“𝒯𝒽ℯ 𝓊𝓃𝒾𝓉𝓎 ℴ𝒻 ℐ𝓃𝒹𝒾𝒶 𝒽𝒶𝓈 𝒷ℯℯ𝓃 𝒶𝓃𝒹 𝓈𝒽𝒶𝓁𝓁 𝒶𝓁𝓌𝒶𝓎𝓈 𝒷ℯ 𝒶 𝓊𝓃𝒾𝓉𝓎 𝒾𝓃 𝒹𝒾𝓋ℯ𝓇𝓈𝒾𝓉𝓎.” Devguru and Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore.
Source acknowledgment: Gandhi and Tagore portraits based on public-domain images; Indian Army insignia referenced from official Indian Army sources. Montage created for editorial/blog use.
Five prerequisites mark the path to appreciating the cohesion of Bharat’s diversity as applied universal humanism, through the jaikara battle cries of the Indian army’s infantry regiments.
1. Definitions of war cry, battle cry, and jaikara.
2. A look at regiment and battalion.
3. Infantry regiments. Class composition of the Indian army regiments and battalions.
4. Class composition of the Indian army regiments and battalions.
5. An explanation of jaikaras in general before viewing them by —
Book Review by Doug Livermore in The Drop, Special Forces Association
A Landmark Study in the Birth of Modern Unconventional Warfare
James Stejskal delivers a masterful exploration of the origins of modern special operations and unconventional warfare. Far from being another biographical treatment of T.E. Lawrence, this exceptional work examines the collective efforts of the British Military Mission (BMM) that operated in the Arabian Peninsula during World War I, revealing how a small cadre of irregular warfare specialists pioneered tactics and operational concepts that would shape military doctrine for generations to come…
Stejskal brings unique credibility to this historical analysis. As a former U.S. Army Special Forces officer who served thirty-five years as a “Green Beret” and CIA case officer, he understands unconventional warfare not merely as an academic concept but as a lived reality… His career included two tours with the elite Special Forces Berlin unit during the Cold War, where he conducted clandestine operations behind potential Warsaw Pact lines, and later service with the CIA in numerous high-risk environments worldwide…
“Iran is that desolate expanse, dotted with oases towns, that the Sassanid called Eransahr, their dominion, ruled mostly through history by non-Persian races, Each one of these invaders …, since the dawn of human memory, has left behind their cultural imprint on a vast desert wasteland we still call Iran, where they rode from oasis to oasis to occupy territory, 𝓉𝒽𝒶𝓉 𝓌ℯ𝓈𝓉ℯ𝓇𝓃 𝓈𝒸𝒽ℴ𝓁𝒶𝓇𝓈 𝓂𝒾𝓈𝓉𝒶𝓀ℯ𝓃𝓁𝓎 𝒾𝓂𝒶ℊ𝒾𝓃ℯ 𝓉ℴ 𝒷ℯ 𝓉𝒽ℯ 𝒶𝓃𝒸ℯ𝓈𝓉𝓇𝒶𝓁 𝒽ℴ𝓂ℯ𝓁𝒶𝓃𝒹 ℴ𝒻 𝓉𝒽ℯ𝒾𝓇 𝓂𝒶𝓀ℯ-𝒷ℯ𝓁𝒾ℯ𝒻 𝒜𝓇𝓎𝒶𝓃 𝓇𝒶𝒸ℯ. One month into American bombings, Iran is at that forever twilight moment in the immensity of time through which its rulers have carved their remarkable journeys in the ‘wasteland’ of civilizations from one oasis to another…”
𝐙𝐎𝐑𝐀𝐖𝐀𝐑 𝐀𝐍𝐃 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐋𝐎𝐒𝐓 𝐆𝐎𝐃𝐒. Written by Abeer Kapoor, illustrated by Ujan Duttta, Reviewed by Dr. Azam Gill, in Different Truths, Jan 31, 2026
ZORAWAR AND THE LOST GODS, an exhilarating, novel, written by Abeer Kapoor and illustrated by Ujan Duttta, was published in 2025 by Bloomsbury. Reviewed by Dr. Azam Gill, in Different Truths
ZORAWAR’s distinctive identity notwithstanding, its illustrious pedigree is traceable to Rudyard Kipling and T. N. Murari. Kipling’s KIM, came out in 1901, and T. N. Murari’s distinguished sequel, THE IMPERIAL AGENT, in 1987. Both novels are as exciting as they are thought-provoking, grounded in history from 1901 to the eve of India’s partition and independence. Murari boldly shepherded Kipling to continue Kim’s character development under the pressures of his English ancestry, vagrancy in the streets of Lahore, the intelligence bureau’s grooming and, the dilemma of clashing ideologies of Independence and Partition.
