World At War - III

Saw episodes through 24 since my last post on the subject. The episodes covered the genocide, the endloesung or the Final Solution to the Judenfrage, or the Jewish Question or Problem. In its distinct, crisp and accurate manner, the episode took us through Anne Frank's house in Holland, to the Nuremberg Laws of 1938, read out by Goering in the Reichstag, with Hitler and the NSDAP leadership looking over(the videos obviously accompanied by Laurence Olivier's baritone voice), the kristallnacht of November '38, then moving over to the rise of Himmler from a small time horticulturist to the earlier years of the Munich Beer Hall Putsch, the formation of the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler and marginalization of the SA, the outbreak of the war and the commencement of the death machines - starting with the Dachau model camp, to other innumerable camps - each surrounded by ancilliary posts using forced labor to oil the war engine. Episode 20, the one focussing on the genocide, showed some morbid, graphic video clips of the camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald and other places such as Mauthausen and Madjanek where initially the Einsatzgruppe shot their victims by the thousands. The video was peppered with interviews of Karl Wolff, Himmler's adjutant, many jewish survivors, other SS soldiers and leaders, some of Hitler's staff like Heinz Linge and Traudl Junge, etc... Particularly interesting was Wolff's witnessing Himmler's visit to Auschwitz and witnessing the slaughter of some of the jews. Apparently, a jewish shooting resulted in some of the brain matter getting splattered all over Himmler's coat, which made him turn all pale and green with sickness. Wolff tried to help keep his boss maintain his cool. Some of the subsequent measures to the Judenfrage included the Wannssee Conference - attended by the likes of Eichmann and Mengele and chaired by Heydrich to expedite the final solution, since each country acquired added to the count of jews and other "unlikeable" elements into the lebensraum, and also because extermination by shooting had its effect on the Waffen SS units and that it was not very efficient. And then came the Zyklon B enabled gas chambers - stills showing naked women and men lined up, children separated from their mothers, piles of belongings and personal effects - including prosthetics, wigs, actual hair, teeth...there was also a clip on the medical experiments.A very moving bit, something I was not aware of earlier, was that a number of the inmates, albeit a very small number, committed suicide by jumping onto the electric wires surrounding the camps. Pictures of some of those people was so moving, since it captured the expressions of helplessness and despair.. A very interesting bit was that most of the jews in the Occupied areas (Netherlands and other scandinavian areas) were told that they were being taken for resettlement to the east, and the video clips actually show a good number of affluent or middle class jews paying to be transported first!!! The very thought, the scenes and clips of the death camps, the death marches, still sends shivers down my spine - even after reading so much on the subject. To think that rational men, ably armed with the latest that technology, or science could offer, would be no different than the Hutus and Tutsis of Rwanda and Burundi in their bestiality and hatred towards other "inferior" fellow human beings or the untermenschen. The episode ended with a scene of the dead and decomposing in the liberated camps, and a particularly stirring colored video clip of large bulldozers picking up piles of skeletal, naked bodies of jewish victims of the Holocaust. Apparently, post the surrender of Germany, civilians were forced to visit the camps and see for themselves how their beloved NSDAP resettled the jewish people. Some of the people are shown reacting to the sight with utter horror. Olivier says in the accompanied narration that apparently a mayor of a german town, and his wife, after going through such a visit, returned back to their place, and committed suicide - out of utter horror, disgust and shame. Its been about 63 years and already we are seeing a revival of neo-nationalistic and in some cases, anti-semitic sentiments in many parts of the world.
