Happy birthday to the Motherland India

Swagat and Namaste for all my Indian visitors. Sixty one years old tomorrow. Wah wah. Many happy returns and definitely shame on me for having missed every birthday party, well 42 anyway ;-)

Despite the 150-year-old gap (due to immigration flows from India to Surinam to the Netherlands), there are actually people out out there, in Hindustan, in Bharat, in India, whose blood is running through my veins.

Anyway, I hope you have a great birthday party and I hope that one day all Indians, from the widows in Vindravan to the slumdwellers in Dharavi, will be able to sink their teeth in the birthday cake which is getting bigger and bigger every year thanks to the enormous economic growth you are experiencing.

Below some pictures I found regarding the partition in 1947 when at least 10 million Indians were forced to flee. Needless to say I also included some pics of the stars who made it all happen: Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (a.k.a. Mahatma Gandhi), Jinnah, Nehru and Lord Mounbatten) and of course a couple of hundreds of thousands of Indians daring to defy the English and march towards freedom.

And the first track you are listening to is from the film Earth 1947. This 1998 film directed by Deepa Mehta is based upon Bapsi Sidhwa's novel Cracking India, originally published as Ice Candy Man. Earth is the second part of Mehta's trilogy Fire, Earth and Water. And of course it stars Nandita Das. Enjoy the pics and the song.






Photo credit: Life Magazine, August 1947

photo credits: Martin Frost's website