South Asia Citizens Web

Every anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, two schools of thought square off. One says, the bombings were not necessary to end the war; the Japanese were close to surrender anyway. The other says remember Pearl Harbor, the Japanese militarists’ determination to fight to the end. But many questions remain unasked in this framework. Why was the U.S. Pacific fleet moved to Pearl Harbor in 1940? Why did Japan bomb it? When were Japanese forces first targeted, rather than Germany?

Back in the day, everyone knew that Stalinist architecture was hateful. The Poles notoriously loathed the Palace of Culture and Science that was the gift to war-ruined Warsaw from the Soviet elder brother or – as the Poles saw it – master. Foreigners and sophisticated Russians sneered at Moscow’s wedding-cake buildings and lamented the old Tverskaya that had undergone a Stalinist remake as Gorky Street.

After staging the Yoga on 21st June 2015 on Raj Path, Delhi, Modi Sarkar has planned to celebrate Rakhi, Raksha Bandhan at a grand scale in late August. This plan has full approval of its parent organization, the RSS. Now a Hindu religious festival will be given the status of a national festival so blatantly. It surely is indication of the type of deeper agenda of narrow nationalism this Government has in mind?

I was born in Amsterdam in 1936. My father was a postman; my mother was a maid until she married. On both sides, their families had been bargees for generations, working the waterways of Holland. My father, born in 1895, was the youngest of fifteen children, though nine of them had died in infancy—infant-mortality levels were high for bargees; hygiene was poor and medical care hard to get.

article by Nandagopal Rajan on the 70th anniversary of the Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima in August 1945