Bhagat Singh: The most misunderstood freedom fighters of India.

Many people know Bhagat Singh as a fearless freedom fighter and many put his photo as their profile pictures. But none of them have not tried to understand his opinions, ideas, and ideologies. 

Important unknown facts of the Bhagat Singh: 

• When you hear the name 'Bhagat Singh', many may think  like weapons and violence. But Bhagat Singh was considered a fierce intellectual of his time. Most of his lifetime, he had a book in his hand. He had studied British, European, American, Russian literature at deep. Some estimates that he had read over 250 books before being arrested. And in the two years he spent in jail, he read more than 300 books. 

• Bhagat Singh was also renowned for his prose for his writing. His articles were published in magazines of that time such as Kirti, Akali, Veer Arjun and Pratap. Bhagat Singh was an intellectual of the very best order. 

• People are happy to project an intellectual revolutionary like Bhagat Singh as a trigger-happy rebel. But Bhagat Singh had said that, "Bombs and pistols cannot bring revolution. Revolution's sword is sharpened on thoughts and peace."

• Bhagat Singh was very influenced by Marx, Lenin, and Socialist ideologies. It pained him when he saw how society treated farmers, laborers, factory workers. It is for these burdened folks that he wanted to fight. 

• Most of our freedom fighters prioritized getting freedom from the British Raj and they debate on Social Justice. Exploitation is exploitation and it does not matter who the exploiter is, Whether it is a Britisher or an Indian. It does not matter who rules or is in power.He wants  farmer and a laborer, should get desire life. 

• Bhagat Singh thought that political revolution was unavoidable in India at that time. But his ultimate objective is socialist revolution. Even he had a revolutionary party called "Hindustan Socialist Republican Association."

• He had raised three slogans.

            Long Live the Revolution! (Inquilab Zindabad)

            Workers of the World Unite.

            'Down with Imperialism'.

 

            During his trials, he raised the slogan like,

 

            "Long Live Socialist Revolution".

            "Down with Imperialism". 

            "The entire earth is a family". 

• Bhagat Singh accepts many of the Nehru's ideologies, and he called Subhash Chandra Bose an emotional Bengali and said that he romanticized India's beauty.

•  Mahatma Gandhi was promoting the Indian version of secularism and on the other hand, Bhagat Singh believed in the French version of secularism. Where there needs to a distance between the Government and religion always.

• He is an Atheist and asked if God created this world why this much pain. He indicated so much injustice, so much pain and suffering in the world, not to name it as a pleasure of a god. 

• Here Bhagat Singh talks about the Theory of Jurisprudence. He believes strongly that revenge as justice is a very outdated idea. That revenge is that the thanks to the justice is an ideology best within in the past. On the other side, the Theory of Punishment where someone is punished for their crime, is also an ideology that is slowly removed from the world. The third is a Corrective theory, which is slowly being accepted within in the world now. It is necessary for human to move on. The corrective theory says that if someone has harmed someone, he should be reformed and converted into a peace-loving citizen. 

Disaster life of Nikola Tesla

When you think about the histories greatest inventors of all time, there are only a few names that come to our mind. However, there's one name that is not as recognizable. 

On January 7, 1943 a female servant working at the New Yorker Hotel walked into room 3327, where she found the body of an 86 year old man.

Tesla died alone and broke. One of the greatest inventors of all time washed out into darkness and died penniless. 

Why?

Tesla was born in the town of Smiljan in present day Croatia on July 10, 1856.

As a child, he began seeing visions accompanied by flashes of light and he was unclear what was real and what was imaginary. The vision motivated his ability to think inventions in his head in such detail that he didn't even need to draw them out. 

In 1919, he said, "Invariably, my device works as I conceived that it should and the experiment comes out exactly as I planned it."

Tesla credits his mom for his interest in the invention. She invented small household appliances in her spare time and she passed this on to her son. 

He went to study in Austria at the Technical College in Graz, where he is  said to have worked from 3 am until 11 pm every day. 

Tesla had a beautiful mind. His brain was too active he can analyze and do mathematics in his mind itself and surprisingly he can speak eight languages. He was a good student at the start but would not finish school.  

He became uncontrolled to himself even addicted to the gambling and cut ties with his family and friend. So they wouldn't find  out.

Tesla moved around Europe and eventually ended up in Budapest working as an electrician at a telephone company and he had an epiphany about developing a new way of generating electricity using alternating current.

In 1882, he came Paris to work for the French branch of Thomas Edison's electrical company. The  managers noticed his talents and recommended him to the Edison at "The Edison Machine Works" in New York City.

Edison

In the year 1884, Tesla arrived in America with only four cents in his pocket because his money was stolen on the boat ride over.

Edison was  impressed by Tesla, later saying: "I have had many hard-working assistants but you take the cake."

This mutual admiration didn't last. They would become bitter rivals. Edison preferred Direct Current(DC) but Tesla was a fan of  Alternating current (AC). Reason is  AC powers can supply a current, our whole homes and other large appliances whereas DC powers smaller items like flashlights. But Edison didn't care about AC because it could have hurt the  sales of direct current since he owned all the patents for DC. 

