World History
*◼: Genghis Khan was defeated in two major battles and seven minor skirmishes in his life,
*◼: Genghis Khan was defeated in two major battles and seven minor skirmishes in his life, each time against the same opponent: Sultan Jalaluddin Khwarazm Shah. The only enemy Genghis Khan paid tribute to for bravery was Jalaluddin. Nur-ud-din Korlakh had rightly said that Sultan Jalal-ud-din was the ransom of the Muslim world. Had it not been for this, the story of the destruction of the Muslim world at the hands of Genghis Khan would have been much longer and more interesting. Had his father accepted his advice to fight Genghis, the history of the world might have been different. If his own brothers had not conspired and occupied the throne, the course of history might have been different. What kind of person was he, he left the throne to his brothers and went out into the forest so that the empire would not fall into another trap.*
By Muhammad Tariq2 years ago in History
Secrets behind Bermuda Triangle
Hi, companions! The year 1945. on 5th December, at 10 past 2 within the evening, 5 torpedo plane flying machine of the US Naval force, took off from Florida. This mission was called Flight 19. It was a 3-hour long schedule preparing mission. It wasn't anything extraordinary, they were basically flying to conduct their customary preparing missions. There were 14 group individuals on the flight, driven by their flight pioneer, a exceedingly experienced pilot and war ingenious. These five planes flew east from Florida. Everything was typical the climate was clear, but almost 2 hours after the takeoff, their squadron pioneer detailed that there were sudden issues in their compass. Their compass ceased working. They take out their reinforcement compass, but the reinforcement compass fizzled as well. They can't decide their genuine position. They inquire the pilots of the other planes but their disobedient were failing as well. Lt Charles Carol Taylor was the squadron pioneer, after the compass broke down, absolutely befuddling messages were sent over radio transmission. The climate begins declining. At 4:
By Muhammad Usama2 years ago in History
The Jewel of the Empire
The Jewel of the Empire In the heart of ancient India, where the sacred rivers Ganges and Yamuna entwined like the strands of a divine tapestry, lay the kingdom of Vaishali. It was a realm of splendor and serenity, where the palaces glittered like jewels under the sun and the temples echoed with the chants of a thousand monks. The air was rich with the fragrance of sandalwood and jasmine, whispering tales of an age when gods walked the earth.
By yerukalva reddamma2 years ago in History
Man Saved This Crying Wolf Cub And Her Dying Mama Wolf, Days Later He Received The Amazed “Thanks”
Once upon a time, in the vast and untamed Alaskan Wilderness, a man named John found himself in an unexpected and life-altering encounter. It was a sunny spring day when John, a prospector in search of gold, ventured along Coho Creek on the southeastern side of Alaska's captivating Caprino Island.
By Franck Senpx2 years ago in History
The Remarkable Life of Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart
The Remarkable Life of Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart In 2006, the Mexican beer brand Dos Equis launched an ad campaign featuring Jonathan Goldsmith as the "Most Interesting Man in the World." The campaign was wildly successful, transforming Dos Equis into one of the most popular imported beers in the US. Goldsmith claimed he based his character on his friend Fernando Lamas, a famous actor and director who lived an adventurous life. However, the real-life subject of today's story makes even Lamas seem dull in comparison. This is the story of Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart, a man whose life was so extraordinary that it reads like a Hollywood script.
By Rabiul Molla2 years ago in History
CIRCLES. Content Warning. AI-Generated.
