Reality of Borders: one of the most traumatic partition

 

The Golden Temple , Amritsar where people from all over the world come to bathe in its water , to look at the holy book inside the temple and to experience the holiness of this place.This place is the epicenter of Sikhism. Close by there is another important Sikh place called Kartarpur. It was established by Guru Nanak, founder of Sikhism  500 years ago. It is the place where Guru Nanak spent his last days and it is the 2nd holiest place in Sikhism. For centuries Sikhs were able to make pilgrimage between this place between their heartland but in 1947 a British lawyer drew a border here turning British India into two countries India and Pakistan with the Golden temple on one side and Kartarpur to another side. Thanks to this border India and Sikhs are now cut off with their holy site.

Dera Baba Nanak, India - a platform at the border site where Sikhs can look at their holy place through a telescope which is just 3-4 km away.

In addition to cutting off the two  communities from their sacred sites this border separated families cut across rivers , forests ,farms , etc. we know today this border is heavily fortified with 3000 km plus fence.

This is the story of violence separation, one.  of the most traumatic events of the 20th century.It’s the story of how the hastily drawn line on a map separated one people into two.

The British controlled parts of India for nearly 200 years. In 1947 an massive independent movement was swelling across the subcontinent  and while back in Britain the country was in massive debt after fighting world war 2 and didn’t have resources to hold on to their colony so they started making plans to leave India. British officials thought that a proper transfer of power would be around five years but British leader in charge Lord Mountbatten arrived in early 1947 , he hastily decided to shrink their exit timeline and so what needed five years would now need to be done in just 4 months.  British India was to be split into two independent Nations, a mostly Muslim Pakistan and Hindu majority ,but officially secular India. 

 To do the actual drawing of the border , the British brought in the lawyer from London. He arrived a month before the British were supposed to leave India. He hadn’t been to British India before and didn’t know much about the region. He had no Idea about India ,Indian geography and Indian politics. Yet he was the one drawing the lines on a map that would affect millions of lives.

During his visit this British lawyer looked at maps and census data , focusing on the maps that showed religious identity of people in India. India has a wide variety of religions and based on these census maps, you can see the people of all religions lived among  each other all over the region.

Below map shows how people from various religion lives together before partition.

So to draw the line British lawyer looked at individual districts putting any district that had Muslim majority population into the new country of Pakistan , while Hindu and Sikh majority districts would be kept within India. Based on this method the lawyer begins to see what the border looks like. He only had five weeks to do this. He later wrote that it would have taken years to settle on property boundary and that’s method of drawing a line conceals that within the district there were sizable communities of all religions that had been living side by side for centuries all through India.

On 15th august 1947 both countries got independence. The lawyer left India on that day and he would never return to India again. Two days after independence the borders were made public, prompting more than 14 millions people to leave their home, their lives for what was now their side of the border. Hindu and Sikhs from Pakistan moved to India and many Muslims in India moved to new Pakistan. These were the people who were indeed forced to lose their entire home , their memories , their childhood and the things they saw. It was one of the largest forced migrations of people ever and it was a chaos , a chaos that led to widespread unspeakable violence cities on fire , sexual violence against women , trains with full of dead bodies.

The division of subcontinent became known as partition of India. The phrase synonym with trauma fueled by the reckless management of Imperial power.

Mssania an small village near border in India to be muslim community before partition. And in the middle of the town is this shrine where resident would conduct ornate Muslim burial practices on the graves. 

The town was actually in Pakistan in most of the maps but in the end  the British lawyer decided to draw the line here.

People here discovered that they were part of new India and many of them fled just across the border of the new state of Pakistan and they left this place empty. But just as Muslim were leaving this village for Pakistan, Hindus and Sikhs from Pakistan were coming across into India and some ended up here. The Hindus and Sikhs that now live in this community have taken it upon themselves to continue Muslim traditions that this community was based off of. They continued to maintain these graves and these symbols even though they not necessarily pertain to their own religion. This is a sign of respect, of common identity in spite of the border.

But this one side of the story. Within the few months after drawing the border India and Pakistan fighting an all out war and many other wars were fought between these two nations.

If you take away the geopolitical bluster , the nukes , the barrier, the trauma of partition, you can still see how much these two  countries have in common. Same language , same food , same taste Hindu , Muslim and Sikh use to live together , attend each other social functions, marriages , everything. If you stand in the wall city in Amritsar and you stand in the walled city in Lahore , the smell that gives away is the same.

He rise 1000 times : a true story of world's famous cook

 

This is the story about a boy from Henryville Indiana. In 1895 , When he was six years old his father passed away. His mother had to start working in a tomato cannery , leaving him to cook and care for his siblings. Life hit him hard at a very young age and because of the difficult situations he faced.

 

 He had to work as a farmhand at the age of ten. When he was in sixth grade , he dropped out of high school and left his home. He started working as a painter of horse carriages. When he was 16 , he faked his age to enlist in the US army. After being honourably discharged a year later he started working as a railway laborer and studied law at nearby university until he ruined his legal career by getting into a fight.

He was forced to move back in with his mom and get a job selling life insurances. After sometime, he got fired for not following orders. Some years later he established a ferry boat company and it was an instant success. Later on he tried cashing in on his FERRY BOAT BUSINESS to create a chemical lamp manufacturing company only to find out that another company was already selling electrical lamps much better than his company’s lamp.

