Kaala Prayanam

  During World War I, General Erich Ludendorff   Chief of Army Staff  and his superior   commander of the German Eighth Army on the Eastern Front against Russia,  Paul von Hindenburg controlled German war efforts for the duration of the conflict. His greatest victories included the Battle of Liège and the Battle of Tannenberg. As the war progressed and German defeat neared, Ludendorff resigned his position in October 1918, a month before the country formally capitulated. Later in the war he became a prominent nationalist leader and helped propagate the 'stab-in-the-back myth' of how the war ended. Though he was a nationalist leader and took part in the Beer Hall Putsch, he came to despise Adolf Hitler after he seized power in 1933. The Beer Hall Putsch, or Munich Putsch, was a failed coup attempt  by Nazy Party leader Hitler to overthrow the government  on 8th and 9th November 1923 during the Weimar Republic.  Later Hindenburg became the Pres...

  Astrid Anna Emilia Lindgren was born in Vimmerby City, the seat of Vimmerby  municipality, Kalmar County in Sweden on 14 November 1907. She   is best known for her children's books, most famously including the Pippi Longstocking series. She wrote over 30 books that have been translated into more than 100 languages, making her one of the most widely read authors in the world. Early in her life, Lindgren worked briefly at a local newspaper where she had a relationship with an editor and became pregnant as a teenager. This caused a scandal and led her to move to Stockholm. She began her career as a journalist and secretary before slowly transitioning to authorship. In 1945, Lindgren won a book publishing competition with "Pippi Longstocking," which launched her to fame. The book became an international success and was followed by many other popular series, such as Emil of Lönneberga, Karlsson-on-the-Roof, and the Six Bullerby Children. Throughout her life, Lindgren was an ...

  Robert Michels a German-Italian sociologist theorized the Iron Law of Oligarchy that over time democratic, egalitarian organizations, labor unions, and society tend to be centralized in the hands of a few individuals or groups. In India, for ten years the power had been centered in Prime Minister Modi, and business magnates Gautam Adani and Mukesh Ambani. Now in America, the power is concentrated in President Trump, X's owner Elon Musk, Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Apple's Tim Cook, and Google's chief executive Sundar Pichai. Greek philosopher Aristotle said, "In tyranny, Oligarchy, and democracy if constitutions get corrupt the leadership acts for itself". It makes the leaders neglect the needs and desires of common people. Democracy gets decreased. Autocracy gets strengthened. Citizens need to be careful and vigilant in protecting their rights and freedoms.

  By 1905, the aging Russian autocracy was in terminal decline. Strikes, unrest, and mutiny sprang up across the vast Russian landscape where, for centuries, people had been told that the Tsar was a saintly father figure; inviolable, all-powerful, and divinely appointed. Demonstrations led by Father Georgy Gapon in St. Petersburg on 22 January 1905 helped to shatter this illusion.  Fr. Gapon was a charismatic speaker and effective organizer who took an interest in the working  and lower classes  of the Russian cities.  Tsarist soldiers opened fire on protesters, killing 140 to 240 people and injuring 33 as per official figures. The crowd had been pro-Tsar, carrying pictures and banners of Tsar Nicholas II, and only wished to present a petition to him  calling for reforms such as limitations on state officials' power, improvements to working conditions and hours, and the introduction of a national . This Bloody Sunday or Red Sunday with a series of events sp...

  Marine Le Pen was born on 5 August 1968, 56 years old,  in  a political family  in Neuilly-sur-Seine an urban commune in the Hauts-de-Seine department just west of Paris in France. She is a prominent figure in the French far-right political movement.  Throughout her career, Le Pen advocated for nationalist and protectionist policies, including stricter immigration controls and opposition to globalization. Le Pen joined the National Front in 1986 at the age of 18. She went on to work as a lawyer specializing in criminal law from 1992 to 1998 before being elected as a regional councilor in 1998. On 16 January 2011, Le Pen became the president of the National Front, taking over from her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who founded the party. She led efforts to rebrand the party and distance it from its extremist past, renaming it the National Rally in 2018. Le Pen ran for the French presidency three times, in 2012, 2017, and 2022. In 2017 and 2022, she advanced to the ...

  Diana Frances Spencer was born into the British nobility, the landed gentry on 1 July 1961 in Sandringham Village, Norfolk County, England. The Spencer family had been closely allied with the British Royal family for generations. Diana's relationship with her stepmother was bad. Hence, she described her childhood as very unhappy and unstable. She was a dance instructor and nursery teacher's play group preschool assistant. Became the wife of Charles III, then Prince of Wales, from 1981 until their divorce in 1996. There was a huge age difference between Diana and Charles. Incompatibility and the extramarital relationship of both with others led to their divorce. Their relationship and eventual break up drew enormous media scrutiny around the world. She was the mother of Princes William and Harry. Her activism and glamour earned her international popularity. She supported many charitable causes, notably landmine clearance, social attitude towards and acceptance of AIDS patients...