Of all the rabbit holes I get stuck in on the internet I don’t know any quite as powerful as Google Earth. Seeing beautiful patterns from above... Dropping down into street view... And seeing the planet in ways I would never get to see in person. So when I came across this post on Reddit, I was fascinated. It described “undocumented markings” in Algeria, in the middle of the Sahara near a location called “Tebalbalet tomb.” Visible on Google Earth. There were 22 of them, each with 12 “surrounding things”, 42 meters in diameter 420 meters apart, at longitude 4'20 East. It almost sounded like a joke. But then I copied the coordinates and I looked. There they were: identical circles in an almost perfect line. 160 kilometers from any signs of life in the world’s largest desert... in the middle of the biggest country in Africa. This is a story about the limits of what you can find out on the internet. About all the different ways of looking at the same thing. And about going all the way there. Over the course of the last 20 weeks, we filmed every step of the process as we tried to figure out one thing... What could these circles be? So this whole story starts back in September 2021 when I first saw the Reddit post. I wanted to figure out what these “markings” were and make a video out of the entire reporting process. No matter how long it took. Because the answer had to be out there. And, step one, I knew I was going to have to send some emails. For weeks, I reached out to everyone I could think of: Algerian experts, officials, tour groups... even the closest hotel, in a city called Aïn Salah. I read up on the town the circles were located closest to: Foggaret Ezzaouia. I asked the commenters on the Reddit post... and we even tracked down a Twitter account we thought was the same Will K who posted this question to several subreddits before deleting his Reddit account. I tried English and French... organizations, academics, locals... And then... I waited. But there was one easy thing to clear up first. Were these circles real? Or were they just some kind of satellite imaging glitch? So I asked a teammate who works with maps a lot: Sam, he produces our series Atlas. And he pointed me to the company that takes a lot of the satellite pictures for Google Earth: Maxar Technologies. I feel very confident that those are indeed on the ground because we see them in multiple images over multiple years. So, I know it wasn't an artifact of the processing that Google might have done with our imagery. And then a colleague of mine who has spent a decent amount of time studying this area said, “You know, this is a very rich area for oil and gas.” “This looks very similar to what we see when they're doing oil exploration.” Oil radically changed the course of Algeria’s history. "Oil from the wastelands of the desert..." "And it's believed that the Sahara is immensely rich in it." When oil and gas were discovered there in 1956, companies flocked to the region against the backdrop of a brutal decolonization war with France. Today, Algeria is one of the world’s top exporters of natural gas. What Steve is talking about here is seismic surveys where geophysicists analyze the Earth’s surface by sending shock waves into the ground. Depending on how those seismic waves bounce back researchers can tell what resources can be extracted from underground. Steve thought that, maybe, seismic pulses from a specialized vehicle could produce something like this. So, we had a hypothesis. But I wanted a second opinion. So I asked Bob Hardage at the University of Texas one of the world’s leading experts on seismic imaging. He responded by email: ”I can assure you with 100-percent confidence that the features in this imagery are not seismic arrays used in oil and gas exploration.” First, the shapes themselves weren’t right. “...there will be hundreds of thousands of receivers positioned as either a single straight line or as hundreds of parallel straight lines.” I looked up pictures from NASA of seismic surveying and you can see what he means. Second: the fact that we could even see them meant they probably weren’t a seismic survey. “... the objective is to leave the landscape like you found it." "If a seismic crew created something like these features a return visit would be made to restore the landscape.” “I have no idea what the circles in the satellite image are." "Whatever they are, the people who created them wanted those features to be permanent.” “Closeout: I don’t think we need to chat.” Thanks Bob. So I kept Googling. I found geotagged pictures from the nearest municipality, Foggaret Ezzaouia on a site called mapio.net. These old stone wells sorta looked like they could be arranged in a circle. But reverse image searches were a dead end. I didn’t know what to do next. So we looped in Vox video’s senior researcher, Melissa, to help me out. So, I was trying to find what this thing was. I don't know if you remember from his original post he calls it the Tebalbalet tomb. Do you remember that? So I found this article. This is from like 1985 — I mean, not 1985: 1885. The “Well of Tebalbalet” is at the latitude 27°20 and longitude 4°38. And that's approximately where what we're looking at is. And it says there are two circular tumuli. I had to Google that, I don't know that word. -Tumuli. What's a tumulus. Tumulus. It's