Uppal in the 70s

 

Last week on X, I came across a site that took my down the memory lane.

The algo on X came up with a post from @tejamalladi with links to a  Felt Map Archive site presenting declassified satellite pics of Hyderabad starting from the 1960s. Almost immediately, I found myself searching for Uppal, the place where I spent my wonder years, and seeing with varying degrees of awe, amazement and nostalgia, the landscape of my childhood. 

We were in Hyderabad from 1970-1980. Our family stayed briefly at Tilak Nagar and Seetaphalmandi before moving to the Survey Colony at Uppal. In my mind this was the place boundless spaces, a place where children could explore and discover new things everyday, where the seasons were marked by passing obsessions - flying kites, cricket, football, gilli-danda, kancha (marbles), comics, rock-climbing, over and above the anticipation and preparations leading up to annual fete's, exhibitions, and the grand festivals of Holi, Diwali and Makar Sankranti.

The earliest map on this site dates back to 1967, and it is interesting to see how this area of Eastern Hyderabad evolved over the past 60 years:

1967: A stark, barren area marked by two distinct features - a distinct triangular area marked for the Survey of India (SoI) campus, and the dark, worm-like Musi river winding to the south. Maybe this was the time when the government had acquired agricultural land for the Industrial Development Area and residential colonies.

1974: In less than 10 years a lot of developments can be seen - the SoI campus now has its distinct buildings (STI, PMP). The buildings that temporarily housed Kendriya Vidyalaya Uppal (KVU) and the vast grounds have appeared. You can even spot the ber trees and the kutcha road that led to the SoI back-gate, and the huge tamarind tree near the junction. The Survey Colony has also come up - once again vast, barren open spaces crisscrossed by footpaths. This was the time when we used to sleep on the terrace in the summers, and SoI staff were handed out long bamboo sticks to guard against dacoits. The dusty footpaths also took us for our shopping and haircut visits to Uppal village. So many memories pop out from this map - the smell of fresh cowdung and dust, the taste of 'Gandhi' coin mints (5-10p each) from the tiny shops at the junction, the taste of soda from a classmates home bottling unit at Beerappagadda, the collection of prosopis thorns under Hawaii chappals; girgits (chameleons), itchy caterpillars and the stinging bite of black ants; early morning calls from friends in the summers that led to day long tramping around all over the place...

1979: This is how the place looked just before we moved to Trivandrum. A new KVUppal school building came up closer to the SoI Colony. For whatever reason all the children were asked to carry one chair each and walk in a line from the old school to the new one (the benches came by truck). There was a major tree-planting drive with pits dug all over the colony, new fences and boundary walls came up. Within these new boundaries we learnt to ride bicycles in the Kainchi (scissors) method because shorter children's bicycles were were unheard of. Outside the new fences were assorted factories making everything from Waterbury's Compound and medicines to biscuits, so we always knew which way the wind was blowing! A shop came up next to the dispensary, and a permanent Ayappa-temple platform now came up across the road in the open grounds behind Type-III quarters. Our universe expanded to regular trips to Habshiguda and Tarnaka to visit friends, and to NGRI campus for weekend movies at their open-theatre (Paakeezah, Aradhana, Mera Naam Joker,  Junglee!)

As I look at the map and distant memories come trickling in, I wonder who came up with the brilliant idea of marking a huge triangle (equilateral, each side 0.5km), as the campus of the Survey of India. For the second oldest government organisation in India (after the army), what a wonderful, permanent tribute to the Great Trigonometric Survey of India'!

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REFERENCES and LINKS

ESRI Imagery - https://www.esri.com/en-us/home

Running, Pain and Latin

Distance running is a fun way to learn Anatomy, and Latin :)

A part of the fun is of course taken away by the fact that these lessons come packaged in pain. A few years ago, after what seemed like a regular run, my right heel started hurting. I thought I had stepped on a sharp stone, or that I had twisted my heel. After many unsuccessful sessions of massages, rubbing in balms and oils (esp. Murivenna), I looked up the symptoms on the web and discovered "Plantar Fasciitis". It has nothing to do with plantations of fascists. This is simply latin for inflamed feet - plantar (sole of the foot) and fascia (band/sheath of tissue) with -itis (inflammation). For some reason this painful condition is also called "policeman's heel".