The other episodes dealt with the Pacific theater - something that I am not as interested as perhaps the Asian people of the South East must be - the Pacific theater and Imperial Japan's surrender. Episode 24 is on the Bomb. It has clips of Robert Oppenheimer giving his famous speech quoting the Gita - the "I am become Death, the destroyer of the world" one. Priceless video clips of the american operations across the Pacific islands including Saipan, Guam, Tawara, the Palau islands, Phillipines, Iwo Jima, Okinawa and finally the Flying Fortresses flattening Japanese cities with tons and tons of bombs. Japan was almost at its knees and its envoys pleading in front of Molotov which was denied as Russia declared war on Japan over Manchuria in mid 1945. The West, after the German surrender, was increasingly scared and hostile towards the intentions of USSR, and rightly so. While the USSR justified its occupation of the "satellite" countries (many of whom, like Poland, felt betrayed by the Allies' not coming to their aid), its declaration of war on Japan must have rung alarm bells across the US, since wherever the USSR waged war, it occupied some or all the territories. And communism coming so close to the US would truly have been unsettling. It would also have given them unprecedented hold over a huge part of the globe, as the Japanese had occupied much of China and the Indo-China. Truman and Byrnes decided to drop the Bombs without informing any of their allies to gain greater bargaining power. The Cold War must have sent its first wave of chilly, cold winds across at this time, cold enough for the US to raise hell in Japan. Some of the Japanese ministers and policymakers interviewed in episodes 23 and 24 mention the sentiments in Japan even when everything was lost. Apparently, even after the two bombs were dropped, 99 of every 100 Japanese people wanted the war to continue, since they feared for their emperor and believed in fighting to the last man. Apparently, even a 1000 atomic bombs would not have shaken their resolve. But the emperor going on radio, informing the people of their decision to surrender to the Allies on Potsdam terms, really took the people aback. The video clips show people crying and the general reaction. What is ironic is the Japanese considering the Americans brutal - yes, 20th century warfare introduced a different kind of warfare unknown to the practitioners of conventional warfare of the preceding centuries - but the Japanese calling Americans brutal?? After Nanking? Just because it was mano-a-mano and not wholesale bombardment? Haven't people across ages realized what they ask for when they wage wars? ...What definitely was not excusable was the use of the atomic bombs...but I guess it was necessary for the world to realize what it could do and what the consequences of an atomic war could be. Had it not been, it would just have been a classified test in the Mojave desert unknown to people, who would have invented the bomb (and perhaps used it) anyways. The rest is history. But I believe, what is unnerving is that history repeats, and rather, has to repeat itself. People start forgetting the affects of war, death and destruction and are forced to experience it first hand when they reach their heights of hubris and arrogance, as the citizens of Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany realized. I feel most for the victims of the warring nations - those who had nothing to do with things, but became unwilling parties. The Occupied countries in Europe and Asia. The Jews , gypsies, romas, poles..the Chinese, the Malayans and the Russians who must have died in such huge numbers. Somehow the feeling is not the same for the thousands of Indians who got killed when Islamic invaders came into the country through the ages - partly because we don't seem to be learning from anything. We still choose to be divided along caste and religious lines. Reading any journal or book on India in the 19th century or earliers seems as if it all happened only recently. Nothing like the homogenous people in other countries who atleast have some common beliefs, have some sense of integrity and propriety. We always remained vulnerable to attacks and reacted to each attack with emotion rather than as a cohesive force. We are a spiritual society, but there is nothing spiritual about being a divided lot...heard we may have an exclusive women-only IIT. Soon there could be a Muslim IIT, a Hindu IIT, etc..and then the communal riots across...hmmm....an endless debate, this.

