At The Edge

As Vice President of the Interim  Government  he visited the North- West  Frontier Province in 1946 in the company of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, 'the Frontier Gandhi', who shielded him from pelting by some goondas. From 'Jawaharlal Nehru in pictures', Edited by D.G. Tendulkar, 14 November 1964. This was the year that saw  Ghaffar Khan and Nehru getting attacked at Malakand Fort. This was the year which saw ' mass serial bombardment' in certain parts of  Wazirtstan as  punitive action . This was also the year of  kidnappings  and ransom.  [More about the scene in NWFP in 1946-47 here] -0- "In 1938 he was talking about her in an exotic setting before a strange audience and in an unexpected context. He was somewhere amidst the barren hills of the North Western Frontier, where a sniper was expected to be hiding behind each rock., and he was addressing a meetng of the supposedly wild and unruly tribes who were being accuse...

If any people choose to think of me, then I should like them to say: 'This was the man who, with all his mind and heart, loved India and the Indian people. And they, in turn, were indulgent to him and gave him their love most abundantly and extravagantly.' Sir, please stop making extravagant and abundant appearances in Newspapers on your death anniversary. -0-

From year 1979.  From year 1982. -0- At least , we could have picked a more interesting topic. How does NCERT deal with this topic? Maybe in another decade of so we will have public discussions on the issue. Of course, triggered by a controversy. Cartoon caricaturing Ambedkar's decision to resign from the Law Ministry over the failure to implement the Hindu Code Bill. Shankar's Weekly, October 7, 1951. From the book 'The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India' by Anupama Rao. Update: Funniest thing. I just realized that the caption 'Note the use of Hindu themes to represent what was, in fact, Ambedkar's challenge to Hindu hegemony.' is essentially wrong and it miss appropriates symbols. The obvious reference that Shankar was making in the cartoon was to an important scene in the story of Buddha, his renunciation....

Pandit Nehru on his Birthday in U.S.A. , 1961 At a children's gathering in Bombay, 1954 Showing his skill with cane at a performance by traditional swordsmen Carrying a Samurai Sword. Visit to a Japanese Film Studio, 1957  Squatting on the threshold to the Banteay Srei temple in Indo-China, 1954 -0-

Throwing a pillow at some inattentive colleague during the debate, Avadi Congress, 1955. This is my new favorite Nehru photo (a fine addition to my Nehru collection ). Came across it in a picture book on Nehru from year 1964.

Sometime back, an interesting query from someone: Ritu Nanda's book about her father, 'Raj Kapoor: speaks' has (above given) photograph of Nehru with Dilip Kumar, Dev Anand and Raj Kapoor. It mentions the year as 1968, which is definitely wrong since Nehru died in 1964. The image is missing in 2nd edition of the book. When was the photograph taken and who took it? I get all kinds of queries and requests, most of them next to impossible. This one too was impossible. Figuring out the date turned out to be easy. Google image search (that now lets you search the web for images using as reference an image that may be sitting on your system) lead to this fine gallery where the image had a name ending with 1958 (I try to follow the same convention while uploading images). So the year was 1958. But the real difficult part was finding the name of the photographer. In a case like this finding the culprit is next to impossible. I kept the case as unsolved. Then re...

There is no other way to put it: I am obsessed with the fortunes of this famous family of Kashmiri immigrants. At the start of any of their biographies when I read the line,'their ancestors originally came from Kashmir', the apathetic banality of history, the sympathies of its readers and objectivity of its writers, its complex plots and its simply complex actors, its generalizations, all cut through to offer a message: at best, this is what awaits. I know people who have these same visions, afraid, they don't even acknowledge it. It makes them do terrible, inane, things even as they do their slow walk to rendezvous with past that is future. -0-