerilla seized a weapon from an American tourist who was exploring the area, he was reprimanded by the leadership.

But the killings of the two tribals and the support to the landlords by the police and subsequent acquittal of the accused changed all this. Also, around that time, Charu Mazumdar paid a secret visit to Srikakulam. He came visiting after an emissary was sent to him to seek his advice. Mazumdar's arrival in Srikakulam in March 1969 gave a fresh lease of life to the Srikakulam movement. He exhorted the revolutionaries to make Srikakulam the Yenan of India. He told them to pursue the policy of 'khatam' or annihilation to the fullest.
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After Mazumdar's visit, the Srikakulam revolution turned bloodier. Unlike Naxalbari, it was in Srikakulam that the rebel guerillas could manage to create liberated zones known as Red territory. Under the leadership of Satyam and Kailasam, the Girijans organised themselves into armed squads and undertook a number of class annihilation actions. Many bright students studying medicine and engineering in various universities of Andhra Pradesh joined the rebel movement. According to estimates, the guerillas had managed to 'liberate' more than 300 villages. Those who were killed were mostly landlords and moneylenders. Some of them were killed brutally, and in some cases the guerillas painted the walls of the house with the blood of the victim or wrote revolutionary slogans with it. Also, a number of policemen were killed in squad action.

In certain cases, the landlords or policemen found guilty of minor offences—which could be anything from harassing villagers or initial refusal to pay heed to the guerillas— were let off with a warning or after they paid a fine to the party. But when the police finally launched a major offensive against the Red rebels, they showed no such distinction. Most of the rebels who were caught were shot in cold blood. Panchadi Krishnamurthy, a young rebel leader, about 20 years old, was caught with a few other rebels by the police on 27 May 1969, taken to a forest area and shot dead. This trend continues even now. In various cases, the police have arrested top leaders of the CPI (Maoist) in urban areas, taken them to a jungle, and killed them. Those thus allegedly eliminated like this include Maoist leaders like Cherukuri Rajkumar alias Azad, Patel Sudhakar Reddy, Sande Rajamouli and many others. Later, a statement would be issued that these leaders were killed in encounters with the police.

~~Hello Bastar: The Untold Story of India's Maoist Movement -by- Rahul Pandita

Day 65 : Book Excerpt : The Better Angels Of Our Nature

If the past is a foreign country, it is a shockingly violent one. It is easy to forget how dangerous life used to be, how deeply brutality was once woven into the fabric of daily existence. Cultural memory pacifies the past, leaving us with pale souvenirs whose bloody origins have been bleached away. A woman donning a cross seldom reflects that this instrument of torture was a common punishment in the ancient world; nor does a person who speaks of a whipping boy ponder the old practice of flogging an innocent child in place of a misbehaving prince. We are surrounded by signs of the depravity of our ancestors’ way of life, but we are barely aware of them. Just as travel broadens the mind, a literal-minded tour of our cultural heritage can awaken us to how differently they did things in the past.

In a century that began with 9/11, Iraq, and Darfur, the claim that we are living in an unusually peaceful time may strike you as somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene. I know from conversations and survey data that most people refuse to believe it.1 In succeeding chapters I will make the case with dates and data. But first I want to soften you up by reminding you of incriminating facts about the past that you have known all along. This is not just an exercise in persuasion. Scientists often probe their conclusions with a sanity check, a sampling of real-world phenomena to reassure themselves they haven’t overlooked some flaw in their methods and wandered into a preposterous conclusion. The vignettes in this chapter are a sanity check on the data to come.

What follows is a tour of the foreign country called the past, from 8000 BCE to the 1970s. It is not a grand tour of the wars and atrocities that we already commemorate for their violence, but rather a series of glimpses behind deceptively familiar landmarks to remind us of the viciousness they conceal. The past, of course, is not a single country, but encompasses a vast diversity of cultures and customs. What they have in common is the shock of the old: a backdrop of violence that was endured, and often embraced, in ways that startle the sensibilities of a 21st-century Westerner.
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In 1991 two hikers stumbled upon a corpse poking out of a melting glacier in the Tyrolean Alps. Thinking that it was the victim of a skiing accident, rescue workers jackhammered the body out of the ice, damaging his thigh and his backpack in the process. Only when an archaeologist spotted a Neolithic copper ax did people realize that the man was five thousand years old.