Kidney woes...again...:(

Its been ten years since I had my pelvic-ureteral junction obstruction operated upon, and more than five years since I last got a "DTPS test" done..and now seems like the old problem is surfacing again..heard that some kind of fibrosis sets in often after a PUJ obstruction surgery, which may result in a secondary obstruction , or the formation of stone, etc. In either case, it may lead to urinary tract infection and may damage the kidney (already distended by as much as 10mm)...:((

Busy being Scrabulous..

Heck no - This is no take on The Eagles' latest hit, but of our getting hooked on to www.scrabulous.com, the addictive online Scrabble game. Too bad that it got pulled out of Facebook. Got to know scores of weird words such as kern, wert, qat, and tons of hours poured into innumerable matches with people across the globe. Scrabble couldn't have been more fun than this. Wish the Agarwalla bros were less greedy for the sake of the fans and sold it to Hasbro/Mattel in Jan when they offered them $10 mill....ah well...game on!

Max Mueller's Cambridge Lectures (late 19th cent.)

Dug from Project Gutenburg, a collection of lectures delivered by Friedrich Max Mueller,the eminent 19th century philologist and indologist, to a class of young Cambridge students who had just passed their Indian Civil Services examinations, What I read was an eye-opener. And strangely, the books and accounts I have read of other "indophiles" and Raj writers often smack of racial prejudices that it seemed that this document was a modern work and not something written /delivered 120-130 odd years back. To quote a passage from his second lecture on the stereotypes westerners carried of Indians:
"I believe there is nothing more disheartening to any high-minded youngman than the idea that he will have to spend his life among humanbeings whom he can never respect or love--natives, as they are called,not to use even more offensive names--men whom he is taught toconsider as not amenable to the recognized principles of self-respect,uprightness, and veracity, and with whom therefore any community ofinterests and action, much more any real friendship, is supposed to beout of the question.
So often has that charge of untruthfulness been repeated, and sogenerally is it now accepted, that it seems almost Quixotic to try tofight against it.
Nor should I venture to fight this almost hopeless battle, if I werenot convinced that such a charge, like all charges brought against awhole nation, rests on the most flimsy induction, and that it hasdone, is doing, and will continue to do more mischief than anythingthat even the bitterest enemy of English dominion in India could haveinvented. If a young man who goes to India as a civil servant or as amilitary officer, goes there fully convinced that the people whom heis to meet with are all liars, liars by nature or by nationalinstinct, never restrained in their dealings by any regard for truth,never to be trusted on their word, need we wonder at the feelings ofdisgust with which he thinks of the Hindus, even before he has seenthem; the feelings of distrust with which he approaches them, and thecontemptuous way in which he treats them when brought into contactwith them for the transaction of public or private business? When suchtares have once been sown by the enemy, it will be difficult to gatherthem up. It has become almost an article of faith with every Indiancivil servant that all Indians are liars; nay, I know I shall never beforgiven for my heresy in venturing to doubt it."
The best passage of this lecture is this:
"Now, quite apart from India, I feel most strongly that every one ofthese international condemnations is to be deprecated, not only forthe sake of the self-conceited and uncharitable state of mind fromwhich they spring, and which they serve to strengthen and confirm, butfor purely logical reasons also, namely for the reckless and slovenlycharacter of the induction on which such conclusions rest. Because aman has travelled in Greece and has been cheated by his dragoman, orbeen carried off by brigands, does it follow that all Greeks, ancientas well as modern, are cheats and robbers, or that they approve ofcheating and robbery? And because in Calcutta, or Bombay, or Madras,Indians who are brought before judges, or who hang about thelaw-courts and the bazaars, are not distinguished by an unreasoningand uncompromising love of truth, is it not a very vicious inductionto say, in these days of careful reasoning, that all Hindus areliars--particularly if you bear in mind that, according to the latestcensus, the number of inhabitants of that vast country amounts to twohundred and fifty-three millions. Are all these two hundred andfifty-three millions of human beings to be set down as liars, becausesome hundreds, say even some thousands of Indians, when they arebrought to an English court of law, on suspicion of having committed atheft or a murder, do not speak the truth, the whole truth, andnothing but the truth? Would an English sailor, if brought before adark-skinned judge, who spoke English with a strange accent, bow downbefore him and confess at once any misdeed that he may have committed;and would all his mates rush forward and eagerly bear witness againsthim, when he had got himself into trouble?"
The last sentence, said almost 130 years back - how many times do we see this even today? How many times do we hear about a western nation insisting on extraditing a westerner commiting crime in a third-world country of dark-skinned people (and judges) to ensure a "fair" trial? (well, the pun obviously intended)...hmmm...guess somethings can never change. But I thank God that the world has its fair share of Max Muellers..