Another term you hear among the latinised running communities is "IT Band Injury". Anybody can get this injury - not just software engineers or musicians - because IT here stands for Ilio-Tibial. And the band here refers to a tendon that stretches along the length of the longest bones in your body - the tibia. An injury of this connective tissue gives you IT Band Syndrome (ITBS) - an aching or sharp pain on the outside of your knee or hip. Once again massages are not of much help and what worked in my case was simple, consistent exercises - toe-curls, rolls, stretches.

Last Sunday, 22 Feb., 2026, we had the New Delhi Marathon (NDM). This year's event was sponsored by Cognizant and attracted over 30,000 participants in four events: Full Marathon (42 km), Half Marathon (21 km), 10km and 5km races. I participated in my usual Half Marathon. It was a well organised event with plenty of water-stations, good signages, clean toilets, decent food (hot chole-kulche!), band-baaja, and nicely spaced out dispersals (no clash with the 5km folks walking abreast). I even managed to meet an old college friend from Trivandrum after 36 years, and in getting back to the sub-2-hour timing (1:58:22)!

A day after the run I am now back to my Latin vocabulary. The new words are - Quadriceps and Iliopsoas - the two sets of muscles that seem to have developed Delayed Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (DOMS). It is peculiar pain that makes the simple act of descending staircases particularly painful.

Quadriceps femoris is Latin for 'four-headed muscle of the femur'.  The four heads are - Rectus femoris, vastus lateralis, vastus intermedius and vastus medialis. Vastus is a Latin word meaning "vast," "immense," "huge," "enormous," or "monstrous", while rectus simply means "straight", "upright", or "direct". Straight and huge - the quadriceps are the largest muscle sets in the human body.

Is there a way to avoid this pain? If past experience is anything to go by, it is unprepared muscles that develop DOMS after a distance run. So would isolation exercise like leg extensions help? Let's see...

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REFERENCES & LINKS

• https://www.samsonphysicaltherapy.com/blog/why-the-front-of-your-thighs-hurt-after-running
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iliopsoas
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadricep
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantar_fasciitishttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantar_fasciitis
• https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/21967-iliotibial-band-syndrome
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thonakal_Gopi
• https://www.uniindia.com/news/sports/sports-delhi-marathon-leads-spd18/3750206.html
• Timing - https://mysamay.in/event/info/4fbe9261-c999-4868-9a1e-acd64b0b79f8

 

 

How Did They Know?

 

Each civilisation had a different way of looking at the stars. They found different patterns and linked them to a wide range of traditions, legends and stories. 

What is amazing is not the patterns but the level of detail they were able to observe in the night sky. A few years ago the jolly, ebullient Khurshed Batliwala gave a talk listing out a few things ancient Indian scientists observed and recorded - 

The Great Bear and Arundhati-Vashishta

The core pattern of this constellation is hard to miss. It looks like a giant kite with a long tail. The Greeks called it Ursa Major, the Great Bear, and saw a far more elaborate pattern - the quadrangle of the kite became the torso of the bear, the tail became its neck and head while the surrounding stars took the shape of a fat tail and spindly legs. 

Ancient Indians, on the other hand, focused on the core form and called it the "Sapta Rishi" - the seven sages - Bhrigu, Vashista, Angiras, Atri, Pulastya, Pulaha and Kratu. Of these Vashista is of special interest because the ancients noticed that this bright spot in the sky was not one but two different stars in close proximity - a double-star. They named the second star after the sage's wife, Arundhati. Each of these stars correspond to the following Arab-Greek equivalents:

• Bhrigu - Benetnash
• Vashista ("most excellent) - Mizar ("girdle")
• Angiras - Alioth 
• Atri - Megrez
• Pulastya - Phecda
• Pulaha - Phecda
• Kratu - Dubhe 

Brightness of celestial objects is measured in Apparent Magnitude. This is on a reverse logarithmic scale, which means that the brighter an object is, the lower its magnitude number. In the Great Bear constellation, the brightest star is Alioth (mag 1.76 - 33rd brightest in the sky), followed by Dubhe (m 1.79), Alkaid, Mizar / Vashishta (m 2.23), Merak, Phecda, and Megrez. 

