Monday, September 07, 2015

Quick notes: Soldier's general, Pilfering Indian treasures...

  • The real hero of 1965 war: Lieutenant General Harbakhsh Singh, GOC, Western Command, disobeyed the then army chief and took on a superior Pakistani armoured column.

    In his book In the Line of Duty: A Soldier Remembers, General Harbakhsh has written: 'Late at night on the 9th of September, the chief of the army staff rang me up... his advice was that to save the whole army from being cut-off by Pakistan's armour push, I should pull back to the line of the Beas river. Pulling back to the Beas would have meant sacrificing prime territory in Punjab including Amritsar and Gurdaspur districts and would have been a far worse defeat than that suffered at the hands of the Chinese in 1962.'  The move would have also resulted in bidding goodbye to the entire state of J&K and the army's 15 Corps that had performed extremely well over there.


  • The Subhash Kapoor case and the plundering of India's past: The mentality of colonialism which in essence says: 'We have a right to these objects; they are the world's patrimony not just one nation's patrimony. We are better able to protect them than the natives.' That's the kind of attitude with which these things have been traditionally acquired by American, British and other institutions. 


  • How India's tax system helps cigarettes flourish: Cigarettes were 175 per cent more affordable in 2011 than in 1990, according to the WHO, all because real incomes have been growing at a faster clip than taxes on cigarettes. Cigarette-price rise = demand drop.  It’s a simple equation, which can greatly help stub out smoking, according to the WHO.


  • Ummah Impotence:


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