Alice and Wonderland
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RANI GAIDINLIU:THE LESSER KNOWN FREEDOM FIGHTER

Rani Gaidinliu joined the freedom struggle at 13 &was sentenced to life imprisonment at 16."We r free people—the White should not rule over us.”Thus calling out to her Zeliangrong tribesmen was the voice of 13yr-old Rani Gaidinliu.

She joined the freedom struggle in the present-day Northeast India. Today, her struggle is lost in history as most of her countrymen wouldn’t even have heard her name. B'coz our history textbooks tell us that only Mahatma Gandhi &Pandit Nehru got India its Independence.

At 16 yrs of age, this valiant girl was sentenced to life imprisonment for leading a movement to drive out the colonial rulers from Manipur and Nagaland. Nevertheless, she was released in 1947 after India’s independence and was given the title ,"Rani of Nagas".

EARLY LIFE AND HERAKA MOVEMENT

Gaidinliu belonged to the Rongmei clan of the Zeliangrong tribe in the Tamenglong district of western Manipur. Born on January 26, 1915, she was fifth among eight children.

Her native village was Nungkao, which is present day Tamenglong distt. Brought up in a specially backward region,she couldn't receive any formal education. However,this didn't stop her from joining the freedom struggle. At the age of 10 she came under the influence of her cousin.

Light travels at about 1 foot per nanosecond.

Hold your hand up 12 inches from your face: you’re seeing your hand as it was a nanosecond ago. Everything you look at is, to one degree or another, in the past. The farther away in space, the more ancient in time.

You can’t see the Sun as it is now, but you can see it as it was about 8 minutes ago. You can’t see Alpha Centauri now, but you can see it 4.4 years ago. You can see the Andromeda Galaxy as it was 2.5 million years in the past. And so on.

With powerful telescopes, we can see galaxies whose light has been traveling to us for more than 13 billion years. We see them shining in a universe that’s still young, where gravity has just begun to pull matter together into stars and galaxies.

We can see something even more distant, and more ancient, than the first galaxies. If we peer out far enough, in between the galaxies, we can see parts of the Universe that are so far away, it has taken the light from that distance almost the entire age of the cosmos to reach us.

#TodayInHistory Ram Prasad Bismil,Ashfaqullah Khan and Roshan Singh are hanged in 1927, as they give up their life for the cause of freedom and inspire many a revolutionary. #LestWeForget

Shahjahanpur was a hub of revolution during the freedom struggle. Most of the revolutioaries in the North, were from this town. And among them, the most famous were two friends, whom destiny would bring together- Ram Prasad Bismil and Ashfaqullah Khan.

Ashfaqullah Khan was born at the turn of the 20th century on October 22, while Bismil was born 3 years earlier on June 11, in the same town. Both of them were excellent writers in Urdu and Hindi.

Both of them would come together under the Hindustan Republican Association, not to mention the fact that Ashfaq was an admirer of Bismil’s poetry, and became close friends with him on that account.

And both these men were hanged on the same date, December 19, 1927 for their involvement in the Kakori event. Two men from different religions, different backgrounds, yet destiny would bring them together.