Note that Mizar / Vashishta is not the brightest, yet it is a well-known naked eye double star with the fainter star Alcor (Vashistha's wife, Arundhati - 'washed by the rays of sun'). This is the double-star, as Batliwala points out, that newlyweds in South India view formally because they rotate in perfect synchrony, and symbolise a balanced, harmonious, and lifelong marriage of mutual respect. References to this symbolic traditions are found in early Vedic literature, including the Rig Veda and especially the Brahmanas (like Taittiriya Brahmana). Out of the thousands of stars in the night sky how did the ancients decide to select this double star?

Batliwala goes on to describe other instances in ancient records and traditions that make us wonder about their perceptiveness:

• The depiction of Varaha avatara in iconography carrying a round earth, long before the Egyptians of Greeks discovered that the earth was round;
• Antares ("like-Mars"), the 16th brightest star in the sky was named "Jeshta" (biggest, eldest, oldest). How did they figure that this star is 40,000 bigger than the sun, ad one of the biggest stars known to man?
• Rust-proof pillars - the one displayed in Delhi and another the Kollur pillar, said to have been built by tribals to welcome Adi Shankaracharya (8th century CE)
• Metallurgy - Zinc extraction from ore was known for 4000 years . A difficult metal to extract because it liquifies at 997C and turns into gas at 1000C. So it had to be extracted within a 3 degree window. The ancients metallurgists did this by turning the furnace up-side down. This technology was copied by the Chinese and in turn, patented by William Champion (1709-89) in Britain
• The value of Pi up to 30 decimals encoded in a Krishna sloka in the KatapayaSankhya format where numbers associated with alphabets: (eg., 1 = ka, ta, pa, ya)

Recently a few more examples turned up in a post titled, "How Much did the Ancients Know ? It’s fascinating". It records the work of one Dharampal (1922–2006), an Indian Gandhian thinker and independent historian who became known for re-examining India’s pre-colonial society using British archival records. 

Dharmpal notes that Hindu astronomers, many years BCE, represented the planets in ways that encoded precise astronomical knowledge. Jupiter was depicted with four dancing girls circling around it. Saturn was represented as a figure with seven arms, one of which grasped a ring. 

• The Dancing Girls of Jupiter: Four moons of Jupiter were not known in Europe before 1609, when Galileo first observed them through his telescope. Even then, only the third and fourth satellites were occasionally visible to the naked eye, and only in the clearest atmospheric conditions. The fact that Hindu astronomical tradition represented Jupiter with exactly four attendant figures suggested a knowledge of these satellites that predated European discovery.
• The Seven Arms of Saturn: Until 1783, European astronomy recognised only five satellites of Saturn. The sixth satellite was not discovered until 28 August 1789, when William Herschel identified it. The seventh satellite was observed by Herschel only after he had completed his grand telescope of forty feet focal length, and was first seen on 17 September 1789.

There is no mention of lenses or telescopes in the scriptures and records, so how did ancient Indians see and record details of celestial bodies with such amazing accuracy? 

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REFERENCES & LINKS

Katapayadi Sutra - https://www.eviolinguru.com/kadapayadi-sutra.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparent_magnitude

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mizar

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcor_(star)

How much did the ancients know? - https://substack.com/home/post/p-188261182 

Kyauktada Katha

George Orwell's book, "Burmese Days" is centred on a fictional town called Kyauktada 'in Upper Burma'. It is the story of an English timber merchant named John Flory set in the 1920s. Kyauktada is actually a district in Yangon so it seems Orwell drew his inspiration for this story from his stay at a small town called Katha ('story' in many Indian languages), on the banks of the Irrawaddy.