According to Tesla, Edison offered him a $50,000 bonus if he could improve some machines that ran on DC. When he did,  Edison refused to pay up. So, Tesla quit and set off to form his own electrical company the following year in 1885.

But his investors showed little interest and decided to take the company and all of Tesla's patents which they could do because Tesla had assigned the patents to the company in exchange for stock which was now worthless. 

After losing his company, Tesla had to take a many small jobs for two dollars a day just to survive. As a turning point in his life and in the world invention's history, In 1887, Tesla invented an induction motor that ran on alternating current.  

Tesla licensed the patents for the AC motor to Westinghouse for $60,000 and also received stock and royalties. Westinghouse hired him as a consultant for $2,000 a month. 

The war of the currents began. Edison tried hard to try to discredit Westinghouse and Tesla. 

Edison's company attempted all the can to stop Tesla and his AC current and they even publicly tortured animals to prove its point. In 1903, they electrocuted a circus elephant named Topsy and produced a film about it called Electrocuting an Elephant. 

Westinghouse and Tesla underbid Edison and his newly formed company General Electric to illuminate the World's Colombian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. The first all-electric fair celebrated the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's discovery of America. According to the report, there were 27 million people who attended that AC and understands AC will power the future. Their success continued when they beat out Edison's General Electric again to build the world's first alternating current power plant in Niagara Falls. 

Westinghouse and Tesla won the war of the currents and direct current was being phased out.  

But there were problems. Westinghouse's company was running out of money and eventually went $10 

Million into debt. In 1897, he went to Tesla and asked if his royalties could be reduced in a desperate attempt to save the company. 

Tesla willingly walked away from $12 million in royalties which in today's terms would be worth over $300 million. 

In return, Westinghouse paid Tesla $216,000 for the rights to use  AC patents forever. With that money, Tesla became financially independent and set up a series of laboratories in New York for new projects. 

This was his period of many inventions and he got over 300 patents for his inventions. Some of them are: 

• The Tesla turbine.
• Bladeless turbine for vehicles. 
• He pioneered x-ray technology by experimenting with radiation. 
• In 1898, he controlled a miniature boat at Madison Square Garden in New York.
• One of his most significant inventions is the Tesla coil. It is a tool that changed the entire history, which  can produce large amounts of  high voltage electricity. 
•  Early version of neon lighting.

Tesla's dream was to bring wireless communication to the world and built a massive wireless transmission station in Long Island, New York called Wardenclyffe Tower. 

He imagined a world where we can send and receive messages wirelessly. But financial supporters didn't give enough support to his project.  He had no choice he decided to abandon his dream project in the year of 1905. 

Tesla's mental health become worse. He lived his last decade in the New Yorker Hotel begins in 1933 and died in debt. 

He wasn't concerned about money. His aim was to about the pursuit of science for the betterment of humanity.   

What is Tulsa Race Massacre?

Joe Biden has made a history, the first sitting U.S. President in 100 years to visit the site of a massacre. Tulsa Massacre is where a mob of  a white American slaughtered hundreds of black Americans. 

Joe Biden visited the greenwood cultural center in Tulsa Oklahoma. it was at this site where almost 300 black Americans were brutally murdered by a white mob. This Tulsa race massacre or The Tulsa Race riot happened on 31st of May and the 1st of June 1921. 

What triggered this massacre? How did it spread why was it suppressed in American history? How does it echo in today's America?

In 1921, May 31st until the afternoon of June 1st a violent mob of Tulsa's white residents killed hundreds of black Americans and left their locality in ashes. This happened in greenwood a flourishing black dominated neighborhood that had sprung up at the start of the 20th century. 

It was separated by a railroad track from the city's white dominated part in the south the neighborhood's progress and prosperity stalked grudge among Tulsa's white residents, racial stress began to surface.

On May 30, 1921 it reached a tipping point a black man named "Dick Rowland" was imprisoned for allegedly assaulting a white woman. 

The next day an inflammatory report in the Tulsa Tribune motivated a confrontation between black and white armed mobs by the morning of June 1st the whiter's had looted and burned down the Greenwood area, leaving 300 dead in the violence and  left nearly 10,000 homeless some of the whiter's were assisted by city officials who irrespectively shot black people on the streets and according to the official  report  planes from above dropped dynamite on the neighborhood. 

The black Americans who survived this were imprisoned and sent to confinement camps. For eight decades the massacre was almost mentioned in newspapers, school textbooks and governmental conversations. 

It entered American history books recently after the  2001 report by the Tulsa race commission revealed how the massacre was actively covered up and how Tulsa city officials hide the bloodbath and shifted the narrative by calling it a riot and blame the black community for what went down. 

It's happened  a hundred years ago, still there has been no justice, no responsibility and no compensation to the victims. 

U.S President Joe Biden wants to destroy the decades of this injustice,  he went to Greenwood on Monday to meet the survivors.

Isn't any different in today's America,

• One in every 10 black men in his 30s is in jail.  
• Nearly 72.4 percent of  black students attend a high poverty school.
• An average black worker earns just 62 percent of an average white worker.
• And 28 percent of those killed by the police in 2020 were black Americans.

The Tulsa massacre continues to echo in America in different forms.