Ötzi the Iceman, as he is now called, became a celebrity. He appeared on the cover of Time magazine and has been the subject of many books, documentaries, and articles. Not since Mel Brooks’s 2000 Year Old Man (“I have more than 42,000 children and not one comes to visit me”) has a kilogenarian had so much to tell us about the past. Ötzi lived during the crucial transition in human prehistory when agriculture was replacing hunting and gathering, and tools were first made of metal rather than stone. Together with his ax and backpack, he carried a quiver of fletched arrows, a wood-handled dagger, and an ember wrapped in bark, part of an elaborate fire-starting kit. He wore a bearskin cap with a leather chinstrap, leggings sewn from animal hide, and waterproof snowshoes made from leather and twine and insulated with grass. He had tattoos on his arthritic joints, possibly a sign of acupuncture, and carried mushrooms with medicinal properties.

Ten years after the Iceman was discovered, a team of radiologists made a startling discovery: Ötzi had an arrowhead embedded in his shoulder. He had not fallen in a crevasse and frozen to death, as scientists had originally surmised; he had been murdered. As his body was examined by the the CSI Neolithic team, the outlines of the crime came into view. Ötzi had unhealed cuts on his hands and wounds on his head and chest. DNA analyses found traces of blood from two other people on one of his arrowheads, blood from a third on his dagger, and blood from a fourth on his cape. According to one reconstruction, Ötzi belonged to a raiding party that clashed with a neighboring tribe. He killed a man with an arrow, retrieved it, killed another man, retrieved the arrow again, and carried a wounded comrade on his back before fending off an attack and being felled by an arrow himself.

~~The Better Angels Of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined -by-Steven Pinker

Day 64 : Essay Excerpt: Drudges, Dancing Girls, Concubines

This essay explores the forms of female slavery and servitude among the Rajput ruling clans of Rajasthan between the sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
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Evidence on the procurement of slaves from just before our period suggests that women in particular were vulnerable to capture and enslavement during battles and raids. An inscription on the Kirtistambh pillar, erected to commemorate the victory of Rana Kumbha of Mewar over Sultan Qutb al-Din Ahmad Shah of Gujarat in 1454, declares that the rana (king) “stole Nagaur from the sultan, demolished the fort there, captured many elephants and took many Muslim women prisoners, and then turned Nagaur into a pasture for grazing.” Similarly, Malu Khan—subedar (governor) of Ajmer on behalf of the Mandu sultan—brought an army against the principality of Merta around 1490, “looting and burning villages and taking prisoners.”

While comparable information is not available for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, evidence from the late eighteenth century suggests that the practice may have continued. During this period, the principality of Alwar (in eastern Rajasthan) emerged as a Rajput state, partly through the subjugation of Meo pastoralists within its declared “territories.” Meo memory recorded how, during one raid upon their fortress, the chief minister of Alwar captured and imprisoned two hundred girls, nine hundred cows, and seventy men. Similarly, during the Jodhpur state’s conflict with Jaipur in 1807, “first the Jaipur forces caught and sold the women of Marwar for two paise each; then in the same way the forces of Singhvi Indraraj [of Jodhpur] and Nawab Amir Khan caught the women of Dhundhar and sold them for one paisa each.”

