Notes of Nagesh

Mohan Guruswamy: .   I saw RRR on Netflix last evening. It was everything I expected it to be. Extremely well made and lavishly mounted. The story was absurd and the distance from reality was of solar proportions. Its abuse of history was vulgar. The early part of the movie is set Hyderabad’s old Adilabad district, populated in those days by mostly Gond Adivasis.    Hyderabad, being a princely state had no British administrators. The only British officer serving in the Nizam’s government was the Revenue Member in the Executive Council. At about the time of the movie it would have been WV Grigson ICS, a man who if anything loved the Gonds. He was the author of the masterful anthropological study “The Maria Gonds of Bastar” (1938), which is still the last word on them. The movie depicts a very cruel and despotic British rule where an English family shanghaies a young Gond girl to Delhi. The first part of the movie is about one of the hero’s (NTR Jr.) who goes to the imperia...

MOHAN GURUSWAMY: History of the Vanquished. In his last days Napoleon Bonaparte, now Britain’s prisoner on the remote island of St.Helena (1815-21) and slowly being poisoned with arsenic wrote to his son Francois, by his second wife the Austrian princess Marie Louise, exhorting him to study history “for that is the only truth!” After Napoleon died Marie Louise answering the call of duty married the Duke of Parma while Francois the titular king of Rome lived in Vienna. One does not know how much history Francois studied in his twenty one years, but one were to go by what was written about his father in Europe soon after Waterloo, he would have discovered that written history is the version of the victor and far from the whole truth. History invariably is written and rewritten to serve the political and ideological cause of the ruling elites. No wonder Winston Churchill said: “Gentlemen, history will be kind to us- we will write it!”  Take Indian history as is being taught in our sch...

Here are 7 lessons on The Twelve Universal Laws of Success: Lesson 1: Desire is the starting point of all achievement . Success begins with desire. If you don't have a strong desire to achieve something, you're unlikely to put in the effort required to make it happen. Take some time to think about what you really want in life and make a commitment to yourself to achieve it. Lesson 2: Faith is the fuel that powers desire. Once you have a strong desire, you need faith to believe that you can achieve it. Faith is not about being sure you will succeed; it's about having the belief that you can overcome any obstacle that comes your way. Lesson 3: Auto-suggestion is the method by which you plant your desire in your subconscious mind. Auto-suggestion is the process of using your thoughts to influence your subconscious mind. By repeatedly telling yourself that you can achieve your goals, you can program your mind to believe it. This can help you to stay motivated and focused, even ...

The right to silence emanates from Article 20(3) of the Indian Constitution, which states that no one can be compelled to be a witness against himself.  The provision gives an accused the right against self-incrimination -- a fundamental canon of law The *right to silence* means that if someone is accused of a crime, they have the right to remain silent and not answer questions or provide information that could be used against them in a court of law. It is based on the fundamental principle that no person can be compelled to be a witness against themselves The act of maintaining silence is an act of speech and expression. Thus, remaining silent while the national anthem is being sung is covered by it.

A MONSTER CALLED WINSTON CHURCHILL. Almost everyday I drive past this stone bungalow in the Bolarum cantonment  called "The Retreat" on which a large sign proudly maintains that Winston Churchill lived here. Our Army is still very proud of its colonial origins but I often think its pride in its antecedents are a bit misplaced. It still has a Plassey Gate in the Cantonment.  Read: "Bengal Famine of 1943 - World War II Affected India Remembering India’s forgotten holocaust  The Bengal Famine of 1943-44 must rank as the greatest disaster in the subcontinent in the 20th century.  Nearly 4 million Indians died because of an artificial famine created by the British government, and yet it gets little more than a passing mention in Indian history books.  What is remarkable about the scale of the disaster is its time span. World War II was at its peak and the Germans were rampaging across Europe, targeting Jews, Slavs and the Roma for extermination.  It took Adolf H...

MOHAN GURUSWAMY: With elections imminent the crisis that Punjab faces is once again not figuring in the political discourse. Punjab can be transformed into a Garden of Eden with an abundance of foods, but the policies of the past have turned it into a costly producer of wheat and rice that is no longer needed. The artificially sustained economy has not only caused over production but has poisoned the soil with excessive fertiliser and pesticide use, and the minds of young people with easily available Pakistani heroin. The likes of Amrinder, Sukhbir Badal, Navjyot Sidhu or Arvind Kejriwal dont have the honesty to tell Punjab the truth. I recall travelling through Punjab in the early 1980s with an English economist. As we drove through the golden fields laden with wheat, and noticing the general lifestyles and carriage of people, I remarked to my companion that if all of India came close to this prosperity, the country would be a major global economy. Those were the times when Punjab was...

What is the right to silence ?

Mohan Guruswamy Ten years ago, today, Manmohan Singh spoke to the media on the looming Modi spectre. He was at his acerbic and pungent best when he commented on the desirability of Narendra Modi as PM and his being a strong man because he presided over "the mass massacre of citizens on the streets of Ahmedabad."  MMS more than once said that history will be more kind to him. How history will judge him is not important to the country? What he did and did not do during his tenure is. He did preside over a decade of unprecedented growth. He also presided over a decade of rampant corruption, few new jobs and a huge flight of capital from the country. On a net basis more went out than came in.  But MMS is right. History will be kind to him nevertheless. History is always kind, unless you are a real monster like Hitler. Why even Stalin and Mao Zedong are enjoying major rehabilitations in Russia and China. PV Narasimha Rao and AB Vajpayee too look burnished and bright now. And look ...

Mohan Guruswamy On January 2, I attended the 150th anniversary celebration of my old school. Mahbub College High School in Secunderabad. It was founded by a clansman, Somasundaram Mudaliar in 1862. A few years later the then Nizam Mahbub Ali Pasha donated 7 acres in Secunderabad where the school now stands and bears his name.  The Mudaliar community in Secunderabad started many other local landmark institutions, like the Keyes High School for girls, and the Prudential Co-op Bank. The Mudaliar community came to Secunderabad with the British Indian Army and provided it with 'dubash' (interpreting) and other services. They also supplied the Cantonment with provisions and were money lenders to the officers and men. (The Chettiars were the money lenders to the East India Company and financed all its wars.) There are still a few Winston Churchill IOU's around. My paternal grandfather came from Nagavedu village near Kanchipuram and established an agency for Imperial Tobacco (now I...

Was it justified for the Bolsheviks to kill the children of Emperor Nicholas II? From a moral standpoint, there was no reason at all. The Bolsheviks could, perhaps, try to justify killing the Tsar, charging him of crimes against the Russian people, or anything like that, but his children couldn’t possibly be blamed of anything. Alexei, for instance, was a sick boy who was not even 14 years old yet. It is so difficult to justify those killings that the Soviets announced the Tsar’s death but tried to hide the information about the children for years. However, if by “justified” you mean from a practical, not a moral standpoint, than it is probably correct to say they had to kill the children. Machiavelli explains this in his book The Prince. Machiavelli says that, if you take a country ruled by an absolute monarch, one step to keep this conquest is to extinguish all the bloodline of the king. If you don’t, than whoever wants to rise against you may take the surviving prince as a unified b...