an ancient burial mound. Which seems... that sounds about right. “... encompassed by two concentric mounds in the form of rings, all of great regularity." "The two rings are respectively 30 and 21 meters in diameter, from crest to crest.” So a document from 1885 said that, around this same area, there were 1) a bunch of wells, and 2) tombs with “rings of great regularity.” Now, the sketches weren’t an exact match. But they got us thinking: what if these things were actually really old? So I sent the pictures to a Tunisian archaeologist who had done research in this area. We spoke in French because of decades of French occupation in the 19th and 20th centuries French is still used in many contexts in Tunisia and Algeria. And she had a new clue. [in French] These monuments, they are without a doubt [in French] because I know Aïn Salah very well... [in French] These monuments are related to... [in French] Water. [in French] It's a desert environment, it's the Sahara. [in French] It is practically the hottest place in the Maghreb. [in French] It’s an area which is very well known for the difficulties of this heat there, and for the water harvest. [in French] So the people, they dig. [in French] It has a name: the Foggaras. Foggara. It’s the North African name for a 2,500-year-old style of irrigation system that goes by many names, but is often called a qanat. Builders dig a well at an elevated point on a slope deep enough to tap into groundwater. They then dig parallel shafts at regular intervals. These provide air flow for diggers as they create an underground channel all the way back to the main well. With a slope of 1 or 2 degrees, the channel carries water long distances powered by gravity alone. In a part of the world with barely any rain and no running rivers this technology can provide water for crops, livestock, and people year round... making human-made oases possible. [in French] It's curious, eh? This was the most promising lead yet. It explained the desert location, the circular shape, the regularity, and spacing. Even the closest municipality’s name, Foggaret Ezzaouia, is named after foggaras. And those mapio pictures of wells started to make sense. But I wanted to run it by more people who had studied qanats. Qanats are actually more than just water infrastructures. I think they are the very raison d'etre: the basis of habitation in such harsh climates. They start from outside of the city, but then they usually end up into the city or into agricultural lands. But when it came to our circles... I have no take on it, honestly. I'm looking at it now. Right. Okay, that's interesting. There's something like 20 of them in a row. Yeah. So that's definitely a foggara. So at the end of that, there should be a town. There should be an oasis or something. But if there isn't, that means that probably the water in the qanat or foggara has dried up since a long time. You should talk to Dale Lightfoot. He is the American geographer who knows everything about qanats. These are what we're looking at. I couldn't even say with confidence whether these are related to water collection. But I can tell you they're definitely not qanats. We also found these pictures. Do you think these could be what the circles are? What you're showing me pictures of here looks a lot like animal-drawn wells. I've seen these in a lot of places. To me, this is not the same thing. I think you're back to square one. Back to square one, indeed. Don't rule out space aliens. I've heard they do crazy things, too. So they might be wells, but probably not a qanat. And maybe not even related to water at all. Could we at least rule that out? That’s when Melissa found a database of oases in the Sahara. With lists of the people who help manage their water supply. Like Mohammed Brik, a farmer in Laghouat, Algeria. I don't think it was done to fetch water. Because the point of going out to look for water is to meet the needs of the population and agriculture. If there’s nothing for 160 kilometers then that’s not a valid hypothesis. Right. Because there is no village, no... There’s no village. There’s no garden. There's no oasis. There's nothing planted. There's no population. We were three months in and it seemed like our most promising hypothesis yet was probably out. Then I got an email. Back in early October, Steve Wood promised to send me high-res images from Maxar’s archive. Finally, we had them. It was the clearest look we'd had yet. And Steve believed it showed a new detail: tire tracks. If that was right, it would mean someone had been there within the last century. I kept asking people. Historians... Algerian officials... Archaeologists... And nearby residents... But after a while, I felt stuck. Like we had exhausted what we could find out on the internet. And there was nowhere else to go from here... except to the circles themselves. The longer this project went on, the more I realized that we had a choice to make. We could keep interviewing more and more people, get more and more theories and ultimately have no way to back them up. Or... we could figure out a way to get someone there... Try to film it... and then, maybe, we could know for sure. So I asked my teammate Christina — who works with journalists all over the world if she knew anyone in Algeria. And that led us to Samir Abchiche, a video journalist