  Berthe Marie Pauline Morisot   was born on 14 January 1841 in  Bourges, Cher, in Central France. She was  a French Impressionist painter best known for her paintings of everyday life, especially of women and children. She was one of the most important figures in the Impressionist movement. Impressionism was a radical art movement that began in the late 1800s among French artists. The aim of the movement was to portray accurate visual impressions by painting scenes and subjects on the spot. Morisot was born in 1841 in Bourges, France. She grew up in a wealthy family and received private art lessons. While copying paintings at the Louvre museum, Morisot met and became friends with other artists, such as Édouard Manet and Claude Monet. Morisot first showed her work at the Salon de Paris in 1864. In 1874, she joined the Impressionists in their first exhibition and would take part in almost all of the later Impressionist exhibitions until 1886. In 1874, Morisot married ...

  Pamphlet showing some of the potential prizes from the first lottery in England.   The world’s  recorded First National   state lottery  in England was drawn on 11 January 1569 in St. Paul's Cathedral in London. There had been lotteries for centuries but this was the first truly national event.  It was instigated by Queen Elizabeth I   who wanted cash to repair and reconstruct England’s ships, ports and harbours, so boosting trade and at the same time making the country better fit for war,   funding various public projects and infrastructure development, exploration, and the upkeep of the royal court all demanded considerable resources. The Queen’s advisers had told her that the option of a rise in general taxation would be deeply unpopular. This, however, was not to be a lottery for every Tom, Dick or Harry. The cost of a ticket was a hefty ten shillings. That was only half of one pound sterling, but it was a sum beyond the means of most workin...

  David Suzuki is Canada's most well-known scientist and environmental activist. He hosted CBC's "The Nature of Things" from 1979 to 2023. He issued early and constant warnings about climate change. Suzuki trained as a geneticist and became a university lecturer and researcher, including on fruit flies. He began his broadcasting career in 1971 with the CBC TV series "Suzuki on Science." Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) is a public broadcasting service over AM and FM radio networks, television networks, and digital streaming services in English and French. He went on to host the TV show "Science Magazine" and the Radio series "Quirks and Quarks" before hosting "The Nature of Things with David Suzuki" in 1979. Suzuki's 1985 TV special "A Planet for the Taking" won a United Nations environment award and in 1990 he founded the non-profit David Suzuki Foundation aimed at working toward environmental solutions. In...

Carrie Chapman Catt, born Carrie Clinton Lane on January 9, 1859, in Ripon, Wisconsin, USA, was a leader of the women's suffrage movement in the United States. She played a key role in securing women's right to vote through the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.  Catt grew up in Iowa and worked to pay for her own college education. At Iowa Agricultural College, she challenged the rule that only men could speak without preparation in the literary society. After graduation, Catt became a school superintendent at age 26. In 1890, Catt married George Catt. They agreed that he would support them financially so she could focus on reform work. Catt became involved in the suffrage movement and rose to leadership in the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). As NAWSA president, Catt developed the "Winning Plan," which combined state and federal efforts to win voting rights. She led the organization during the final push for the 19th Amendment. It was ratif...

  Marie-Sophie Germain was a French mathematician, physicist, philosopher, and one of the pioneers of elasticity theory. She was also well known for number theory. Women were not permitted to study especially mathematics and sciences. Despite opposition from her parents initially and difficulties presented by society, she gained education from books in her father's library. Her mother secretly supported her studies. She learned through correspondence with famous mathematicians like Joseph Louis Lagrange, Adrien Marie Legendre, and Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss under the pseudonym of Monsieur Le Blanc, the name of a former male student. Fortunately, Lagrange did not mind that Germain was a woman, and he became her mentor. Her paper on the theory of numbers was rejected by the Paris Academy of Sciences because Germain was a woman. She did not stop. She became the first woman to win the Paris Academy of Sciences grand prize for her essay on the theory of elasticity on 8 January 18...

