#NationalSportsDay in India commemorates the birthday of Major Dhyan Chand, one of the finest sportspersons the country has ever produced.
Did you know despite winning three Olympic Golds, his best match was none of those games and was instead played on Indian soil?
Back in those days, the Beighton Cup was the ultimate achievement for hockey players and Dhyan Chand said it was his "life's ambition" to win the coveted trophy for his home team Jhansi Heroes.
In his autobiography 'Goal', Dhyan Chand noted that the 1933 Beighton Cup final against Calcutta Customs was the best match he ever played. In a keenly contested affair, the Jhansi team won by a solitary goal scored by the wizard himself.
One of the most memorable anecdotes was shared by his son Ashok Kumar. Dhyan Chand toured New Zealand in 1926. In a match, his stick broke and he threw it away. Close to 5 decades later, when his son went to NZ, a man showed a splinter of wood collected from Dhyan Chand's stick.
His wizardry in the Olympics are already stuff of legends. Yet, one of his most cherished moments actually came a year before the Berlin Olympics, when the contingent toured Australia. Don Bradman paid them a visit and graciously agreed to pose with the team for a photograph.
This #NationalSportsDay, our humble tribute to the original GOAT, one of the earliest truly global sporting sensations of the country.
This statue is from his hometown, Jhansi.
On #NationalSportsDay2020, here's a plug to a new exciting franchise-based sporting league in the offing.
On this day in 1869, #MahatmaGandhi was born in Porbandar, Gujarat.
In 1982, Richard Attenborough's film 'Gandhi' raked in eight Oscars. The film had an ensemble cast and crew, even in lesser roles. Many were already famous and many became legends in the years to come.
THREAD:
In 1962, Motilal Kothari, while working for the Indian High Commission in London, asked Richard Attenborough whether he would direct a film on Gandhi. He got Mountbatten to have a word with Jawaharlal Nehru who agreed with the script. The film is dedicated to all three of them.
Nehru's choice for the role of Gandhi was Alec Guinness. Peter Finch, Harvey Finney, Anthony Hopkins and even Dustin Hoffman were considered at one point of time. The role finally went to a certain Krishna Pandit Bhanji. Ben Kingsley, as he was better known, won an Oscar for it.
#OnThisDay in 1962, 'Silent Spring', one of the most influential books of all time, was published. It takes its title from the ruinous imagery of John Keats' 1819 ballad 'La Belle Dame sans Merci'.
A Thread:
By the early 1960s, Rachel Carson was not an unknown author. Having trained as a biologist, she joined the US Fish and Wildlife Service. In 1951, she published 'The Sea Around Us' which was a bestseller.
+
She would spend much of the next ten years focussing on harmful effects of pesticides and this is how she came across a newfound antagonist.
DDT had been around for quite some time. During the days of World War II, it was used to treat malaria.
September 26, 1983. Stanislav Petrov, a lt. colonel in the Soviet Strategic Air Defence Forces, stations himself as the duty officer at the command centre of Oko, a brand new early warning system built to detect any nuclear attack from the US.
+
It's half past midnight. All of a sudden, the warning light comes on. A siren starts screaming. This means a missile has been launched from US. A second warning light appears and the siren screams of another missile. Then a third, a fourth, a fifth. The writing is on the wall.
+
Everyone in the room freezes for a while. Petrov finds himself in a dilemma. He has clear orders, i.e., pick up the phone and order an appropriate response. The window of reaction is so small that if a split second passes, there might not be any missile bases left in USSR.
Last week we added 13 questions from each of the 13 editions of the Indian Premier League, at #IndiaGyanKaBhandar to make #IndiaKnowledgeKaSuperpower.
The D-Day has come. As the nation gears up for the first match of #IPL2020, let's take a look at the answers of those questions:
2008
Which cricketer was CSK’s preferred choice for the role of skipper whose decision to represent the city he was brought up ultimately resulted in MS Dhoni being roped in as the most expensive player in the inaugural edition?
@Bazmccullum scored a mammoth unbeaten 158 runs in the very first match of the tournament. However, who was the first Indian to score a century in IPL?
Answer: @im_manishpandey, then 19-year old, while playing for RCB against Deccan Chargers.
Rome won the bid to host the 1908 Olympics. London took over hosting duties as the Italian government had to divert funds to the reconstruction of the city of Naples. The obstacle: Mt. Vesuvius erupted in April 1906. For Italians, April truly turned out to be the cruellest month.
The New York Times noted that the Neapolitans were rather glad. They said the eruption of Vesuvius was in preparation for the arrival of King Edward, who left Marseilles on April 3 on the royal yacht Victoria and Albert, accompanied by Queen Alexandra and were due a visit.
+
The King and Queen did indeed visit Naples while the clean up operation was underway and later made a cash donation to aid recovery.
However, Queen Alexandra's tryst with Italy and the Olympics did not end here.
From an unresolved mystery at a hotel in Mussoorie inspiring her debut novel to the adaptation of her long running play 'The Mousetrap', let us navigate through the many Indian connections of the Queen of Crime!
Summer of 1911: Frances Garnett-Orme, a British spiritualist, arrived at Mussoorie's Savoy. She was followed by another spiritualist, E. Mountstephen. One day, while Eva had gone to Lucknow, Frances was found dead, with traces of poison. Eva went scot-free due to lack of evidence
The case intrigued the British populace in India and it reached Rudyard Kipling who sent the details of the mystery to his friend Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The facts of the case were passed on to Agatha Christie and the case was fictionalized into 'The Mysterious Affair at Styles'.