in Algiers. I’m about to be a dad. So no more adventures for me after this. We hired Samir to be our on-the-ground journalist... to use his expertise in the area to help us solve this mystery. The next part took months. We knew this wasn’t going to be an ordinary video shoot. We were asking him and his team to travel incredibly far to go do something potentially dangerous. But Samir took this story into his own hands. He was obsessing over every hypothesis, establishing local contacts figuring out all the details of how to get a team of people from Algiers 15 hours away by car to Aïn Salah and then deep into the desert where no roads go. Finally, Samir figured out how to make it happen. And at 7 pm on a cool February night, he and his second cameraman Abdelate... set off. And it begins. Shit. It does not begin. We can't find a hotel. They're all closed. And we're going to try Hotel El Djanoub. We have the Royal Suite. I just woke up. It's starting to get super hot. There's no service. It's yellow everywhere. But it’s beautiful. Yeah, but it’s beautiful. Which way to Ain Salah? 300 km to Ain Salah. 150 km. All we've seen is the horizon. They'd already spent 24 hours driving to get here. Now, they had to go another 160 km from Aïn Salah into the desert. But they had to pick someone else up first. Farid Ighilahriz, an archaeologist who used to lead Algeria’s national archaeological research center and managed one of Algeria’s largest national parks. He’s here to help the team identify whatever they come across. How are we going to do this without cell service? No no, I made a map. From there, they prepared. They got groceries... Bought fuel... Interviewed local officials... Planned the GPS route... And they assembled a team. A driver, an archeologist an assistant, and a desert guide. It’s right about here that I lost communication with Samir. And I wouldn’t be able to hear from him until he was back in town... With, hopefully, a definitive answer. No sandstorms, so that's good. That was making us nervous yesterday. It's still a bit risky, because nobody passes through this way. Almost nobody. And we're just two SUVs. This one is reliable, the other one, we don't really know. What’s weird is that as the crew got closer and closer... They started finding signs pointing to every one of our theories. First, tire marks from seismic survey trucks… Then, a well system... Water is always just three meters below. And finally, ancient tombs. We just saw something from far away. Yep, it's a tomb. There’s another one. So this is a tumulus. It's one of the oldest kinds of funeral monuments. And on the morning of day two, they checked the map, and… We're going roughly in the right direction. So we're 11 km from the first ones. I think we found them... False alarm... Did you see? We are approximately 500 meters from that place. Let's go! We got really excited, but they weren't there. Apparently they're just 500 meters away. We're not far. Right there, you can't see anything. You can't see anything. Right there, yeah? 10 ... 11 ... 12 .... There we go, we have all 12. After 160 kilometers of driving off-road in the desert... they were there. The 22 circles, all in configuration. They were surprisingly faint. You might not notice them if you happened to be passing by. As Samir and the team explored the area, they found the next set. And the next ones. This one's a bit clearer. The hole comes out of the ground. And a lot of them had something in common... metal wires. They’re connected. And there ... Come see up close... ...they run underground. Can I dig a little? No, no no. Not here? No. Sorry. So maybe they dug just a little bit... It's dynamite. Okay. Under these little mounds was dynamite. But here we have something else, too. We call these "attachments." It's what you'd put around a wooden crate. That's how they must have brought in the dynamite. That inscription reads SOTEMU — that’s a French acronym for the “Tunisian company of explosives and ammunition.” But one of the wires looked different than the others. It still had a yellow plastic coating. This is where it got a little scary. Is it possible... Was this one not detonated yet? Well get out of there, don't stand there. Be careful. We gotta tell everyone to be careful. Eventually they decided that the dynamite — if there was any left was probably harmless, because it would have needed a detonator to go off. So they started to dig. It must go down at least a meter. But it was buried quite deep. So, at some point, to be safe, they stopped. And then they found a clue no one could have expected. Farid? Ah, yes. Bricato... Français... "Made in France." Old cans of sardines and tuna. Here we found a little tin can. That was used for food... ...by those who worked here... ...who carried out this exploration. Oh, there’s color. Whoa... This could be the solution. So we knew what it was: dynamite, buried underground. And when Samir and the crew finally got home... I called him to hear all the details. My English, is it work for this? Yeah, it's perfect! We think that we have--we know the solution. So it's a method of searching for petroleum. But it was an old technique. At the very beginning of this journey, that’s one of the first things that anyone ever suggested. Is that it had to do with searching for petroleum. Which is crazy that it’s