Dawn, The Review, sometime in October 2000 In 1719 two powerful nobles entered the Red Fort of Delhi and made their way to the presence of King Farrukh Siyar without permission. They accused the king of plotting against them, and he found himself without the power to remind them that he was the king. A […]
Muhammad Shah “Rangeela” Read More »
Dawn, The Review, sometime in 2000 The face that launched a thousand ships may never have existed for all we know. There are no contemporary records of Helen of Troy, who is sometimes believed to have lived in Greece in the 13th century BC. Excavations at the site of the ancient Troy, now in modern
Dawn, The Review, 5-11 October 2000 Half-Greek, half-Persian and all Egyptian, Cleopatra was a woman who asserted her authority in a man’s world on her own terms. Historians, mostly men, have rarely forgiven her for that, while the fascination she has held for generations is comparable to that of Alexander the Great. A descendant of
Cleopatra – The doomed Pharaoh Read More »
Dawn, The Review, sometime in September 2000 If ever there was a man who lived by the dictates of mind completely ignoring the voice of his heart, it was the Mughal emperor Shahjahan. Ironically, he is best remembered as the lover who built the famous Taj Mahal for his sweetheart. Shahjahan’s life is an interesting
Shahjahan: the rigid ruler Read More »
Dawn, The Review, sometime in September 2000 Sharing a husband with seventeen other wives and several hundreds of slave girls is far from the romantic picture of an all-encompassing love that frames the portrait of Nurjahan in popular stories. However, the fact remains that she was indeed loved by her royal husband in ways unusual
Dawn, The Review, September 7-13, 2000 ‘What’s your sun sign?’ The answer to this question could decide one’s appointment to the civil services in the days of Humayun, if one is to believe the story that he organized his entire administration on astrological elements. According to this account, for instance, the officers belonging to water
Dawn, The Review, sometime in 2000 He was raised like an orphan. Not that his parents were dead, but his father was in exile and the little infant was in the custody of its uncle. A merciless uncle he was, for he had wrung the infant, barely a few months old, from the hands of
Dawn, The Review, August 24-30, 2000 Somewhere around 430 BC in Greece, a man in his mid-fifties completed a medium sized book on which he had been working all his life. The book was about the heroic struggle between his own people, the Greeks, and the mighty empire of the Persians. But this political story
Dawn, The Review, August 10-16, 2000 It would be erroneous to call anyone the father of all knowledge, but if such a title were to be given to a single person, it would have to be Aristotle. This great old man of Greece lived more than 23 centuries ago, but his stamp can still be
Analyzing Aristotle Read More »
Dawn, The Review, July 20-26, 2000. Prince Salim, the would-be emperor Jahangir, is being taken to the gallows for rebelling against his father, the emperor Akbar. He turns around to face a crowd that has gathered, not to see the bloodsport, but out of devotion to the noble prince. “Remember this as my dying wish,”
Unveiling Jahangir Read More »