Lest We Forget - A short collection of interesting facts and events from history

Many of you would have seen the Hollywood movie “Black Hawk Down”. The movie depicts the events of the Battle of Mogadishu in October 1993 when a unit of the US army sent to extricate the Somali rebel leadership, was ambushed, their helicopters shot down, and had to be evacuated by armoured carriers. It was the result of a major intelligence failure, where the Somali rebels had prior information of US operations that day. What you might know is how 6 years prior to that event, in October 1987 the Indian army found itself in exactly the same scenario during the Battle of Jaffna University in Sri Lanka - An airborne commando operation to extricate the LTTE leadership was ambushed, attacked and then had to be evacuated in a now legendary tank operation. My intention is not to detail out the events of October 11-12, 1987 when the Battle of Jaffna University occurred but to give some interesting facts from it. You can read about the complete battle on Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.or

While a lot has been discussed on the internet on what happened in Afghanistan, as a history enthusiast I cannot refrain myself from adding my thought here - As they say, history often repeats itself and those who don't learn from it are bound to fail. The British learned their lesson in 1842 the Russians in 1989 and the Americans in 2021.   This is precisely what happened in 1840, when the British invaded Afghanistan in the hope of using the divide between the then ruling factions (Barakzai and Sodozai) to have their puppet king installed. The Afghan warlords united against the British and such was the uprising that only 1 man returned from the 15000 strong army from India.   The same happened during the Soviet invasion of 1970s, and the same was repeated now. One very interesting aspect was the fall of Mazar-e-Sharif to the Taliban. This was one of the first cities to fall a few weeks back. Those who have knowledge of the 1990s war in Afghanistan will recall that this city has t

An interesting fact from history (1) - there is a town called Buffliaz on the jammu-srinagar highway in India. It apparently gets the name from the famous Macedonian king Alexander's horse Buceaphalus, who was killed in the battle of Hydapes in 326 BC, and was buried here. The horse was very dear to Alexander, having been with him right from its youth days. ___________________________________________________________________________________ An interesting fact from history (2) - Did you know the sitting Chief Minister of an Indian State was killed when his civilian plane was shot down by Pakistan? The incident happened on 19th September 1965, when Balwantrai Mehta was the Chief Minister of Gujarat. The 2nd Indo-Pak war had started and forces from both sides were engaged in combat throughout the international border. Balwantrai Mehta, his wife and 6 others were in Beechcraft aircraft being flown by Jehangir Engineer, travelling from Mithapur to Kutch. The plane lost its path and ca