Accidental Blogger

A general interest blog

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Category: History

  • Bangladesh 1971 (Omar)

    Revisiting Bangla Desh 1971 by Nadir Ali on Tuesday, December 7, 2010 at 7:14pm I served as a young captain and major in Dhaka and Chittagong and then as second in command and later as commander of 3 Commando Battalion , in the fateful 1971 .I was there from early April to early Oct . We were…

  • Bombed in Karachi (Omar)

    Bombing in Karachi :  Washington Post.  A group of terrorists was able to get together and attack a major police facility with automatic weapons and a huge truck bomb. Obviously, these are not isolated disgruntled individuals taking revenge for the latest drone attack. They are well organized, well trained and well supplied with arms, ammunition, technical…

  • Lahore: Another Place, Another Time (Omar)

    Salma Mahmud has written a fabulous article about Lahore as it used to be before partition drove a stake through its heart in 1947; focusing on the life of Rai Bahadur Kanhayia Lal, an engineer and polymath who left his mark on Lahore and wrote one of the earliest histories of Punjab, as well as…

  • What was malt liquor? (Andrew Rosenblum)

    When a Detroit minister named Mayowa Lisa Reynolds went to her City Council last summer to complain about malt liquor advertising, she came prepared.The minister had conducted a survey in which she found a Colt .45 billboard in every square mile of the city. She looked in the nearby, majority white suburbs of Plymouth and Royal…

  • Churchill’s Secret War – An Appreciation of Madhusree Mukerjee (Narayan)

    Search for 'Graham Greene' on the Internet and you will have to wade through a whole lot of hits on the actor of the same name;  look up 'Distant Thunder' and most of the links lead to the Hollywood movie of the VietNam war.  Read Adam Gopnik's review of new books on Churchill and you…

  • Churchill: a hero to the west and a brute elsewhere

    Ahem. At last a western historian has the honesty to face up to what  India, the middle east, Africa and Barack Obama knew all along. In a new biography of Winston Churchill, British historian Richard Toye exposes the rampant racism of the WWII hero so revered in the west for his fight against the spread of fascism in Europe.…

  • By George, those books are late!

    He couldn't tell a lie but he did forget.

  • The famous cliche – that wasn’t what the astronauts said

    Another famous saying from outer space turns out to be not quite what we think it was. "Houston, we have a problem," is a catchall phrase for SNAFUs that happen even outside of Houston but that is not exactly what the Apollo 13 astronauts actually said when they heard a bang aboard the spaceship. In…

  • Who’s buried in Jesus’ tomb?

    Here is an alternate view of Jesus' resurrection. This story makes its rounds every year around Easter in one form or the other and it is not really as new as the BBC report makes it out to be. I had heard it many times as a child in India. The reason why the Rozabal shrine has only recently been getting attention…

  • Thé, Chai, Tea: flavors of populist uprisings (Narayan)

    The right wing Tea Party movement has come up a couple of times in our recent discussions. Narayan reflects on similar popular uprisings elsewhere. In an op-ed piece in the New York Times titled The Tea Party Last Time, Prof. Robert Zaretsky recalls a time in France when populist anger led to the rise of…

  • Sepia Tinted India

    I have been meaning to write about the Tea Party of American politics for some time. But the ever escalating ridiculousness of the Tea Partiers' bald faced lies and innuendos is so maddening that it has kept me from composing a coherent post. Perhaps more on that later. Instead of High Noon at the GOP sponsored High Tea, let…

  • Walking in our neighbor’s shoes

    A sobering historical perspective on Haiti by Morgan Meis of The Smart Set and 3 Quarks Daily.