The availability of the “women of the vanquished” as spoils of war seems to have been widely assumed in the region. It is clear that not all such captives were of the same kind. As we discuss below, some female captives were skilled artisans, while others were kinswomen and lesser servants and clients of defeated warriors. However, it is not always possible to determine which captives were retained exclusively by the victorious chiefs or military commanders, and which, if any, became shares in the “loot” distributed among ordinary soldiers. Courtly chronicles concerned with celebrating the preeminence of their princely patrons were not likely to record the disbursement of captives to humble-born soldiers. Nevertheless, these chronicles hint at the fact that all captives were not always sold as slaves; some women perceived to be of higher social rank were incorporated into the harems of their conquerors, with or without “marriage.”

In his chronicle, dating to around 1660, Nainsi recounts how in the early fifteenth century Rao Rinmal of Jodhpur exacted vengeance upon the Sisodiya Rajputs of Mewar for murdering their ruler, Rana Mokal. After a successful siege of Chitor and the killing of those responsible for Mokal’s murder,

Rinmalji cut off the heads of the Sisodiyas and planted them on stakes to create an enclosure [chokya kivi]. Then he created a wedding pavilion [mandap] with those stakes. And he wedded the daughters of the Sisodiyas to the [victorious] Rathors. The weddings continued throughout the day.

~~ESSAY: Drudges, Dancing Girls, Concubines -by- Ramya Sreenivasan from the book: Slavery and South Asian History

Day 63 : Book Excerpt : No god but God

When Majnun heard of the death of his beloved, he rushed back home and writhed in the dust of her grave. He lay down and pressed his body to the earth as though in prayer, but his parched lips could utter only one word: “Layla.” Finally, he was released from his pain and longing. His soul broke free and he was no more.

Some say Majnun’s body lay on top of Layla’s grave for months; others say years. No one dared approach, for the grave was guarded night and day by the beasts of the desert. Even the vultures that swooped above the tomb would not touch Majnun. Eventually, all that remained of him was dust and bones. Only then did the animals abandon their master to lope back into the wilderness. After the animals had gone and the dust of Majnun was swept away by the wind, a new headstone was fashioned for Layla’s tomb. It read:

Two lovers lie in this one tomb
United forever in death’s dark womb.
Faithful in separation; true in love:
May one tent house them in heaven above.

Sufism—the term given to Islam’s immensely complex and infinitely diverse mystical tradition—is, as Reynold Nicholson long ago observed, fundamentally indefinable. Even the word Sufi provides little help in classifying this movement. The term tasawwuf, meaning “the state of being a Sufi,” is without significance, referring as it probably does to the coarse wool garments, or suf, which the first Sufis wore as an emblem of their poverty and detachment from the world. Indeed, as a descriptive term, the word Sufi is practically interchangeable with the words darvish or faqir, meaning “mendicant” or “poor.” Some have argued that Sufi is derived from the Arabic word safwe, meaning “elected,” or suffa, meaning “purity,” though both of these must be rejected on etymological grounds. Others have suggested that Sufi is a corruption of the Greek word sophia: “wisdom.” This is also unlikely, though there is a tempting symbolic connection between the two words. For if sophia is to be understood in its Aristotelian sense as “knowledge of ultimate things,” then it is very much related to the term Sufi, just not linguistically.

As a religious movement, Sufism is characterized by a medley of divergent philosophical and religious trends, as though it were an empty caldron into which have been poured the principles of Christian monasticism and Hindu asceticism, along with a sprinkling of Buddhist and Tantric thought, a touch of Islamic Gnosticism and Neoplatonism, and finally, a few elements of Shi‘ism, Manichaeism, and Central Asian shamanism thrown in for good measure. Such a hodgepodge of influences may frustrate scholarly analysis, but it also indicates how Sufism may have formed in its earliest stages.

The first Sufis were loosely affiliated and highly mobile individuals who traveled throughout the Muslim Empire seeking intimate knowledge of God. As these “wandering darvishes” grew in number, temporary boarding houses were constructed in high traffic areas like Baghdad and Khurasan where the mendicants could gather together and share what they had learned during their spiritual journeys. By the eleventh century—around the same time that the Abassids were actively persecuting the Shi‘ah for their heterodox behavior—these boarding houses had become permanent structures resembling cloisters, a few of which gradually evolved into sophisticated schools, or Orders, of mysticism.

