Freedom at Midnight

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One of the great woman adventurers of the 20th century, she turned her back on Victorian society to study at Oxford and travel the world and became the chief architect of British policy in the Middle East after World War I. Over four prior book collaborations, Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre honed a winning formula for accessible, page-turning popular histories: focus on a narrow, dramatic moment in time, using a restricted point of view. From renowned journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski comes this intimate account of his years in the field, traveling for the first time beyond the Iron Curtain to India, China, Ethiopia, and other exotic locales. The authors misrepresent Indian women and their role in Indian society, the same way British empire had done so.

The fabled India of the maharajas, with their palaces and harems, their gold-caparisoned elephants and their glittering private armies—the India of Kipling’s legendary army, with its young British officers commanding troops of a dozen races, religions, and castes—the India of tiger hunts and pigsticking, of sadhus and holy men— the India that was the heart and soul of an empire—underwent a violent transformation into the new India of Gandhi and Nehru, precursor of the Third World. Virtually overnight, millions just picked up what they could carry and migrated either north or south depending on their religion. This book solely focuses on the transfer of power from the British Empire to the Indians and the by-product of independence – the Painful Partition all this while I have been seeing the partition of India from a different point of view. It had epitomized the Victorian ideal of India better than anything else -dark, plucky soldiers staunchly loyal to their distant empress, led by doughty young Englishmen, straight arrows all, steady under the Pathans’ fire, good at games, stern but devoted fathers to their men, chaps who could hold their liquor in the mess.

It was during the carnival of 1913 that a young Stalin arrived in Vienna on a mission that would launch him into the upper echelon of Russian revolutionaries, and it was here that he first collided with Trotsky. India and Pakistan were both hard at work rewriting their own histories and much archival data was impossible to find. A whole generation of young men who might have patrolled the Frontier, administered the lonely districts or galloped their polo ponies down the long maidans was left behind in Flanders fields.

If you watch the movie Gandhi, and read this book, you have pretty much got the history of the time covered and a good understanding of the politics of the time. It's probably the most easily readable book on the subject, which explains the insane amount of popularity it had enjoyed and still enjoys.Authors proudly mention Mountbatten's link to the Czars, one of the worst dictators in the history of the world, to establish his credibility. The Muslims who wanted a separate Muslim state went to newly formed Pakistan and the people who wanted a separate Muslim state went to the newly formed Pakistan and the people who wanted to be in a secular state remained in India or came to India, as simple as that. Because of these limitations this book is a place to start, not the place to stop in any serious study of South Asia, but reviewers who have suggested that the authors are apologists for the British are dead wrong. Very rarely comes a defining moment that changes history to the extent of being un-recognizable and very rarely comes a book that changes your life, perceptions and everything that you presumed to be true once and for all. The focus tends to be on the ideas rather than on the authors in Vedic literature, they are largely religious in nature, reflecting the world view and spiritual preoccupations of ancient India.

It [Swathanthryam Ardharathriyil] may not be the perfect jailbreak movie, but it is arguably one of the best jail movies ever made in Malayalam. Cruelty and dimension; a land of past accomplishment and present concern, whose future was compromised by problems more taxing than those confronting any other assembly of humans on earth. Through this piece, the author-duo have delved into some of the darker sides of the prominent figures of that era and the whole populace as a whole.

It covers the six months prior to and six months after 8/15/47, when India and Pakistan gained independence from Britain. Every Sikh and Hindu officer spoke, often with tears in his eyes, to bid farewell to the Moslem Colonel Mohammed Idriss, who had led them through some of the bitterest fighting of World War II. Leon Uris magnificently portrays the birth of a new nation in the midst of enemies - the beginning of an earthshaking struggle for power. Readers in Pakistan may find it particularly off-putting as it gives a very negative portrayal of Pakistan's founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah and essentially is an argument against partition. After all bureaucrats and military generals, and all those people are supposed to come from a royal background such as Mountbatten's and Churchill's.

With a timeline that moves from seven years before to a decade after 1984, the book strives to answer critical questions that continue to linger till today. While he captures the tragedies that have repeatedly befallen Africa's peoples, French also opens our eyes to the immense possibility that lies in Africa's complexity, diversity, and myriad cultural strengths.And amused I was with the arrogance with which the prose is written and the misrepresentation of history has been perpetrated through these pages. The British were a race that "God had destined to rule the Indians" and had acquired India "naturally. It is also the story of a Sikh boy and a Muslim girl whose love endures and transcends the ravages of war. and in fact, Cyril Radcliffe, the barrister whom he had tasked with drawing up the boundaries (who had never even been to India before this, by the way), submitted his final draft on 9 August–just five days before the event.