ZORAWAR’s active timeline on the eve of the First World War is close to that of KIM’s. Abeer Kapoor adroitly deals with the unbridled greed driving the East India Company (EIC) and Crown Rule. William Dalrymple’s ANARCHY, a history of the EIC, cherishes the same theme. It opens with the irony of the Indian word loot, appropriated and enacted by the EIC with moral alacrity and single-minded ruthlessness, refined and delivered to Crown Rule after the failed 1857 Revolt. ZORAWAR laudably wields prose and plot structure to make its point without recourse to dealing a victim card. Devoid of subjective adjectives or attributes, the narrative engenders a refreshing liberty in the reader to adjust the story within a chosen moral framework, if so desired.
Zorawar Khan strips bare the Raj’s devious “𝓓𝓮𝓹𝓪𝓻𝓽𝓶𝓮𝓷𝓽 𝓸𝓯 𝓽𝓱𝓮 𝓡𝓮𝓬𝓵𝓪𝓶𝓪𝓽𝓲𝓸𝓷 𝓸𝓯 𝓦𝓮𝓪𝓵𝓽𝓱” which loots priceless Indian treasures. History, spies, nationalists and emperor Ashoka’s Navratan, or The Nine Unknown, astrology and secret resistance societies interlock to echo Kipling’s KIM. Thrilling scenes and counterfactual twists enhance the historical reality of colonial greed
ℐ𝓃 𝓅ℴℯ𝓉𝓇𝓎, ℐ 𝓈𝓅ℯ𝒶𝓀 𝓉𝒽ℯ 𝓉𝓇𝓊𝓉𝒽..” Dr. Roopali Sircar 𝐆𝐚𝐮𝐫, poet, novelist, writer, editor, conservationist and social justice activist.
And yet, her sparkling and fructuous memory, complements Twain’s nugget of wisdom.
𝐃𝐫. 𝐆𝐚𝐮𝐫 𝐬𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐞𝐬.
“Propelled by my father, I began writing poetry three decades ago. The intense grief of his sudden death stirred me. Like the monsoon rain, 𝓌ℴ𝓇𝒹𝓈 𝓅ℴ𝓊𝓇ℯ𝒹 𝒾𝓃. And as the years turned pages, my poems began to tell stories embracing the world around me. The poems trace the development of my mind as I grew to understand 𝓈ℴ𝒸𝒾𝒶𝓁 𝒶𝓃𝒹 𝒽𝒾𝓈𝓉ℴ𝓇𝒾𝒸𝒶𝓁 𝒾𝓃𝒻𝓁𝓊ℯ𝓃𝒸ℯ𝓈 𝒶𝓃𝒹 𝒸ℴ𝓃𝓃ℯ𝒸𝓉𝒾ℴ𝓃𝓈.
“𝓑𝓻𝓮𝓪𝓴𝓲𝓷𝓰 𝓼𝓽𝓮𝓻𝓮𝓸𝓽𝔂𝓹𝓮𝓼 is the natural outcome of my poetic oeuvre. War, widowhood, myths, rural folk, contemporary social conditions are some of the themes that haunt this volume. The poems in this volume are my spontaneous response to life’s true happenings. You may find the 𝓼𝓪𝓽𝓲𝓻𝓮 and 𝓲𝓻𝓸𝓷𝔂 sometimes difficult to bear. 𝓒𝓸𝓷𝓯𝓵𝓲𝓬𝓽 and 𝓿𝓲𝓸𝓵𝓮𝓷𝓬𝓮 have, historically, and in contemporary life, obliterated images of peace.” We are not able to hear the nightingale in the concrete jungle.”