The Sufi Orders centered on a spiritual master who had withdrawn permanently from the Ummah to pursue the path of self-purification and inner enlightenment. Called Shaykhs in Arabic and Pirs in Persian (both of which mean “old man”), these Sufi masters were themselves the disciples of earlier, legendary masters whose unsystematic teachings they had collected so as to pass them on to a new generation of disciples. As each disciple reached a level of spiritual maturity, he would then be charged with transmitting his master’s words to his own pupils, and so on. It is therefore easy to see why Sufism appears like an eclectic recipe whose ingredients have been collected from a variety of sources over a long period of time. Of course, as the Sufi master Shaykh Fadhlalla Haeri teaches, “there is a big difference between merely collecting recipes and actually cooking and eating.”

Nevertheless, it is important to recognize that Sufism, like Shi‘ism, was a reactionary movement against both the Imperial Islam of the Muslim Dynasties and the rigid formalism of Islam’s “orthodox” learned class, the Ulama. Both sects vigorously employed ta’wil to uncover the hidden meaning of the Quran, both concentrated their spiritual activities on devotion to the Prophet Muhammad, and both developed cults of personality around saintly characters—whether Imams or Pirs.

~~No god but God -by- Reza Aslan

Day 62 : Book Excerpt : You’re Looking Very Well

There are few if any organs in our body that do not decline in their function with age, and many deaths are due to age-related illnesses. But not everything is bad news. A major study by ELSA (English Longitudinal Study of Ageing) in the UK is designed to find out about the health of the elderly, and participants are interviewed every two years. It is encouraging and impressive that 60 per cent of those aged 80-plus describe their health as good to excellent. But that does mean that 40 per cent have health problems. The study also found that while arthritis is age-related, joint pain and back pain were not, and were no more common among the elderly than the young.
The study looked at the proportion of people who remain free of certain diseases, including four eye diseases, seven cardiovascular diseases and six other physical diseases. Around half of those aged 50–54 still had none of those diseases, but only around one in ten of those aged 75–79. Wealth and education lead to longer physical functioning, possibly because both lead to better personal care. Money matters: people in the richest part of London live 17 years longer than those in the poorest parts. Individuals who are 50–59 years old and from the poorest fifth of the population are over ten times more likely to die earlier than their peers from the richest fifth. The poor are more likely to be unhealthy, despite a fairly even distribution in the quality of healthcare between different wealth groups.
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Disability and frailty are common problems for the elderly. Those who are ill experience ageing very differently from those who are well. There are 75-year-old joggers and 75-year-olds who are very frail. Frailty is a condition associated with ageing whose symptoms include weight loss, decreased muscle mass and strength, weakness, lack of energy and reduced motor performance. The condition seems to spring from a general weakening of the body, including the skeletal, muscular, blood and hormonal systems. The most commonly used measures of disability are reports of problems with the basic activities of daily living such as mobility, looking after oneself by preparing meals, shopping, managing money and taking medication. While disability indicates loss of function, frailty indicates instability and the risk of loss of function. The frail person is at increased risk of disability and death from minor external stresses. Frailty may also be identified by particular clinical consequences such as frequent falls, incontinence or confusion. In many cases a single factor, such as undetected cardiovascular disease, can be the reason why people become frail. Instead of having classic symptoms such as a heart attack or a stroke, people may have partly blocked blood vessels in the brain or the legs, the kidneys or the heart, which can result in exhaustion or mental confusion or weakness or a slow walking pace. It has been found that those people who had a positive outlook on life were significantly less likely to become frail.
As we age, our cells become less efficient and our bodies become less able to carry out their normal functions. Muscles lose strength, hearing and vision become less acute, reflex times slow down, lung capacity decreases, and the heart’s ability to pump blood may be affected. In addition, the immune system weakens, making it less able to fight infection and disease. Heart pumping giving maximum oxygen consumption declines about 10 per cent every ten years in men, and in females a bit less; maximum breathing capacity declines about 40 per cent between ages 20 and 70; the brain shrinks and loses some cells; kidneys become less efficient and the bladder gets smaller; muscle mass decreases by about 20 per cent between 30 and 70 years, though exercise reduces this; and bone mineral is lost from age 35; sight may decline from 40 and hearing declines when older. These changes in our bodies with age are not due to ill health but are, alas, normal, and they can cause health problems.
Once adults reach 40, they start to lose just over 1 per cent of their muscle each year. This could be due to the body’s failure to deliver nutrients and hormones to muscle because of poorer blood supply. Tendons, which connect muscles to bone, and ligaments, which hold joints together, become less elastic and are easier to tear. We also get slower in physical activities, as I know all too well. The good news is that one in five people aged between 65 and 74 are doing recommended levels of exercise. But physical labour can also have negative effects – lawyers and priests over 55 die at lower rates than blacksmiths and ironworkers, and at even lower rates when over 75. Mammalian muscles can regenerate, but in mice the old muscle regenerates poorly. Joining the muscles of old and young mice together resulted in the old muscle regenerating better, and the young a bit worse.

