Sunday, December 04, 2005

Rewriting history or telling the truth?

History doesn't always tell the complete story of an event. Especially, if that event occurred at a place where history is what the ruling elite make it to be.

In October of this year, I came across an article that really made me to think about how history is written. It made me wonder whether we always hear the truth in history or just the side of the story which the rulers then wanted their people to hear. I published this particular article then in my now defunct yahoo 360 page. Since this blog of mine has got a wider audience than my old blog....I'm reproducing it down here....Shamelessly....with some changes...

Today I came across a very interesting link that one of my friends sent me that dealt with the first recorded human flight. I'm re-producing a part of the article that was published in Deccan Herald , an English daily from southern India,two years back. It follows as below....

"Flying high Hundred years after Orville Wright's first flight, K R N SWAMY remembers Shivkur Bapuji Talpade, the Indian who flew an unmanned aircraft, eight years before Wright.Orville Wright demonstrated on December 17th 1903 that it was possible for a 'manned heavier than air machine to fly'. But, in 1895, eight years earlier, the Sanskrit scholar Shivkar Bapuji Talpade had designed a basic aircraft called Marutsakthi (meaning Power of Air) based on Vedic technology and had it take off unmanned before a large audience in the Chowpathy beach of Bombay. The importance of the Wright brothers lies in the fact, that it was a manned flight for a distance of 120 feet and Orville Wright became the first man to fly. But Talpade's unmanned aircraft flew to a height of 1500 feet before crashing down and the historian Evan Koshtka, has described Talpade as the first creator of an aircraft.


I'm providing the link for the remaining of the article over here... Shivkar Bapuji Talpade

I myself had done some googling over this topic and found some interesting results.( Google )

I'm not saying that all the content in these websites is true , but there can't be smoke without any fire right?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

hay, its called subaltern history and it is really interesting. Allows you to see yourself in a different light!! go ahead and explore...

AK