finally confirmed. It's the same thing that they do today just with dynamite instead of more finely tuned technology. This is crazy, this is so much more wild than I expected. Ironically, it put us right back right where we started. Seismic surveying. The circles are the remnants of surveyors looking for resources underground. This whole time, that first guess was right. But only sort of. Because Bob Hardage at the University of Texas was right when he said in that email that this doesn’t remotely resemble seismic surveying… Because this isn’t how seismic surveying works today. It’s an older technique, from the early days of surveying that uses dynamite explosions instead of vibration machines. The explosions would provide the seismic waves that would reflect and refract off of the ground underneath and that would tell surveyors that something — potentially something valuable, like oil was underground and worth digging for. The circles looked like this because of the force of those dynamite explosions happening underground. From this moment, a new question came. Who did this and when? Knowing it was a seismic survey wasn't enough. But we had one other clue from the desert to turn to... the sardine cans. I reached out to Saupiquet which seems to be the only one of these companies that still exists but they said they couldn’t identify their age by photos. So I found someone who’s been collecting sardine cans for over 40 years: Philippe Anginot. He even made a museum out of it. And I showed him the pictures. What we have here is what's called a three-body can. So these are typical cans from the 1960s. After 1960 the “Arsène Saupiquet Cannery” became the “Saupiquet Company.” When it's still labeled "Arsène," it's from before 1960. So because this can was labeled Arsène Saupiquet, we know that it was manufactured before they changed their name in 1960. Because of its 60s-style “three-body” design, we know it’s probably from the very late 1950s. Granted, this is canned food, so it’s possible that it was purchased years before it was actually eaten. But I think we can safely guess that these cans were left behind by an oil exploration crew sometime in the late 1950s. All that was left was to figure out who those people were. Before going into the desert, Samir recorded interviews with the experts that they met along the way. And there was one interview with someone who actually would have been there in the late 1950s. The father of the desert guides, who used to work as a guide himself. Peace be upon you. Here are the photos, Belhadj. I see the small holes placed like the hands of a watch. When did the drilling of [that area] take place? In 1953, the vehicles came to Djebel Beida to go to the probe. So this place existed and a company was working there. Yes, it is true. What were they doing. I know that they were digging, that's all. What was their name? I no longer remember. But I believe CREPS. I know that, at that time, CREPS was working. CREPS — a French acronym for the Sahara Petroleum Research and Exploitation Company was a joint venture between the French government and Shell. CREPS had a permit to explore and extract oil in this entire expanse of the Sahara from 1953 to 1958. Lining up that map with Google Maps shows that the circles are inside that CREPS sector. And according to these French Senate records they started geological surveys right away. Within that time, CREPS became the first company to strike oil in the Sahara, in 1956. This spurred a rush of oil companies into the region. And the struggle over control of Saharan oil became a centerpiece of France’s brutal war against Algerian Independence. "It was the end of nearly 8 years of bloodshed." "And the African nation won its freedom after 132 years." Even when Algeria won its independence in 1962 France maintained rights to Saharan oil for years to come. These circles are the scars of colonialism. They're evidence of one country’s attempts to take the resources of another. And they’re only as isolated as they are because oil wasn’t found there. Everywhere that it was, was transformed forever. So, we figured it out. These circles in the Sahara were made by French CREPS employees looking for oil. They were made by underground dynamite explosions arranged in circles along a straight line through the desert. And based on the dates of the CREPS permit, and the types of cans they left behind we can safely say they were there around 1957 or 1958. When we figured it all out, I emailed Bob. And he said this: "You have certainly done a persistent and thorough investigation." "I am comfortable with the conclusion that your features are remnants of decades-old, first generation analog recording of seismic data." "An unbelievable preservation." "Comparing 1950s seismic equipment and today's seismic equipment is similar to comparing propeller airplanes and deep space rockets." "Essentially, there is no comparison but two different worlds." "Well done." Thanks, Bob. We only know this thanks to the help of dozens of people someone’s sixty-five-year-old trash, a lot of time on the internet and a long, brave journey into the desert. Of course, a story like this could always keep going, more and more specific. But at some point to finish a story, we have to ask ourselves if the answer we have is satisfactory. And I think this one is.