 

All this hardship in life but this guy wouldn’t give up. He moved to work as a salesman for a tier company. But again he lost his job when the company closed its manufacturing plant. 

 

By the age of 40 he met the general manager of an oil company who asked him to run a service station for him but the station had to close down as a result of the great depression. That same year the shell oil company offered him a service station , rent-free. In return for paying the company a percentage of sales. He started operating the service station and also began to serve chicken dishes and other simple meals for people who were stopping by at the station. His pan-fried chicken soon became a Favourite with the people of the area and made him famous in the region.

Few years later he took out the station and started a proper restaurant. After fairly succeeding at his venture he started to advertise his food and to his shock , an argument erupted out of the blue with a local competitor and resulted in a fatal shootout with one of his employees dying.

 

Four years later he bought a motel next to his chicken restaurant hoping for better  business but it got fired and burnt down to the ground together with his restaurant. Yet this ambitious man rebuilt and ran a new motel with a 140- seat restaurant until world war-2 forced him to close it down again. When war ended, he tried selling  his recipes to other restaurants. His recipe was rejected 1009 times. When finally in 1952 , he sold his secret recipe  “KENTUCKY FRIED CHICKEN” for the first time to the city’s largest restaurants. It quickly became a hit and as a result several restaurant owners franchised the concept and paid him $0.04 per chicken.

 

However , good times didn’t last very long. His own restaurant was crippeled when an interesting highway reduced customer traffic.he sold it and was left only with his savings and $105 a month from social security. So finally he pursued his dream to franchise his chicken concept nationwide and travelled the US looking for suitable restaurants. He opened a new restaurant and a company headquarters in 1959. He often slept in the back of his car. He visited a restaurant offer to cook his chicken and if the owner liked it then he negotiated a franchise right. In 1965, at the age of 75 , he was just getting started! 

 

After years of rejection , failure , and misfortunes COLONEL SANDERS’ franchise approach became highly successful. KFC was one of the first fast food chains to expand globally, opening outlets in Canada , UK , Mexico and Jamaica. By the mid-1960s, the COLONEL remained the company’s symbol after selling it. He travelled over 400000 KM a year visiting KFC restaurants and delighting customers around the world. At the age of 90 COLONEL SANDNER passed away. At that time there were 6000 KFC locations in 48 different countries. In 2020 there are more than 23000 KFC restaurants in 150 countries worldwide.

 

If you are overwhelmed by rejection or discouraged by setbacks remember the story of COLONEL SANDERS

• A SIX GRADE DROPOUT
• FIRED FROM MULTIPLE JOBS 
• RUINED HIS LEGAL CAREER
• SETBACK BY THE GREAT DEPRESSION , FIRE AND WORLD WAR-2

 And yet became the world's most famous cook after reaching “Retirement Age”.

 

COLONEL SANDERS created one of the largest food chains in the world with many things, but above all he was a great success story! 

With his story we can learn that  despite thousands of rejections and misfortunes, dedication along with hard work can create success ; regardless of age.

 

Guys tried to cover the whole story , so if you like it do share and comment from whose story you are inspired the most.

 

 

The story behind BEIRUT BLAST

LEBANON is a country in western Asia with a population of 68.5 lakhs. The main two religions are Islam with 54 % of citizens and Christanity with 40.7% of the citizens. Beirut is the capital of Lebanon.

 

There is a port which is known as  Beirut port silos where 2750 tonnes of Ammonium Nitrate were stored. From this warehouse a huge blast occurred and its impact was felt till 20 km.Till now 100 people were reported dead and more than 4000 people were wounded and more than 100 people are missing.

Main question arises how did this blast occur ?

It all started in september 2013 , when a ship headed from Georgia to Mozambique faced technical problems and had to dock in the Beirut port. Ship was carrying 2750 tonnes of Ammonium Nitrate .

Ammonium Nitrate is generally used as a fertilizer. However it readily forms explosive mixtures with varying properties when combined with primary explosives such as azide or with fuels such as aluminium powder or fuel oil and because of this its use and trade is restricted by many countries.

When Beirut’s port authority found Ammonium Nitrate in the ship they said that this ship would be not allowed to go further as it stored Ammonium Nitrate without proper paperwork. The owner of the ship abandoned the project by saying that this ship doesn’t belong to them and Lebanon can keep this ship.

Now Lebanon faced the problem of what to do with this huge amount of Ammonium Nitrate ?

So in 2015 they decided to keep this in a storage house located at Beirut port silos and they will look after this matter later This was the extreme negligence to keep huge amounts of Ammonium Nitrate at the port which is one of the busiest places. Ammonium Nitrate which was stored here since 2014 suddenly blasted and it was horrific.

Now the reason given by authorities of this blast is due to negligence and carelessness. But this took another angle when Trump made a comment on the Beirut blast. He said that this was an attack. So a question arises: who can do this? First culprit comes to mind is Israel but through its various sources confirms that they had nothing to do with this blast. Why israel?  Because there is a group called HEZBOLLAH in Lebanon which is involved in their internal affairs and politics and this is a militant group many countries declared them as a terrorist including Israel and they constantly attack Israel. So this theory arises that Israel was the reason behind the blast but Israel confidently denies this.

Presently it makes it more difficult for Lebanon with covid 19 infections on the rise , hospitals were already struggling to cope.

2020 is a curse for human race .