by Dr. Azam Gill, in Different Truths, September 7, 2025
Version 1.0.0
“The 9/11/2001 attack on New York’s Twin Towers spawned industrial-scale conspiracy theories anchored in the victims’ suffering and public wrath, attributing malafide premeditation to the ineffectualness of intelligence analyses. The hijackers of the 9/11 attack on civilians in the Twin Towers, weaponized themselves, civilian aircraft and their unwitting passengers. They harvested nearly 3000 dead and thousands more injured, shook the world. The domino effect, disrupted the world order, still tottering in proxy wars of attrition. Maud Quessard & Élie Baranetsa of The Institute of Strategic Research of the French Armed Forces, (IHEDN), believe…”
To check out JADINY Just Another Day in New York, the first counterfactual / alternative history thriller on 9/11, offering a bibliography of 167 references, click here: USA https://shorturl.at/NzLWNUKhttps://shorturl.at/ognqy
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Shubrangshu Roy’s ground-breaking Zara’s Witness has rightly been called “brilliant and original” by Dr. Subhash Kak, researcher, scholar, author, professor and world authority on Indo-European studies and Information Science. In impact, Zara will smile in the company of Bach’s Jonathan Livingstone Seagull, St Exupéry’s The Little Prince, Gibran’s The Prophet and Coelho’s The Alchemist. After the ersatz blossoming of Maharesh Yogi and Ravi Shankar nudged by the Beatles’ self- grafting, this is a breath of fresh air blown from India’s multi-millennial civilization. It tests the reader’s focus and throws a challenge to finish it and, titillating dormant mechanisms fretting over the essentials of Being. Reading Zara is not for the faint-hearted.
Yet, Roy is kind, and in the footsteps of Ezra Pound and Eliot he, too, explains, though not in footnotes but in his End Note, which is worth the wait. Ancient Indic wisdom is often retrieved from an interlocking framework of overlapping stories in which birth, name changes, and mutation predate, exceed and outshine Gabriel Garcia Marques’ adored time travel and, Zara does full justice to that convention, enhanced by the author’s own talent at crafting and orchestrating twists in the meticulous plotting.
Roy has taken “… the four stages of life as per ancient Indic wisdom: the Brahmacharya Ashrama, the Grihastha Ashrama, the Vanaprastha Ashrama and finally the Sannyasa Ashrama” and reversed the order in his courageous undertaking. To fully appreciate the scope of his philosophical intrepidity requires, of course, proportionate courage and fortitude on the part of the reader! Yet, Roy does not hesitate to take icons from popular western culture, strip them to the bone and let them loose to find their own place within the core and expression of his Indic perception.
And at the end of the day, Zara’s Witness is a father’s loving care for his daughter, miles ahead of General Ingles’ Soldier’s Prayer for his son.
My complaints? Why did I have to be submitted to a whole series of eeks, outahs, remembahs, wannas, lotsas outas etc of the ‘hey daddy-O’ hip era? Roy’s plums of peace seek shores of peace where the tired, poor, huddled masses can land, to breathe freely and attain peace for the sum of their existence. Zen, Daddy-O, and thanks for an enriching read!
Published in Different Truths on June 16, 2025. Written by Dr. Azam Gill, author of JADINY: Just Another Day in New York, the only counterfactual historical thriller on 9/11.
Dr. Azam Gill elucidates that fiction reshapes reality — counterfactual and dystopian genres ask ‘what-if’ to warn, teach and reimagine society’s past and future, exclusively for Different Truths.
Dr. Azam Gill elucidates that fiction reshapes reality — counterfactual and dystopian genres ask ‘what-if’ to warn, teach and reimagine society’s past and future, exclusively for Different Truths.
Dr. Azam Gill elucidates that fiction reshapes reality — counterfactual and dystopian genres ask ‘what-if’ to warn, teach and reimagine society’s past and future, exclusively for Different Truths.
“Science and fiction both begin with similar questions: What if? Why? …” – Margaret Atwood, Booker Prize laureate.
The Bard himself took popular tales, asked himself questions, reworked them with plot twists and ‘what-ifs,’ submitted them to his genius, and his renown transcends time and space.
What if Khalid ibn al-Walid had lost to Heraclius at the Battle of Yarmouk in 636 and Abdel Kader had won the Battle of Tours against Charles Martel in 732? What if the Mahrattas had won the Third Battle of Panipat in 1761, Nelson had lost the battle of Trafalgar in 1805, Napoleon had won at Waterloo in 1817 or Confederate General Robert. E. Lee had prevailed at Gettysburg in 1863? How would the world have unfolded then, and where would we have been today?
Or if Hitler had won the war and England had been occupied, as in Robert Harris’s best-selling 1992 novel, Fatherland. The answers to these questions acquire the status of didactic fiction that instructs within an entertaining framework.
to read the full article by Dr. Azam Gill, author of JADINY: Just Another Day in New York, the only counterfactual historical thriller on 9/11, available worldwide.
Azam Gill 