The book brings to life the life and times of the British colonial enterprise in the 1920s, seen through the eyes of a merchant named John Flory. He lives in a small, insular community of Britishers who are already nostalgic about the violence used to bring the natives to heel. In the words of the local administrator, "In my young days, when a butler was disrespectful, one sent him along to the jail with a chit saying 'Please give the bearer fifteen lashes'. Ah well, Eheu fugaces!"

Flory is a misfit at the  British-only club, an oddball in the sense that he is not as disdainful of the locals. An Indian doctor, Veeraswami  - 'very slimly' according to his compatriots - is a good friend with whom him enjoys long conversations. It is in these conversations that Orwell frames his views on  the Empire. Here the roles are reversed, it is Veeraswami is a a loyal subject of the empire, an admirer of all things British, while Flory is the skeptic who thinks he is living a lie -

"But my friend, what lie are you living?' 

"Why, of course, the lie that we're here to uplift or poor black brothers instead of to rob them.. Look at our schools - factories for cheap clerks. We've never taught a single useful manual trade to the Indians..."

This anti-Empire line of thought is expanded through the Veeraswami-Flory conversations:

"What was at the centre of his thoughts now, and what poisoned everything, was the ever bitterer hatred of the atmosphere of imperialism in which he lived. For his brain to develop - you cannot stop your brain developing, and it is one of the tragedies of the half-educated that they develop late, when they are absolutely committed to the wrong way of life - he has grasped the truth about the English and the Empire. The Empire is a despotism - benevolent no doubt, but still a despotism with theft as its final object..."

"The real backbone of the despotism is not the officials but the army. Given the Army, the officials and business men can rub along safely enough even if they are fools. And most of them are fools. A dull, decent people, cherishing and fortifying their dullness behind a quarter of a million bayonets."

"With Indians there must be no loyalty, no real friendship. Affection, even love - yes, English men do often love Indians - native officers, forest rangers, hinters, clerks, servants. Sepoys will weep like children when their colonel retires. Even intimacy is allowable, at the right moments. but alliance, partisanship, never! Even to know the rights and wrongs of a 'native' quarrel is a loss of prestige."

No wonder Orwell was wary of a backlash if the book were to be published first in Britain. He wisely decided to publish this book in USA instead.

I loved the flowing prose in "Burmese Days", and the way he brings out his characters - especially the Burmese ones. One particularly obnoxious one is Ko Po Kyin, "the crocodile" and his wife, Ma Kin Kin...dressed in a guangbaung of pale pink silk, an ingyi of starched muslin and, and a paso of Mandalay silk. Another interesting character is is Ma Hla May, Flory's mistress who aspired to be a bo-kadaw - a white man's wife - but is discarded as soon as Elizabeth, a young lady turns up at Kyauktada. The crocodile uses her to undermine Flory and destroy his rival, Veeraswami. 'Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned', especially if she turn up at the most unexpected places screaming Pike-san pay-like! Pike-san pay-like ('Give me the money') !

This is only my second Orwell book after Animal Farm many years ago. It is William Dalrymple's podcast on that led me to Burmese Days, so if you don't have the time read books do listen to this particular series on the remarkable life and times of George Orwell.

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LINKS and FURTHER READING

* Orwell and Dalrymple on English Class (2022) - https://quillette.com/2022/05/02/orwell-dalrymple-on-english-class/

* Empire Podcast - Episode 302 - https://youtu.be/s_vrCr3XW8o?si=92s71EOZ5hjpqvh6

Bhopal-Sanchi: 20 Years Later

 

The last time I visited Bhopal was during my JICA days, in the early 2000s. My projects were far fron the city, in Sagar, Damoh and Tikamgarh districts. This meant my usual hotel  - Jehan Numa Palace - was only a stopover for rest and recuperation from the long road journeys. 

