I skipped the anniversaries

I skipped the anniversaries
By Shashi Tharoor
"The Hindu", Online edition of India's National Newspaper
December 18, 2005

The bleak reality as the author writes this last column of the year is the realisation that 2005 will never come back ... .

"In my 26 pieces in this space this year, I have waxed eloquent about a host of subjects ... . But what I have utterly failed to do is to recall ... ."

1955 AND HISTORIC: The opening ceremony of the Asia-Africa Conference in Bandung, Indonesia. PHOTO: AP

MY last column of the year! This should ideally be an occasion to breathe a sigh of relief, to contemplate many weekends well-spent in research and reflection, and to give vent to some idle musings about, say, Christmas pieties or New Year's Eve high-jinks. But I find myself in an invidious position, lamenting the lost opportunities that the tyranny of chronology will forever deny me in this space.
For you see, the stark reality as I write this last column of the year is the realisation that 2005 will never come back. In my 26 pieces in this space this year, I have waxed eloquent about a host of subjects, covering places from Aspen to Auschwitz and themes from books to booklessness. I have talked about the women of Kerala and the children of Hiroshima; I have discussed desi chauvinism and pravasi rootlessness; I have celebrated Einstein and mourned K.R. Narayanan. But what I have utterly failed to do is to recall and commemorate many of the dozens of significant anniversaries that have fallen this year, an excuse to do which will not come again in the foreseeable future.
2005 offered variety

The irony is that this is the easiest course open to the historically-minded columnist: find an event whose centenary, or bicentenary, or jubilee of some sort, falls within the columnist's deadline, and write a piece recalling, extolling, regretting or celebrating the event in question. And what a cornucopia 2005 offered your humble columnist! The 100th anniversary of the battle of Takashima, in which the Japanese defeated the Russians and first opened the eyes of Asian nationalists to the realisation that the invincible white races were actually fallible. If colonialism's end began when its sustaining myths collapsed in the consciousness of the colonised, then 1905 marked the beginning of the end of colonialism. What a column that might have made! Alternatively, of course, I could have celebrated not war but peace, for this year also marked the 100th anniversary of the Japanese-Russian talks at the Portsmouth peace conference convened by U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, an endeavour that won the American (best known for the maxim "speak softly and carry a big stick") his Nobel Prize for Peace. And then there was the Partition of Bengal, Curzon's ill-advised attempt to curb the Swadeshi movement, soon reversed (but resurrected amid the traumas of the definitive Partition of 1947).
But why stop at 1905? I could have hailed the 150th anniversary of the first publication of a masterpiece of literature, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "The Song of Hiawatha". Too precious? Fine, what about the 200th anniversary of the death of Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson, who expired on the deck of his battleship in 1805 with the immortal words to his deputy, "Kiss me, Hardy"? (Revisionists have suggested that what Nelson actually said was more profound, but that the bluff Yorkshireman Captain Hardy did not understand his lordship's philosophical dying words, "Kismet, Hardy".) Remembering Nelson could have prompted a column about the Napoleonic wars, or about the naval magnificence of the British fleet (Britannia used to rule the waves, of course, whereas nowadays she doesn't even waive the rules). Another opportunity missed: kismat, hardly.
History and geography

Or I could have gone back further in history and closer in geography, and written of the death of the Emperor Akbar the Great, exactly 300 years ago in 1605. What an extraordinary figure Akbar was — a man who unified a subcontinent and consolidated an Empire, but who did so with wisdom and sagacity, ruling a diverse people with firmness and tolerance, including a respect for other faiths and other opinions that was truly ahead of his time. Akbar's curiosity about religious belief saw him play host to priests and theologians from around the world, and even to experiment with the creation of a syncretic faith for India, Din Elahi. Much of the pluralist underpinnings of Indian nationalism can be traced back to this Great Mughal who left us three centuries ago. Another column lost.
On wars
But columnists don't even have to think in centuries. Why didn't it occur to me to remark upon the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II, the 50th anniversary of the Bandung Afro-Asian Conference (which led to the birth of the Non-Aligned Movement), the 40th anniversary of the pointless (and infructuous) Indo-Pak war of 1965, the 30th Anniversary of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's declaration of a State of Emergency (which marked a defining moment for the maturation of Indian democracy), the 20th Anniversary of Rajiv Gandhi's historic speech on the occasion of the centenary of the Indian National Congress (when he declared, about the failures of the Indian state, that "the fence was eating the crop"), or even the 10th anniversary of the end of the civil wars in the former Yugoslavia? All of them could have offered convenient launching pads for wise disquisitions infused with the wisdom of hindsight.
Too late, alas, for 2005. But be braced, dear reader, for my attempts to make amends next year. Except for one inconvenient fact: nothing of any great consequence seems to have happened in 1906. Or 1806; or 1406, for that matter ... .