Since this is Veteran’s day in the United States I felt it was most appropriate to have a post about military matters. Embassy Magazine is a publication targeting the diplomat community in the Ottawa, Canada area and recently ran a piece about the often overlooked Brown soldiers of the two World Wars.

Over 1,300,000 soldiers of Indian ancestry fought in the First World War. It remains the largest volunteer army ever assembled in the history of the world. It was the largest number of soldiers fighting from the British Empire after those from the British Isles. Not Canada, not Australia, no other part of the Empire contributed as many troops.

Two and half million Indian soldiers fought in the Second World War. You might want to read those sentences again.

If this group of soldiers came from anywhere in the Western world and if they were white, there’d be monuments to them in every major Western capital in the world.

I guess thats the way of history though isn’t it? Whoever ends up in charge writes history by highlighting certain things and not emphasizing others. Continue reading →

I used to go from Birmingham to Amritsar by foot, but it was a very slow walk!

Birmingham International Airport (BIA) has celebrated the launch of a new non-stop long haul charter service with specialist tour operator, Midland Airways. Travellers are now able to fly direct to Amritsar, the City of the Golden Temple, from Birmingham each Friday. This service will increase to two flights per week before the end of the month and will see a third weekly departure in early December.

The flights are operated by a new airline to Birmingham, Slovak Airlines, using a 215 seater 767-200 aircraft. Although the service is operated as a charter flight, passengers have a choice of two classes – economy (203 seats) and first class (12 seats). Prices start from GBP299 return.

Currently, the weekly service departs from Birmingham each Friday at 21:00, arriving the next morning into Amritsar Airport at 09:30. The return flight leaves Amritsar on Sunday at 13:30 and arrives into Birmingham at 20:00 the same evening. These flight times will change as new frequencies are added.

[FYI: The original Flying Sikh was Milkha Singh, “the only Indian to have broken an Olympic record” (unfortunately, he broke the record in the 400m preliminaries, and then came in 4th in a photo finish in the 1960 Rome Olympics.)]

An early Diwali in New York yesterday at the South Street Seaport:

It’s one of the most upscale Diwali settings I’ve ever seen, tall ships and a fireworks barge bobbing beneath skyscrapers of robin’s-egg blue… Ashen wrappers smelling of gunpowder drifted onto the heads of desi elders who had splayed themselves across the wooden pier steps… A dance troupe on the pier practiced ballroom with shells whistling overhead, a scratchy violin track playing in the background.

Continue reading…