During those days I remember visiting the usual touristy places in the city - the newly built Bharat Bhavan, the lovely Van Vihar zoo along the banks of the Upper Lake, and, of course, a drive across the Tropic of Cancer to Sanchi and Vidisha, on my way to the northern districts. It was a nice but sleepy city - not a place one would like to visit often.

This time, two decades later - I saw a city that had been transformed.  More lakes, better infrastructure, and a more happening place. The area around the lakes have been beautifully developed with gardens, boating-clubs, lovely roads snaking along the banks. The old city is of course crowded and dirty as it used to be, but the rest of the city looks cleaner and nicer with its new roads, gardens, flyovers, malls, a new airport, and many lovely museums!

Reaching there was a breeze. Thanks to the uncertainties of air-travel in winters (and the recent Indigo cancellation-fiasco), we took an overnight train  (Dakshin Express) from Nizamuddin to Bhopal. The highlight of this trip was the seemingly miraculous recovery of an iPad which we had forgotten under one of the pillows. We realised the loss about an hour later after we had tucked in lots of poha-jalebi and chana-batura from the famous Manohar Dairy & Restaurant. Through the cries of despair and loss (the tab had four years of BTech notes), we connected with the Indian Railway helpline (139) and the new RailSewa app.

Amazingly there was a follow-up call from the Railway Police within a few minutes and the iPad was found and handed over to officers at the next station, Itarsi, which was about a 100km from Bhopal. By evening the tab and its teary, grateful owner were happily united! :)

Now that a potential kill-joy had been averted, we were able to immerse ourselves in the sights, sounds and wonders of Bhopal and the ancient lands along the Betwa river.

Museums

The new Tribal Museum is no doubt the best thematic museum  have seen in India. The main building itself is beautifully designed around a central amphitheatre, with every wall, hallway, nook and corner lovingly decorated with various  tribal art forms. One of these hallways leads you to a cluster of "tribal houses" that tell you how each of the major tribes in MP designed their living spaces using mostly mud but also in locally available sandstones. As our luck would have it we were visiting on a Sunday when the whole building was live with rhythms and songs of different tribal groups performing in the central amphitheatre.

On weekends the museum canteen (again the prettiest i have seen) serves thali's from each region. I treated myself to a wholesome missi-roti thali which came with a jackfruit (katthal) curry, a kadi, saag and pickles followed by a plate of mahua-jalebis - Delicious!

Sanchi Stupa

Sanchi is on the banks of the Betwa river. As you go downstream and north-eastwards, it meets the Halali river at Vidisha. On the narrow strip of land between these two rivers is the white sandstone hillock of Udaigiri.

Further north-east the Betwa marks the border between Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh, and feeds two large reservoirs created by two dams - the Rajghat Dam Reservoir, and the Matiala Dam. From here the river broadens out and flows past the historic cities of Orchha (near Jhansi) for about 300km before it joins the Yamuna river at Merapur Dariya (UP)

Two decades ago, Sanchi was a lonely hill next to a small village with the railway line running in the the distance. There were hardly any hotels to stay and the famous stupa hd just a few disinterested staff at the ticket-counter. There were hardly any signboards and you could walk around wherever you wanted. I remember sitting next to the beautifully carved pillars of Stupa-2 (200m downhill from the main stupa) and watching the trains snake around the hills on the plains below.

Now the whole place was super-crowded. Busloads of schoolchildren, tourists from all over India, and a few foreigners. What a contrast from my visit about two decades ago when this holy site had only a few Indian tourists, some pilgrims from Southeast Asia and lots of visitors from Europe and USA. 

UDAIGIRI CAVE TEMPLES

This first thing I noticed here was a beautifyl white-trunked tree clings to the steep rockface over the main entrance to Udaigiri caves. The guards told me that this was the Kulu Vruksh (Sterculia urens). It is also called Bhutya - the Ghost Tree - because that is exactly what it looks like on moonlit nights!