  Croatian Fascist Leader  Ante Pavelić, who was a lawyer initially, founded the fascist ultra-nationalist organization Ustaša while he was in exile in Italy on January 07, 1929, with help from Italian Fascist Dictator Benito Mussolini. Later this movement was known with anglicized versions of Ustase, Ustashe, and Ustasha. To attain their goals Ante Pavelic declared knives, revolvers, machine guns, and atom bombs are the icons. Islam, which had a large following in Bosnia and Herzegovina, was praised by the Ustasa. From its inception and before the Second World War, the organization engaged in a series of terrorist activities against the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, including the assassination of King Alexander I in 1934.   Pavelić allied himself with Nazi Germany, and when they invaded Croatia in 1941, he was selected to lead the puppet government named the Independent State of Croatia. During his rule, the government murdered hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews, Roma populat...

  Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen was a German physicist and professor of physics at Wurzburg Public University, Bavaria. On November 8, 1895, while testing in his laboratory whether cathode rays could pass through the glass, he produced and detected high-energy electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength shorter than that of ultraviolet rays and longer than that of gamma rays. Rontgen took radiation of his wife's hand, which demonstrated the bones of her hand and implied a medical use for the discovery. Mrs Roentgen exclaimed, "I have seen my death."   After 7 weeks of study of their properties, of this new type of radiation able to go through screens of notable thickness,   he reported about these rays in December 1895. These are now known as X-rays or Rontgen rays. This achievement earned him the first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901. A very radioactive element 111, roentgenium, with multiple unstable isotopes, is named after him. Rontgen was born on 27 March 1845 in Lennep, Rhi...

  Reinhard  Heydrich was born on March 7, 1904, in  Halle an der Saale, German Empire. He was r egarded by many historians as the darkest figure in the Nazi elite, Heydrich chaired the Wannsee Conference in 1941 which formalized plans for the deadliest phase of the Holocaust. He directly oversaw the Einsatzgruppen, the Nazi death squads that killed more than a million Jews, and served as the brutal protector of Bohemia and Moravia during the Nazi occupation, earning him the moniker "the butcher of Prague." Heydrich had previously served as the director of the Gestapo from 1934 until 1939, when he took over as the director of the Reich Main Security Office, responsible for rooting out opposition and resistance movements in Nazi territory. So crucial was his involvement in the Holocaust that Adolf Hitler once referred to him as "the man with the iron heart." He was assassinated on June 4, 1942, at the age of 38 in Prague by Czech rebels during Operation Anthropoid.

  Hermann Wilhelm Göring  was  born on January 12, 1893, in  Rosenheim, Kingdom of Bavaria, German Empire. He was  a German politician, Nazi military leader, and convicted war criminal, known as one of the most powerful figures in the Nazi Party which ruled Germany from 1933 to 1945. A decorated World War I fighter pilot ace, he was a recipient of the Pour le Mérite ("The Blue Max") and the last commander of Jagdgeschwader 1, a fighter wing once led by Manfred von Richthofen. As an early member of the Nazi Party, Göring was among those wounded in Adolf Hitler's failed Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. After Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, Göring was named minister without portfolio and oversaw the creation of the Gestapo, Hitler's secret organization. Göring's rise in power made him the second most powerful man in Germany. He held the position of commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe (air force) until the regime's final days and was entrusted with mobilizin...

  On 3 January 1925, Benito Mussolini dissolved the Italian Parliament, proclaimed himself the dictator of Italy, and took the title "II Duce" (The Leader). On that day he spoke dictatorially in the chamber of the deputies. He accepted political, moral, and historical responsibility for the Fascist rule, for the death of the reformist, socialist leader Matteotti, and promised a tough crackdown on dissenters. The king kept quiet without any response. On 4 January 1925, he ordered to control all "suspect" political organisations, to replace elected mayors and councils. Searches, and arrests of the opposition leaders and dissented people were initiated. Elimination of offices and organizations followed. Mussolini disbanded the constitutional, and conventional safeguards against autocracy. He abolished elections, freedom of speech, association, opposition parties, and unions. In 1927 he established spies. All the actions were being executed by the police and the army. F...

  Phoenix Settlement   Tolstoy Farm   Mohanchand Karamchand Gandhi founded two ashrams for community living in South Africa. The Phoenix Settlement was the first ashram-like settlement established near Durban, KwaZulu-Natal in 1904.   This was the home for Gandhi and his family from its founding until his return to India on 9 January 1915.  Tolstoy Farm, the second ashram in South Africa, was  initiated and organized  in Johannesburg in 1910 during his South African Movement.  It  was meant for training and preparing people for non-violent satyagraha and served  f rom 1910 to 1913  as the headquarters for campaigning satyagraha against discrimination against Indians in Transvaal, where it was located. Hermann Kallenbach, a Gandhian supporter, allowed Gandhi and seventy to eighty others to live there as long as their local movement was in effect.   Kallenbach  suggested the name for the community, which soon const...