By Timothy Mwiti2 years ago in History
INDIA&PAKISTAN. Content Warning. AI-Generated.
This is the Golden Temple. People come here from all over the world to bathe in its waters, to look at the Holy Book that is inside of this middle Golden Temple and to just experience the holiness of this place. This place is the epicenter of Sikhism. It sits right here in northern India in a city called Amritsar. Close by there's another important Sikh site called It was established by the founder of Sikhism more than 500 years ago. It's the place where he spent the last years of his life and it is the second holiest place in Sikhism. For centuries, Sikhs have been able to make pilgrimage between these two sites to move freely throughout their heartland. But in 1947 a British lawyer drew a border here turning what had been British India into two new countries, India and Pakistan. I could only call it one of the most bizarre lines, which were ever drawn across a map It went right here with the Golden Temple on one side and Katarpur on the other. Thanks to this border Sikhs in India are now cut off from their holy site. So many come here to a platform that the Border Patrol set up. The platform looks across the border where with the help of telescopes, Sikhs can look at their holy place just three or four kilometers away. In addition to cutting off communities from their sacred sites, this border separated families, cut across rivers, forests, farms, railroad tracks. Today this border is heavily fortified with nearly all 3,000, plus kilometers fenced. It's lit so well that you can see it from space and barely anything or anyone crosses over it When we talk about the drawing of the line, what was the most painful was the division of families which took place and that is a very big reality. This is the story of a violent separation. One of the most traumatic events of the 20th century It's the story of how a hastily drawn line on a map separated one people into two. This is a horror story. What we saw was a town soaked with the stench of death. In the train of murder and arson, come the refugees. Their suffering is the new tragedy of India. Many will never reach their new land. These are the things that are setting the heart burning on either side of the line. The sun is setting and I'm walking along one of the oldest roads in Asia One that used to connect this region but today a border runs through it and instead of connection and trade what you see here is this: There's barbed wire, there's fences, there are officers everywhere and yet, there's also ice-cream and popcorn and paraphernalia. This feels like a sporting event. You can buy keychains of machine guns. Thousands of spectators file in, filling this stadium that looks down on the border. On the other side Pakistanis are doing the same. Then, both sides start their different show. Two hours of chanting and dancing Then the finale, a face-off between the two sides. They strut back and forth in this coordinated choreography and it all ends with the lowering of each flag and the closing of this gate. This bizarre border show plays out every evening. But this ceremony, this fence, this intense nationalism If you rewind just a little in time, none of this existed. The British controlled parts of India for nearly 200 years but by 1947, a strong movement of independence was swelling across the subcontinent while back in Britain, the country was in massive debt after fighting World War II and didn't have the 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 probably take around five years but when the British leader in charge 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 four months. British India was to be split into two independent nations, a mostly Muslim Pakistan and a Hindu majority, but officially secular India. To do the actual drawing of the border, the British brought in a lawyer from London. He arrived the 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, no idea about Indian geography, no idea about Indian politics. And yet, he was the one drawing the lines on the 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 that people of all religions lived amongst each other all over the region. So to draw the line the British lawyer looked at individual districts putting any district that had a 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 began to see what a border might look like. He only had five weeks to do this. He later wrote that it would have taken years to settle on a proper boundary and that's because this method of drawing the line conceals that within these districts there were sizable communities of all religions that had been living side-by-side for centuries all throughout