RIFLE RANGE BOY

Christiaan Huygens (1629 - 1695) I always wondered how such a small country as the Netherlands could transform themselves suddenly to a seafaring nation and a superpower from the 17 century onwards. Sieving through its history, one can find that it was paved with many upheavals and uprisings. Lord Burgundy is credited for uniting regions around Holland, Luxemburg and Belgium. Protestants, who were protesting silently against the tyranny of control of the Roman Catholic Church and congregated around the Netherlands, declared themselves as a Republic as the Spanish kingdom became weaker. With superstition and dogma out of the way, with science as the guiding light, the people of the Netherlands prospered. Encouraging citizens to think, speak and not be ostracised for out-of-the-box ideas, scientists prospered. They had entered the golden age of their existence. With advances in science, in particular astronomy and navigational knowhows, they went places. Improvement ...

*Lyrics from Joni Mitchell's ' Big  Yellow Taxi ' It is said that India is the only country that did not persecute its Jews. It is said to be ever embracing other cultures without making compulsions. The Indian civilization view every moment of time of a lifetime as a continuum, a figment of time, a drop in the proverbial in the ocean of milk a.k.a. Milky Way. People may come and people may go. Civilizations and conquerors spring and dissipate but Mother Nature drags on through space. This analogy is succinctly depicted in the history of Mauritius. The inhabitants were leading a peaceful life with their dodo birds and forest. Life was peaceful and the equilibrium was maintained under the auspices of Mother Nature. Civilizations decadent of their own doings, full of disease and ill intentions had to escape their shores, like roaches escaping their hideouts after a whiff of insecticide, started crawling to their shores. Stories like these are too far too many to be ...