~~You’re Looking Very Well: The Surprising Nature of Getting Old -by- Lewis Wolpert

Day 61 : Book Excerpt : Stalin's General

Of all the Moments of triumph in the life of Marshall Georgy Konstantinovich Zhukov nothing equaled that day in June 1945 when he took the salute at the great Victory Parade in Red Square. Zhukov, mounted on a magnificent white Arabian called Tspeki, rode into the square through the Spassky Gate, the Kremlin on his right and the famous onion domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral directly ahead. As he did so a 1,400-strong orchestra struck up Glinka’s Glory (to the Russian Motherland). Awaiting him were columns of combined regiments representing all the branches of the Soviet armed forces. In the middle of the square Zhukov met Marshal K. K. Rokossovsky, who called the parade to attention and then escorted Zhukov as he rode to each regiment and saluted them.
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Stalin’s choice of Zhukov to lead the parade evoked no comment. He was, after all, Stalin’s deputy supreme commander and widely regarded as the main architect of the Soviet victory over Adolf Hitler’s Germany, a victory that had saved Europe as well as Russia from Nazi enslavement. Newsreel film of the parade that flashed across the world only reinforced Zhukov’s status as the greatest Soviet general of the Second World War.

When the German armies invaded Soviet Russia in summer 1941 it was Zhukov who led the Red Army’s first successful counteroffensive, forcing the Wehrmacht to retreat and demonstrating to the whole world that Hitler’s war machine was not invincible. When Leningrad was surrounded by the Germans in September 1941 Stalin sent Zhukov to save the city from imminent capture. A month later, Stalin recalled Zhukov to Moscow and put him in command of the defense of the Soviet capital. Not only did Zhukov stop the German advance on Moscow, but in December 1941 he launched a counteroffensive that drove the Wehrmacht away from the city and ended Hitler’s hope of subduing the Red Army and conquering Russia in a single Blitzkrieg campaign.

 At the height of the German advance south Zhukov played a central role in masterminding the Soviet counteroffensive at Stalingrad in November 1942—an encirclement operation that trapped 300,000 German troops in the city. In July 1943 he followed that dazzling success with a stunning victory in the great armored clash at Kursk—a battle that saw the destruction of the last remaining reserves of Germany’s panzer power. In November 1943 cheering crowds welcomed Zhukov as he and the future Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev drove into the recaptured Ukrainian capital of Kiev. In June 1944 Zhukov coordinated Operation Bagration—the campaign to liberate Belorussia from German occupation. Bagration brought the Red Army to the gates of Warsaw and the capture of the Polish capital in January 1945 and marked the beginning of the Vistula-Oder operation—an offensive that took Zhukov’s armies through Poland, into eastern Germany, and to within striking distance of Berlin. In April 1945 Zhukov led the final Soviet assault on Berlin. The ferocious battle for the German capital cost the lives of 80,000 Soviet soldiers but by the end of April Hitler was dead and the Soviet flag flew over the ruins of the Reichstag. It was Zhukov who formally accepted Germany’s unconditional surrender on May 9, 1945.