Udaigiri is home to one of the oldest surviving Hindu temples with the earliest known sculptures of Ganesha and Mahishasura-Mardini. For all its fame this site seemed poorly designed and maintained. You approach Udaigiri from the south on a narrow road separating the hills from the village. The parking lot and ticketing office is at the far end, and from here you need to walk back along the same road (this time inside the fence) on an uneven footpath to see the cave temples and sculptures. 

The most beautiful Varaha-Bhudevi sculpture is on a cave wall that is just about two meters from the boundary wall. On top of this space constraint you have a thick wooden barricade that prevents you from taking in the full view of the magnificent panel. As if this were not bad enough ASI has also blocked the view to the oldest Anantashayana sculpture with a wall of plastic venyl that is so dirty that you can barely see the sculpture behind it.

BHIMBETKA

This place is surreal. On the walls of caves carved by the elements millions of years ago you have an entire complex of rock niches and shelters that served as home to people who lived 12,000 years onwards!

BHOJRAJ TEMPLE

A massive, incomplete temple that stands next to what was once the largest lake in central India. What a sight it must have been in those days! 

The present temple is the result of a great renovation effort by the ASI. It seems when the temple was originally found, the roof had collapsed and split the massive Shivalinga. The roof was subsequently reconstructed albeit partially.

Why did Hoshang Shah destroy the Bhojpur dam in the 1400s?

REFERENCES -------------

. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoshang_Shah

. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prabandha-Chintamani -- Sanskrit-language collection of prabandhas (semi-historical biographical narratives). It was compiled in c. 1304 CE, in the Vaghela kingdom of present-day Gujarat, by Jain scholar Merutunga

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhojpur,_Madhya_Pradesh

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mihira_Bhoja - Mihira Bhoja's epithet was Srimad-Adivaraha (the fortunate primeval boar incarnation of Vishnu) -- adivaraha dramma billon coins

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teli_ka_Mandir

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterculia_urens

Fachu Kandi Pass - Notes from a Crossover Trek

This is a note to myself. As the years go by, and as details of our numerous treks in the Himalayas start to get mixed up, I find it necessary to write down at least some highlights and details of each trip. These notes may also be useful for those who discover that much of what see online, especially on website put up by travel companies, are either incomplete or simply inaccurate.

This year our plan was to go for the Bali Pass trek, a high-altitude rote that connect the Har-ki-Dhun valley to Yamunotri. The weather gods however willed otherwise. This year the monsoon season had extended from July and August into September. Three months of heavier-than-usual rains and cloudbursts in this region had washed away some bridges. The forest department had refused to give permission for this route so our guides decided to take up the next best option - to take a diversion from the earlier planned route to cross over to the Yamunotri valley via the Fachu-Kandi pass. 

Crossover treks are fascinating. They could be a metaphor for life itself - especially when you are travelling with a group of friends in their 50s. The lush green forests of youth stretch out behind you, and what lies ahead seems barren, desolate and depressing unless, of course, you are in good company :) 

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Itinerary

• Day 1 - 13/09/2025 (Saturday) - Tempo ride from Dehradun to Sankri -- Juddo waterfall -- Lakhwar bend-fork diversion -- Lakhamandal helipad -- Bernagad -- Kunwa
• Day 2 - 14/09/2025 (Sunday)- Sankri to Kedar Kantha Base-camp
• Day 3 - 15/09/2025 (Monday)- Across- Phulari Ridge -- Bhoj-Garhi Camp (3405 m / 11,170 feet)
• Day 4 - 16/09/2025 (Tuesday) - Bhoj-Garhi -- Pushtara Bughyal
• Day 5 - 17/09/2025 (Wednesday) - Kota-Damin Byepass -- cross tree-line -- Aruka camp (3829m)
•  Day 6 - 18/09/2025 (Thursday)- Past SaruTal -- KandaTal -- cross Fachu Kandi Pass (4356 M / 14,291 feet) -- Kurshil, Dubril Villages to Hanuman Chatti GNMN Lodge -- Evening aarti at hilltop temple
• Day 7 - 19/09/2025 (Friday) - Drive to Janki Chatti -- trek to Yamunotri Dham and back -- drive to Naogaon Shivalik Camp-Lodge
• Day 8 - 20/09/2025 (Saturday)- Drive to Dehradun -- train back to Delhi

Davai, Pustai, Rabota, Skoreye!

