Look at this beauty taking shape! ✨🚄
Our very first Vande Bharat Sleeper prototype is getting closer and closer to its final form, and it's exciting to watch it come together piece by piece.
Meanwhile, more coaches are already progressing through production. ⚙⚙️🚆
@ish_anttt@goldenhues018 Desh does not become "acha" magically out of thin air.
Lot of people have to work hard for it.
It's not possible to work hard for your poor nation without being patriotic.
Patriotism is a prerequisite for development not a consequence of it
This Republic was the successor of the harrappans , the Mauryan , The Guptas and immediately began rapid industrialization pulling people out of poverty and comfortably becoming a rich nation by the beginning of the 21st century
In a Parallel universe Bose managed to raise a very large army with all the Indians from the British army joining him.
He overthrew the British bringing the entire subcon under a single indigenous rule for the first time since chakravartin samrat Ashoka.
I was fourteen, walking home from school in Paris with my French-American friend. Summer was around the corner and the heat was relentless.
‘You must be used to this heat,’ she said.
‘Not really,’ I replied. ‘We lived in the hills in India before we came to Paris.’
‘Hills? I didn’t know India had hills.’
‘We have the Himalayas,” I had replied. ‘The highest mountains in the world.’
She stopped dead.
‘You’ve got to be kidding! The highest mountains are in America.’
That expression of absolute certainty is etched into my memory even today.
Twenty years later, when I met her again in New York, I reminded her of that conversation. We couldn’t stop ourselves from laughing.
So anyway that afternoon we went home, and I opened my Philips Atlas and showed her the Himalayas.
‘You know,’ she said thoughtfully, ‘ I’d always wondered about that weird name. I just assumed it was some Native American name.’
A few weeks later, in geography class, while studying the Alps, our teacher announced they were the highest mountains in the world.
My newly enlightened friend proudly corrected her.
‘Actually, the Himalayas are.’
The teacher shot me a look that instantly identified the culprit behind this inconvenient fact.
Then, without missing a beat, she recovered.
‘Yes… but the Himalayas are the newest highest mountains. The Alps were the oldest highest mountains.’
Case closed.
At fourteen, I learnt one of life’s great lessons: The West doesn’t just write history, geography, science. It often decides it.
If something is ancient, extraordinary or foundational, somehow it must have originated in Europe or at the very least be explained through a European lens.
The Rig Veda became “Aryan.” A Middle Eastern Jew named Jesus acquired blond hair and blue eyes.
Even Panini, at one point, seemed to belong to everyone except India.
Now, apparently, Panini is Pakistani.
Progress, I suppose.
From ‘ that’s impossible’ to ‘it was ours all along.’
The script changes. The narrator doesn’t.
#SundayMusings