FREIBURGER ZEITGEISTLITERATURE (Satis Shroff)

Lest We Forget: Auschwitz, Treblinka, Grafeneck (Satis Shroff) It does me good to witness that a Culture of Remembering has sprouted in Germany, France, Switzerland and Austria where the respective museums are doing a great job informing visitors about the World Wars, how people lived and suffered in those terrible days. Young school children are obliged to visit concentration camps, write essays and discuss about these themes. Not a single Abitur class (GCE 'A' level) finishes its final exams without having visited a concentration camp, and discussed about the problems and misery created by the World War I and II, and the National Socialists. Nevertheless, it is scary to feel the fear and anxiety expressed by Hans Sahl (1902-1993) when he wrote: 'More than the onerous task of surviving, my mind is engaged with the thoughts, what'd going to happen to this world that has experienced such things, what will happen to the children who know of the holocaust through h...

Review: THE GURKHAS (Satis Shroff)Review: The World Beyond the Mountains (Satis Shroff) Byron Farwell: The Gurkhas, Penguin 1985, London, 317 pages, ISBN o-14-007569-0 ‘The Gurkhas’ is a history of the finest infantrymen in the world who come from a country where ‘It is better to die than to be a coward,’ and where most bear the name Bahadur, which means ‘courageous,’ and who carry out their mission with the help of the deadly, curved kukris. ‘Ayo Gurkhali!’ Here come the Gurkhas! Is a battlecry that makes their enemies in battle wince, and sometimes abandon their weapons to save their dear lives. Younghusband marched unopposed into Lhasa on August 3, 1904 with his Gurkhas. During the Falkland War the Argentines fled when they realized that they were being outflanked by the Gurkhas. Byron Farwell narrative about the Gurkha battalions and their military engagements are enhanced by citations from the books on the same, making it a jolly reading material. The readability score is g...

Fictional Shortstory:  TWO WORLDS (Satis Shroff) I look at the Himalayas and feel peace and joy sweeping over me. I don’t see the valleys, spurs, tarns we learn about at school. I see the eternal snows as the home of Gods and Goddesses: Shiva, Parvati, Meru, Kailash, Annapurna and Sagarmatha. At home I lived in a Hindu world in a house that is actually a two-storied bungalow. At school I inhabited a western-oriented, Catholic world. My Mom said that the Ganges river, also known as Ganga, was brought from Heaven by the sage Bhagirath. Ganga was received by Shiva on his head, and from her mouth flows the water to the earth, down the Ganges delta. But my Irish teacher said the Ganges has its origin in a Himalayan glacier. One was mythology, I was told, and the other was Geography and I had to learn to keep the two apart. Growing up was learning to live in two worlds, two cultures, two languages, norms and values, and sometimes I was muddled up in my thoughts. Why was I scared when I s...