News of a Kidnapping

Started reading Marquez's The News of a Kidnapping, a journalistic account (in Marquez's inimitable and magical style of narration) of a string of actual kidnappings of some journalists and high profile people in Colombia during the height of the Cartel menace there. I have just finished 45 odd pages of the almost 300 page book and have absolutely fallen in love with the gripping tale. Its a departure from the other books I have read of GGM - The General in his Labyrinth, Chronicles of a Death Foretold. But even then, you get a sense of the amazing interweaving of classic magic realism with a real life drama unfolding in the avenidos and casas of Bogota, The Extraditables (the body of drug dealers most prone to getting extradited to the US, headed by the one and only Pablo Escobar) who seek recourses such as kidnappings as a measure to weigh upon the political leadership headed by Gaviria to change the Extradition policies of Colombia. For me, the setting holds a special place in my heart since I was a part of the team working for an IT project for Banco Concasa spA, a Bogotan bank a long time back - in 1998-1999, and we were told that our onshore personnel were strictly instructed to use the shuttle provided to them from their hotel to the office premises and not venture anywhere else. Bogota was, like Manila and Baghdad, a dangerous place to be in during the Cali cartel menace. And we could easily have been mistaken for locals, with similar physical features....I though am quite intrigued by South America and would love to make a trip to all those exotic and esoteric places rich in Mayan, Aztec, Incan and the myriad other cultures that have formed the rather strange (and quite India like) culture there....coming back to the book, I guess through the writings of Borges, Marquez, Fuentes, Paz, and many others , we get to sneak into that unique culture with a lot more awe because through their eyes, it looks all the more magical...

Our final Olympic medal Tally for 2008

Its finally over for us and the results are there for all of us - 1 Gold, 2 Bronzes. Thank you, so much, Abhinav, for atleast increasing viewership of the Games this part of the world. Hope we move from the All Limp Picks to some better picks next time (London,2012)...

Sun xVM Virtualization and Ubuntu Hardy Heron installation today

Downloaded and installed the Sun xVM VirtualBox virtualization software today on my office machine and installed Ubuntu 8.04 "Hardy Heron" on it. Working like a dream. I recall working on the Apple Mac OSX Tiger's terminal window and using the sudo bash commands (and that had actually taken me by surprise since I had never known earlier that the Mac is UNIX based or has a kernel support of some kind)...

December 21, 2012

For the past few days, a lot of our news channels have been beaming all kinds of news stories into our homes. One of them is the alleged Doomsday forecast of the end of the world as we know it on December the 21st, 2012. I checked it on the net and found many sites, including Wikipedia entries on the subject. Apparently, this date is the last date of the Meso-american calendar that was used by the ancient Mayans. The end of the day does not indicate the end of the planet, but the end of a major epoch, and a major upheaval across civilizations, perhaps leading to major changes to life on Earth. However, seems like post Y2K, not many people are very serious about doomsday forecasts. But still, in many pockets of America, it seems, people have again started stocking food, duct tapes and what-not. As if these things could actually help people fight natural or climatic changes (as professed by the 12/21/12 followers, there would be major geological changes and some are even claiming polar reversal - without elaborating on the causes or the source of energy to effect such a radical change)....and as so common across the US, there are tons of merchandise available (really wonder what makes people buy such stuff - if they really believe in this stuff, its just 3-4 years for them (or us, rather) to live. What, therefore, is the big idea behind building a whole, new merchandise industry behind this date?)...

Delerium's You & I

Been awake quite late today - to finish off a presentation (not quite finished, but I guess I would wrap it up tomorrow in office). Listened to some chill-out ambient tracks and absolutely fell in love with Delerium's You & I. The voice of Zoe Johnston is so captivating in this track. I am yet to hear the other Delerium tracks that I've got - just been hooked on to this one , and of course, Serenity..Listened to this number continuously for atleast 4-5 times before shutting off my laptop..