Following Zhukov’s triumphant parade before the assembled legions of the Red Army, Navy, and Air Force in June 1945 he seemed destined for an equally glorious postwar career as the Soviet Union’s top soldier and in March 1946 he was appointed commander-in-chief of all Soviet ground forces. However, within three months Zhukov had been sacked by Stalin and banished to the command of the Odessa Military District.

The ostensible reason for Zhukov’s dismissal was that he had been disloyal and disrespectful toward Stalin and claimed too much personal credit for victory in the Great Patriotic War, as the Soviets called it. In truth, Zhukov’s loyalty to Stalin was beyond question.
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In February 1947 he was expelled from the Communist Party Central Committee on grounds that he had an “antiparty attitude.” Zhukov was horrified and he pleaded with Stalin for a private meeting with the dictator to clear his name. Stalin ignored him and the anti-Zhukov campaign continued. In June 1947 Zhukov was censured for giving the singer Lidiya Ruslanova a military medal when she had visited Berlin in August 1945. Shortly after, Ruslanova and her husband, General V. V. Krukov, were arrested and imprisoned. “In 1947 I feared arrest every day,” recalled Zhukov later, “and I had a bag ready with my underwear in it.”
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In October 1957 Zhukov was accused of plotting to undermine the role of the Communist Party in the armed forces. Among Zhukov’s most active accusers were many of the same generals and marshals he had served with during the war. Khrushchev sacked Zhukov as minister of defense and in March 1958 he was retired from the armed forces at the relatively young age of sixty-one.

During the remainder of the Khrushchev era Zhukov suffered the same fate of excision from the history books he had experienced during his years of exile under Stalin. In 1960, for example, the party began to publish a massive multivolume history of the Great Patriotic War that barely mentioned Zhukov while greatly exaggerating Khrushchev’s role. Another expression of Zhukov’s disgrace was his isolation from the outside world. When American author Cornelius Ryan visited the USSR in 1963 to research his book on the battle of Berlin, Zhukov was the only Soviet marshal he was prohibited from seeing.
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In October 1964, however, Khrushchev was ousted from power and there began a process of rehabilitating Zhukov as a significant military figure. Most notably, the Soviet press began to publish Zhukov’s articles again, including his accounts of the battles of Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk, and Berlin.
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When Zhukov’s memoirs were published in April 1969 it was in a handsome edition with colored maps and hundreds of photographs, including some from Zhukov’s personal archive. The Soviet public was wildly enthusiastic about the memoirs. The initial print run of 300,000 soon sold out and millions more sales followed, including hundreds of thousands in numerous translations. The memoirs quickly became—and remain—the single most influential personal account of the Great Patriotic War.

Zhukov’s triumph in the battle for the historical memory of the Great Patriotic War was not one that he lived to savor. By the time a revised edition of his memoirs was issued in 1974 he was dead. In 1968 Zhukov had suffered a severe stroke from which he never really recovered. His health problems were exacerbated by the stress of his second wife, Galina, suffering from cancer. When she died in November 1973 at the age of forty-seven, Zhukov’s own health deteriorated rapidly and he passed away aged seventy-seven in the Kremlin hospital in June 1974.

Zhukov’s funeral was the biggest such occasion in the Soviet Union since the death of Stalin. As Zhukov lay in state in the Central House of the Soviet army in Moscow thousands came to pay their respects. When his ashes were interred in the Kremlin wall on June 21 the chief pallbearer was party general secretary Leonid Brezhnev and at the memorial service that followed the main speaker was Minister of Defense Marshal A. A. Grechko.

~~Stalin's General- The Life of Georgy Zhukov -by- Geoffrey Roberts