A DATE WITH HISTORY

History was not my favourite subject in school - blame it on unimaginative teachers, rotten error-riddled NCERT textbooks and to a much lesser extent, my preoccupation with geography....So much so that history and the mandatory civics classes ( people outside CBSE, ever heard of it?) became evil step-sisters who had to be tolerated...

When I became a journalist - toying around with incidents and precedents and patterns -I started re-discovering some bits of the Indian story over the millenium and farther old, only for the realisation to smack me in my face that it wasnt history's fault...it was the way I was introduced to it...

So I went on the overdrive ( typically hyperactive!) making up for lost time and wasted opportunities..

There were so many stories badly told and more often never told in Indian history classes that cheat students of the rich heritage and culture that we alone can lay claim too...

And it couldnt have been more obvious, as I walked through the streets of Westminster in London, where every building had a tale to share....Monuments to every imaginable incident memorable, narrating stories that I barely knew - a monument to commemmorate the War Dead, another to record how the nation weathered the Black Death...and some others...that brought back unpleasant memories( atleast for me) like the one at Marble Arch for General Dyer who was responsible for the Jallianwala Bagh massacre...Guess one person's hero is another's terrorist...

But one person, who has been getting burnt on a stake for a long time now, atleast once a year, for four centuries now, is this Catholic plotter, Guy Fawkes, whose famous Gun Powder plot to assassinate the king was discovered on time...

Now remember, the monarch is a divine figurehead for the Church of England and the Protestanism that its a flagbearer for....(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Windsor_castle_guyfawkesnight1776.jpg)

So with banners that read God Save the King/Queen, in towns across Britain and also across many nations of the Commonwealth ( India is not a part of this league) the Guy Fawkes Day is commemmorated on Nov 5....




This year, I was at the epicentre of the celebrations across Britain, atleast thats what many claim...The Lewes Bonfire.( for more check the link out..(lewesbonfirecouncil.org.uk)

The town of Lewes is quaint, so are the people who have been proudly participating in the parade every year...

Its as if on that day every year, the town quietly hitches a ride on a time machine, to the times when the robes of the gentry and the cassocks of the priests and the beacons of fire were the ways of the world..

And we stood by the pavements, me sipping on some expertly prepared mulled wine (its such a delicious feeling as it goes down your throat)- something to warm the innards as temperature plummeted rapidly soon after the sunlight faded by 5 in the evening...

And soon enough, there poured onto those very stones of the cobbled streets, like it has happened every year for over four hundred years, men, women and children - holding beacons of a proudly guarded tradition, some dressed in costumes that have been handed down generation after generation.....

And many 'Guy Fawkes and his fellow Catholics' were burnt at stake...a throwback to the days of Grand Inquisition and the subsequent Reformation that moulded European history and culture...

Also represented, on the streets in grand processions were clans from every region that Britain has placed her imperial feet on.....

So there were the Zulus and the Indians, the Chinese and the Australian convicts...all the colour of British history spilling out from the pages onto the roads by the light of the fire of the beacons they carried..

And as the flames grew larger, the crowds swelled....My feet cried in protest, we had been standing watching the processions for nearly 5 hours...Some good wine and the frazzled feeling from dodging firecrackers gamefully thrown your way made us decide to call it a day, before the competition of the bonfires began...

I hear its a sight to behold...But I had had my fill of history for the day...watching Lewes ablaze with the emotions and sentiments lovingly treasured over hundreds of years



More Brighton chronicles will follow...For now, enjoy the slideshow of my bonfire...Ill keep it on my blog page till the end of the month...So enjoy the fireworks...