Every century in human history has been eventful, and the twentieth century has been no exception. While some of these events failed to sustain their topical appeal, others have left their indelible imprint on the sands of time.
On December 17, 1903, two American brothers, Orville and Wilbur Wright, became the first humans to fly a powered aircraft, called The Flyer’, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, USA. For reasons well known to all of us, the world has not been quite the same since. But perhaps even more remarkable than the effect it has had on various spheres of human activity, including economics, travel, warfare and exploration, is the crucial role it has played in bridging distances geographically and breaking down psychological barriers between nations and races. The globalised world we see today would have been impossible without the aeroplane.
Image Source: capmembers.com
ADVERTISEMENTS:
Is there anyone in the civilised world who, sometime in the course of his life, has not taken recourse to antibiotics? Antibiotics have become so much a part of our everyday lives that we take it pretty much for granted. Very few of us even care to know when it all started.
In the late summer of 1928, a Scottish bacteriologist named Alexander Fleming returned to work after a holiday to find that a dish of bacteria he had left uncovered had gone mouldy, and that in the process, the mould had killed the bacteria. The mould was identified as ‘penicillium notatum’. Thereafter, penicillin was to become the world’s first antibiotic, a capacity in which it has saved millions and millions of lives.
We all know that August 15, 1947, marks a milestone in Indian history, but how many of us are aware of the wider implications of India’s independence? Besides generating a major wave of decolonisation that freed much of the world from European oppression, it heralded a vital breakthrough in the way protest movements could be conducted, establishing the feasibility of Satyagraha, or resistance to tyranny through mass civic disobedience inspired by the principle of ahimsa or total non-violence.
This novel style of campaigning found adherents all around the globe. Martin Luther King and James Lawson in America, Nelson Mandela in South Africa, Benigno Aquino Jr in the Philippines and Aung San Suu Kyi in Myanmar are among the many leaders of international stature who have followed the Indian model, though they sometimes made their own modifications.
ADVERTISEMENTS:
The very fact that, as recently as on June 15, 2007, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution declaring Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday as ‘The International Day of Non-Violence’ is eloquent testimony to the contemporary relevance of a way of fighting that draws its strength not from physical might but from moral force.
The Wright brothers taught us to fly and introduced an exciting new dimension into our lives; penicillin brought us back from the dead, as it were; and the struggle for India’s independence helped us, and a good many of our brothers and sisters across this planet, to enter a new life of freedom, self-respect and human dignity.
Not only will these be recorded in golden letters for posterity, but there are no better examples to show that there is more to human life than just living—if we can break out of the shell of our ordinariness, there is a higher, more meaningful existence waiting to welcome us.