When I first met my (former) SIL’s teen nieces (when I went to Jalandhar for my daughter’s wedding, I was shocked when they told me they liked/admired Hitler. I learned it was because he fought the British and they considered the British their oppressors.
I tried my best to explain to them how evil he was and when I returned home I mailed them a copy of The Diary of Anne Frank, SIL calls it the Hitler book.
I’m so thankful for the info available on the internet … even if you’re in the most remote part of the world, if you have an internet connection and thirst for knowledge so much is available now.
But we also didn’t study more than a cursory amount of European and World history — there was so much indian history to cover (8-10000 BCE of the Indus Valley civilization through to independence in 1947 and after). (My nephew in CA found it very funny that his world history textbook covered all that in a chapter, and 200 years of american history over several years )
That said, this happened an hour or two from Jalandhar, and was one of the galvanizing events of the freedom struggle, very close to home for them.
I was stunned because I’d never heard someone express a favorable opinion of Hitler. (I’m sure some in Europe might still be pro Hitler but they don’t admit it)
The girls went to a private school but I guess the material was limited. Yes, I learned about that massacre in Amritsar.
I have a friend who was a young boy (Sikh) in Lahore during Partition, he and family fled to Northern India, left almost everything behind. Several years ago he had the opportunity to go back and visit that home. The first night he stayed in a hotel then went to the house. The family invited him in and insisted that he check out of the hotel and spend the night with them.
Have you seen the movie Munich? Shows the futility of revenge.
Re: liking Hitler, I’m late to this and might be missing something or whole chunks, but Modi is a fan of Mussolini and has model his movement (Hinduvat) after Mussolini’s fascism. Hitler is not far off in that regard, except way more brutal and genocide.
I just finished Geraldine DeRuiter’s new essay collection, If You Can’t Take the Heat: Tales of Food, Feminism and Fury. She’s the author of that James Beard Award-winning blog post about Mario Batali’s sex abuse apology, which included a recipe for “pizza-dough cinnamon rolls”:
Finally finished Thirty Names of Night - felt a bit of a slog. Happy to dive into Ruth Reichl’s The Paris Novel …
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ChristinaM
(Hungry in Asheville, NC (still plenty to offer tourists post Hurricane))
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I’m reading Still Life by Sarah Winman. Has anyone here read it? My Libby copy got returned but I am still able to read it as long as I don’t close it on my Kindle. Trying to decide if it will be time well invested or not.
Haven’t read it either. Interesting that not closing the ebook works. I sometimes disconnect my Fire from the internet to prevent a book from being taken back by the library
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