Everybody wants to rule the world!

Whilst reading through the history of Partition of India, I encountered that the people of Punjab gave a lot of resistance to the Radcliffe's line which carved out a portion of the fertile basin which fed a good portion of India. The idea of 'butchering-off' a piece of the cradle of civilisation of mankind seemed ludicrous. The inhabitants there were proud of their heritage. It is said to be the nidus of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa. It was at the crossroad of civilisation. Its proximity to the Silk Road promoted the meeting of minds of the Persian, Arabic and Chinese think tanks to discuss knowledge of the known and unknown at a physical and metaphysical levels. They had dwelled into many mystic secrets of the Universe.

Forget the fact that by the dawn of Indian Independence, one of its biggest cities, Lahore had more brothels than libraries and its citizens were thinking of their next meal rather than the mystery of the Cosmos, they nevertheless, felt a chip on their shoulder. They felt special.

Come to think of it, many of God's creations have reason to think that they are special. That they are the centre of human refinement and even enlightenment. Inhabitants of Southern Indian are proud of their heritage and claim stake to being the original inhabitants of the Indus Valley who were rudely chased away by less cultured forces who pulverised their advanced way of living. They stand high with their oldest spoken language and fairly old and advanced knowledge of science, medicine and literature. Scrolls of ancient scriptures are proof of their claim.

A bit to the East, the Chinese say they do not have to proof anything. Evidence of their influence to the world is seen nicely in the opening ceremony of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. With their mammoth armada of friendly ships exploring the four corners of the world when the rest of the world thought that Earth was flat like a pancake, their paper, gunpowder, you name it that they introduced to the world and the current resurgence as the biggest economy of the world, they feel that they are the centre of the world!

A bit farther, the Native American takes offence on being 'discovered'. As far as they were concerned, there was nothing to be discovered. In fact the red-hued people were discovered a band of bandits scurrying through their shores with ill-intent on their minds. Their pipe of peace was abused. Just because the travellers took a wrong turning somewhere, the Natives were called Indians. "We had something good going here till intruders came and screwed it up," they said. "We lived in harmony, in tandem, in symbiosis with Mother Nature, respecting each other!"

Further down south, the Aborigines reminisce of a very distant past in their existence way before memory of consciousness to a time when they knew all the phenomenal secrets of the Universe. And intruders came in and destroyed everything, claiming to give us, natives, modernity. They promise to show us a New World!

The visitors, one the other hand, looked at other civilisations with disdain and contempt. They had an urgent need to modernise the natives, bring modernity to their society. They did not want them to be stranded in their age old mumbo-jumbo animistic and pagan beliefs. They wanted them to be saved from eternal condemnation.