 

If there is one word you would catch from the numerous clips from the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war, it is "Dawai!" Even though it sounds like Hindi for medicine, it simply means "Move!" in Russian. In the videos the soldiers and civilians are urging people to try and get away from the gruesome, drone-dominated warfare that had hits soldiers and civilians in both countries.

This word turned up time and again in a book I just finished reading - "A Woman in Berlin". Written by a then anonymous young lady in Germany, it records the last days of the Third Reich. A time when the tide of war had turned. Hitlers armies that had spread out all over Europe and North Africa have all stalled. In Eastern Europe, a full retreat is in progress with the Russians rolling back the invaders, taking back their lands from the ruins of Stalingrad (now Volgograd), across the vast steppes, all the way to the nerve centre of Germany's war effort - Berlin.

It was a difficult time for the civilians in the city - especially for its women. For years they have been hearing the exploits of their own soldiers returning from the conquered lands. Stories of cities and towns bombed into submission, of women raped and children orphaned. Rumours of concentrations camps into which millions of jews, gypsies and PoWs disappeared. Now, in Berlin, the shoe is on the other foot. Russians are all over the city, and they are settling scores.

This book gives us a glimpse of the horrors faced by women in war-zones. The author  - now we know her as Marta Hillers - who was an educated, well travelled young lady whose boyfriend was away on some battlefront. She had been staying alone in a bombed out neighbourhood, scouring around for food and water.

The constant forecasts of death by starvation, of complete physical annihilation by the enemy were so pervasive that we're stunned by every piece of bread, every indication that we will still be provided for. In that respect Goebbels did a great advance job for the conquerers: any crust of bread from their hands seems like a present to us.

Homo homini lupus (Man is a wolf to man)...It's true everywhere and always, these days even among blood relatives...Hunger brings the wolf out in us. 

It's a blessing to be able to pray easily and unabatedly; amid the oppression and torture, in all our despair and fear...

In a city teeming with Soviet soldiers, single woman are easy prey, and they often spell trouble for the neighbours as well.

The most bitter thing in the life of a single woman is that every time she enters some kind of family life, after a while she ends up causing trouble: she's one too many; someone doesn't like her because someone else does, and in the end they kick her out to preserve the precious peace.

Marta gets raped time and again until she figures that be best way to deal with the situation is to get 'protection' from senior officers. These connections not only help her fend off other soldiers but also improve her access to food, books, and work opportunities, first as a translator, and then at a laundry.

The high-level connections also give her the confidence (Nicht haben Angst - Not to be afraid)  to deal with petty thievery, and the mindspace to dwell on larger issues ;) 

It turns out that Russian men, too, are 'only men' - i.e. presumably they're as susceptible as other men to feminine wiles, so it's possible to keep them in check, to distract them, to shake them off...

Recovering a stolen radio by pretending to be well connected as a translator - "However it appears that most of life's mechanisms rely on little tricks like that - marriages, companies, nation-states, armies.

It is at the laundry that we hear the now familiar words - 

'Davai, pustai, rabota, skoreye!' = 'Move, get on with it, work, faster!'...On the way back I was swinging my bucket gaily, in the spirit of 'what doesn't kill me makes me stronger'!.

 Over period 20 April and 22 June 1945, martial law comes into effect. Some semblance of order is restored bringing with it rations, water and electricity supply. 

The memoir ends rather abruptly. The book did not find any takers in Germany and was first published in USA in the mid 1950s. It is only in 2003 that a new generation emerged to look back at the war with a fresh perspective.

This makes you wonder about the condition of women and children in today's war-zones - Sudan, Gaza, Syria, Myanmar, DR Congo, Ukraine and Russia - and the decades it will take for the wounds to heal..

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