I wanna read history!
Posted: November 17th, 2010 | Author: Aakash Bapna | Filed under: non-tech | Tags: apple announcement, beatles, history, hitler, holocaust, itunes | 1 Comment »Yes, I want to read history again, the world history. I never thought I would go back to that subject after my school. So how this now?
I mostly read tech related stuff online and offline. Time had never permitted me to look beyond the articles on techcrunch, hackernews, techmeme or twitter. Offline I read the Google Story, then the iCon- Steve Jobs, and more recently the facebook effect.
Like every geek, today I was checking the Internet for the much awaited Apple announcement on blogs, which came to be that iTunes would be selling “The Beatles’ from today. So what the heck? I remember reading in iCon, that Apple had some legal dispute with The Beatles record publishing company over the name Apple.. I knew Beatles were big but how big? they are from 1960s.. why so much fuss about this now? I expected that if they are so old and famous, most fans would likely be owning their records on some media (tapes, CDs) by now.
I quickly googled for The Beatles and added to my knowledge that they were originally from England and have been the most commercially successful rock band in the history. There were 4 band members, 2 of them already died. They are also on the list of TIMES 100 most influential people of 20th century.
This is where it gets interesting.. I clicked on it to discover that Albert Einstein was on top of this list. Runners up were- Mahatma Gandhi(Yay!) and Franklin D. Roosevelt. There was one more interesting reference on the page citing to a letter from Einstein to president Roosevelt suggesting US to start nuclear research. Later Einstein regretted sending this letter, the picture on this special cover of TIMES was of Einstein in ‘immense sadness’ captured by a famous photographer. Thats quite a lot good stuff I read today.. But I wasn’t done yet.
Next on the TIMES top people page was mention of Adolf Hitler and why he didn’t make up to the top 3 on list.. They said that as he was unsuccessful in his endeavors and as the century ended on positive note, they skipped him but he was there on list. Whenever Hitler’s name comes up, there is one word that always tied with it- Holocaust. I knew it was related to mass killing of people, mostly Jew, but didn’t knew the numbers. I opened up the page to it, and boom ! to my shock there were not hundreds,thousands but MILLIONS of Jews killed in the Holocaust. 67% of over 9 million jews were murdered. How they killed them ? I am not even supposed to talk such stuff in my religion.. But this was important- Why did they kill them ? Why some people hate Jews so much?
Eventually I figured out the reasons, but still not satisfied with them, I need to read more.. Reading the history will help me find answers to the stuff I find weird today.
See from where I went- Apple announcement->Beatles->Times top 100->Einstein->Hitler->Holocaust->Jews
(The reason I talked about this in so much detail is that how internet makes it easy to rediscover lost subjects of interest and instantly read about them. But books are books, I can’t really trust something written on Internet, the authors are less known, in most cases its just random people’s views. If you happen to know good books on world history(the early 1900s) do let me know in comments)
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