World At War - 2

Saw a few more episodes this week of my favorite series of a long long time - World At War. At times I think that prior to the Internet age, the most intellectually stimulating things had invariably been created in the land of the Queen - be it the Oxford English Dictionary, or the Encyclopaedia Brittanica, or the Wisden Almanac, or this series...The episodes that I saw, post my last entry, included Germany's Unternehmen Barbarossa, the absolutely wonderful episode 10 - on the kriegesmarine's U-Boats. What has fascinated me so much has been the footages of some of the top Nazi and British characters and their interviews..be it Grossadmiral and subsequent Reichspraesident, Karl Doenitz, or the Reichsminister for Armaments, Albert Speer, or the last surviving awardee of the Knight's Cross with Oakleaves, Swords and Diamonds, Adolf Galland..I could continue writing pages after pages about the series, and about the absolutely impeccable quality of the documentary...

62nd Independence Day today

Today is India's 62nd Independence Day - a day spent quite lazily at home - with some net browsing, some TV channel surfing and watching some movies. And ofcourse, talking with parents and mulling over the grim news of the past few weeks - of the untimely deaths of the sons of two of our close family friends...
All the news channels were busy debating about our political degeneration over the years - politicization of religion, the Kashmir crisis, Musharraf's imminent ouster and his probable options now. Michael Phelps' umpteenth Olympic gold and our umpteenth loss in Cricket (and our eternal optimism on the Olympics front...am I being too cynical? Oh no..I have been to some of our National sporting facilities and know for sure that anyone coming out of those places cannot even compete with our neighboring countries let alone qualify for the Olympics) constitutes our sports news. Still remember the 1988 exhibition soccer match between Mohun Bagan and Brazil's Sao Paolo that I happened to see from the Jawaharlal Nehru stadium stands in Delhi..did we lose 20-0, or was it 25-0?? The best part was that I was caught on the TV happily sleeping with my mouth gaping open and apparently the commentator said that my expression said it all about our state in soccer..:) Well, all this is still a much better option than listening to some inane celeb gossip that hogs our other channels. Fortunately, atleast for now, our entertainment channels haven't been able to create products like Britney or Paris Hilton yet..we still have much better things to do than to track the number of times any of our female celebs got pregnant..and I really dread that day when we have our own local versions of those bimbettes..Today's also Anup bhaisaab's birthday. Tomorrow is Rakhi and I'm waiting for Bonnie's rakhi to arrive. We may end up the day tomorrow at Ajay bhai's place...

The Muttley and Dastardly series over the weekend

Last weekend I saw the Muttley and Dastardly series that Nilu shared with me a while back. Absolutely love this duo, especially Muttley (who also is/or bears a strong resemblance with Mumbly). He absolutely reminds me of our incorrigible Chaman, with the same shaggy look and the protruding lower canine teeth. I really wish at times that Chaman could snicker like Muttley - the trademark wheezy, asthmatic and vicious sounding laugh - or the trademark rashaffasharashaffasha grumble. And whenever Dastardly asks Muttley in the Stop the Pigeon series if he wanted a medal for his rescuing efforts, Muttley responds with an enthusiastic "Yeah Yeah Yeah" ..:)...hats off to Iwao Takamoto for creating these characters - and the other characters like Penelope Pitstop (I love the Hooded Claw and his "I'll get you Penelope")..:-\

India's first individual Olympic gold...finally!

My early morning trip to work got started with a pleasant news - that Abhinav Bindra, one of our rifle shooters, bagged the first individual gold in the 108 years of India's tryst with Olympics. Finally! Someone! Our nation of a billion people now has someone to look up to. Anyways, I should not be talking all this. Sports as a profession is a tabooland for most of us Indians. We are trained to man the "Backoffice" of the world. And you can't be caught playing at work, can you? Well, there are exceptions - Rajyavardhan Rathore got us an individual Bronze last Olympics. So what if Jamaica's got more medals than us? Does Jamaica have the most expensive sporting federation on their soil (our Board of Control for Cricket in India)? Who cares about performance -who cares if we are a bunch of underachievers when it comes to team games? For us, it takes only one guy to do something - add more (even two doesn't help - look at our Tennis wunderkinds - Paes and Bhupathi), and we have squabbles, politics, tons of endorsements, aspirations to become cine-stars - anything but being good sportspersons. Our brightest stars are solo achievers - Vishy Anand in Chess (can't we have an Olympics Chess event ever??), Rathore and now Abhinav in rifle shooting, Sania in Tennis, Padukone in Badminton, Ramesh Krishnan in Tennis...(can't count many there too...ah well!!)..Hey, when would Age Of Empires get into the Olympics??

