Babel

Tag: communism

  • Oh Calcutta!

    Crumbling heritage buildings, a communist legacy, buses and automobiles from the 1950s…It’s no wonder that some call you the Havana of India. For more than 30 years, the ‘City of Joy’ stood still and stayed in a time warp as the rest of India moved on and entered the age of globalisation.

    Now, however, the last bastion of the Left has fallen to the capitalists and multinationals. Your antiquated streets are getting filled with Dominoes, Pizza Hut, McDonalds and the likes.  The cars are flashier and there is a genuine attempt to rid you of those cute 1950s buses! It, however, does look like the rickety trams of yesteryear will stay.

    So what’s better for you? To stay a living museum that we outsiders can visit and admire before going back to our normal lives? Or for you to catch up with the modernisation bandwagon?

    Maybe a middle path will suit you a la Vienna?

    The traditionalist in many of us dream of a Calcutta with restored old buildings, but cured of its excessive poverty. A city where all things new can make their presence felt albeit not at the expense of past glories.

    Changes happen, but you still stay the friendliest city in all of India. Never change that about yourself!

  • Face to Face with Propaganda: Romania presented to the English-speaking world in 1985

    Blue communist graffiti on marble wallWell, I’m not going to comment much, for the ones who know how the (not only Communist) propagandistic wooden language sounds like, this post will be as clear as the day, for those who don’t – read my comments, and don’t take any quote literally!

    My source today will be from Prof. Andrei Oțetea’s A Concise History of Romania (English edition edited by Andrew MacKenzie), published at Robert Hall Limited, London. Here it goes…

    Romanian history is not a chronicle of kings and queens such as British children, learning the history of their own country, once had to commit to memory. True, there were Dacian kings, but the last of these, Decebalus, took his own life when his forces were overwhelmed by the Roman Emperor Trajan in A.D. 106. When the Emperor Aurelian withdrew from Dacia in A.D. 271 a long period of chaos followed until the separate principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia emerged in the fourteenth century. These to principalities merged under A.I. Cuza in 1859 and he may be said to be the first prince of Romania. His reign, however, was brief; he was deposed, and in 1866 Prince Charles de Hohenzollern Sigmaringen, an officer in the Prussian army, was elected Prince of Romania. He was crowned king in 1881. His descendant, King Michael, abdicated in 1947, so the reign of the Hohenzollern kings may be said to be a comparatively brief one. (pp 15-16) (more…)