India. August 15 1947, Independence Day for India and Pakistan The British lawyer left that day. He would never return to India again. Two days after independence the borders were made public, prompting more than 14 million people to leave their homes, their lives for what was now their side of the border. We were told that you have to cross the border to India. Hindus and Sikhs from Pakistan moved into India and many Muslims in India moved into the new Pakistan. These were people who were indeed forced to lose their entire homes, their memories, their childhood and the things they saw. It was one of the largest forced migrations of people ever and it was chaos, a chaos that led to widespread unspeakable violence cities on fire, sexual violence against women, trains, full of dead bodies. The survivors I talked to were just children when all of this happened. The division of the sub-continent became known as the partition of India. A phrase synonymous with trauma fueled by the reckless mismanagement of an imperial power. I'm in a small village right near the border on the Indian side that used to be a Muslim community before partition. And in the middle of town is this shrine where residents would conduct ornate Muslim burial practices on these graves. Look at the original maps at the British drew up when they were trying to draw this line. This town was actually in Pakistan in most of the maps. But in the end the British lawyer decided to draw the line here. The people here discovered that they were now a part of the new country of India and so many of them fled just across the border to the new state of Pakistan and they left this place empty. But just as Muslims were leaving this village for the new 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 the Muslim traditions that this community was based off of. They continue to maintain these graves and these symbols even though they don't necessarily pertain to their own religion. This is a sign of respect, of common identity in spite of the border. But this is just one side of the story. The sub-continent echoes and shudders to the sounds of a full-scale undeclared war. Within just a few months of drawing this border, India and Pakistan were fighting an all-out war. One that centered on this region in the north, which both sides claimed as their own. The new countries would fight several more wars over the years, a border fence would eventually fortify the majority of this boundary, and both countries would acquire nuclear weapons turning up the tensions and deepening the division. But 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. I'm at a school in Delhi. Students are skyping with a school in Pakistan. These kids are speaking a similar language and it takes them just minutes to dive into the common roots of their culture. This shared identity with these kids are feeling isn't uncommon in India and Pakistan. Same language, same taste, same food Hindus and Muslims and Sikhs used to live together, attend each other's social functions, marriages, everything. We have this divide now. If you stand in the wall city in Amritsar and you stand in the walled city in Lahore believe me, the smells, which is a kind of giveaway are the same. I'm visiting a group of Sikhs coming off the train. They were able to get a visa to go visit this religious site that most have to see through a telescope. So with all these cultural similarities, all these happy faces, shared interests? How do you explain this? You see, it is a politician, who poisons people's minds. The divide is created, nurtured, fostered because it suits a certain politics. Over the years, politicians on both sides have exploited tension with the other side to stoke feelings of nationalism. Back here at this viewing platform, there are construction vehicles everywhere. For years, the Sikhs have lobbied for easier access to their holy site and after years the two governments finally agreed to build a little notch into this border, a corridor that will allow Sikhs to freely access their site without a visa. These four kilometers will restore a small part of what was once the Sikh heartland. But for millions of Indians and Pakistanis who continue to live with the repercussions of the traumatic events of 1947, this fortified and volatile border remains unchanged. If anything, it's getting thicker. Seventy years later, the shadow of partition continues to divide families, halt trade, cut connection, stop cooperation, instill fear, promote hatred and the people who live in its shadow on both sides, old and young, continue to live with this division that's superimposed upon their history of deep connection.
By Timothy Mwiti2 years ago in History