Syberia

I played Benoit Sokal's eponymous Syberia. An epic of an Adventure game, its an absolute treat just to watch each frame of the game. The details are superb, and we travel from esoteric, sleepy alpine hamlets like Valadilene - ofcourse, after solving very complicated riddles that almost make us a part of those locales - to Barrockstadt, where I am currently at. You are Kate Walker, an American lawyer in the storyline. An acquisition bid by a toy company brings you to an Austrian town of Valadilene, the HQ of the Voralberg family. The town is a beautiful, sleepy town, but surprisingly has 2-3 visible inhabitants. The rest of the inhabitants are automatons - clockwork characters with a soul element added to them, thanks to the genius of Hans Voralberg, a mysterious member of the Voralberg empire. Kate's seemingly routine work gets murkier by the news of the death of Anna, the head of theVoralberg empire, the very day of her arrival at Valadilene (and this is almost where the storyline starts). Her boss, a ruthless Jay Jonah Jameson type character based out of NY, doesn't want her to return without closing the deal. And so, in the absence of Anna, Kate would have to find the mysterious brother, Hans, to complete the deal...and what follows is a very interesting process of clue-finding and investigating and solving, and traveling eastbound - from Valadilene, to Barrockstadt, to many other towns across Russia into Siberia...all amidst an incredibly beautiful setting. A must have game...I am enjoying it more than The Longest Journey and Riven. But I love this genre (not as much as I love RTS games though). I also have another of Benoit Sokal's titles - The Sinking Island..haven't played it much though...

Banzai!

Today I saw the World At War episode 6 - the Pacific theater of the war. The episode beautifully elucidated the build up to the Japanese intrusions in Manchuria - including its quitting the League, its brushes with USSR for the huge coal deposits in Manchuria, and how the imperial army switched directions and moved along the Great Wall into mainland China. What was unique about this war, the Sino Japanese one, was the absolute ruthless and barbaric nature of it. Apparently, even the Nazis were taken aback by the nature of the war. Nanking is quite famous, or rather infamous for this. Apparently, there was this competition between two rival generals of the imperial army to behead as many people as possible and in one day each beheaded hundreds of Nankingians. Peking fell, Shanghai followed. Due to the presence of Europeans who were also there for material benefits, Japan got into the Axis alliance. The episode then took us to the Indo-china region and how they finally got into war with Britain for Malaya and Burma. Britain at that time was fighting on multiple fronts - in Egypt against Mussollini's forces and Rommel's Afrika Korps and also facing the Luftwaffe Blitz. The Japanese advances weaned the Africa units of some of their reinforcements. Rommel could therefore push Wavell's forces east to near Tobruk. The tug of war continued for a while (Episode 8 is about the African wars) in the Middle Eastern/Mediterranean theater. I often use words like "Ging Ming!" with Shveta - meaning "save us!" (or "save me"?)...seems like when little girls were being carted away for persecution in Nanking, some lady in the European occupation areas heard their cries and those cries haunted her for the rest of her life, after she knew what happened to the people there.
To think that all this happened 60-70 years back seems strange. USSR lost more than 25 million people, Germany about 7-8 million. Who does bodycount in poorer countries?...Globally some 40-50 million or more must have perished in those 5 years. And yet we are 7-8 billion people today!!...

Ye Olde Bayeux Tapestry...

The Bayeux Tapestry is a historical artifact, commissioned by Odo de Bayeux ,the half-brother of William the Conqueror, one of the early Norman rulers of England (arguably the earliest)..its a large piece of woven cloth and kept in a museum in Bayeux, Normandy. It reveals a lot about the 11th century customs, and has many stories of bravado woven into the huge tapestry - including folklore, scandals of the time, tales of bravado, intrigue, coronations, whatnot....here's a sample..