Col Nirbhay Kumar (retd)

Parivartan in Bengal is welcome as long as laws are implemented equally and fairly for all citizens. The desire to “tight karo” any one particular group cannot be the basis of government policy.

Asking my prime minister Jonas Gahr Støre about why Norway refers to India as a democracy when the Indian PM has not had a press conference in 12 years at home. Is not a free press important to democracy anymore? Støre points to India holding elections. He does acknowledge differences in press culture, but also points to Indias large population.

we are so fucked lmao

I have contributed my part as an Indian. Please share positive messages with her before these Andhbhakts start hurling abuses/trolling at this brave journalist. Save India from getting embarrassed.🙏🏻

Primeminister of India, Narendra Modi, would not take my question, I was not expecting him to. Norway has the number one spot on the World Press Freedom Index, India is at 157th, competing with Palestine, Emirates & Cuba. It is our job to question the powers we cooperate with.

The Soldier Who Found a Baby on the Battlefield and Carried Her for 40 Miles The American Soldier Who Found an Abandoned Baby on the Italian Battlefield and Carried Her 40 Miles to Safety — Then Spent 60 Years Wondering If She Survived, Italy, 1944. January 1944. Anzio, Italy. The Anzio beachhead was a particular kind of hell — a narrow strip of Italian coastline held by Allied forces under constant German bombardment, no room to advance, no room to retreat, just the grinding daily mathematics of holding ground under fire. Corporal James Whitaker, 24, Georgia, was moving through a bombed farmhouse on a patrol assignment when he heard it. Not crying — past crying. The sound an infant makes when it has cried beyond what crying can accomplish and has gone to a place beyond it, a thin persistent sound like a mechanical thing running down. He found her in the farmhouse cellar. An infant girl. Eight months old at the most. Alone in a wooden crate lined with a woman's wool coat. Alive, barely, from cold and dehydration. No one else in the farmhouse. No one else anywhere visible. He picked her up. The Problem James Whitaker was on a combat patrol in an active battle zone carrying an infant who would die if he put her down and who he had no ability to help if he kept her. He had no formula, no milk, no baby supplies of any kind. He had his canteen, a chocolate bar, and forty miles between his position and the field hospital at the rear. He started walking. The Forty Miles He carried her inside his field jacket, against his chest, where the body heat kept her warm. He gave her water from his canteen, dripped slowly from his finger to her lips the way he had seen his mother water young animals — a memory that surfaced from childhood without warning and turned out to be exactly applicable. He broke small pieces of chocolate and let her suck the sweetness from his finger. He moved at night when he could, staying off roads, moving through terrain that was simultaneously trying to kill him from German positions and from Italian winter. He talked to her. Quietly, constantly, in the specific soft register humans use with infants regardless of whether the infant understands. He told her about Georgia. About his mother's cooking. About the farm where he grew up. He told her it was going to be fine, which he was not certain was true but which he had decided to commit to regardless. She was alive when he reached the field hospital at dawn on the second day. A nurse took her from his arms. He sat down on the ground outside the hospital tent and did not get up for an hour. The Handoff The field hospital logged the infant as a found civilian, turned her over to an Italian Red Cross representative, and that was the last official record that connected her to James Whitaker. He asked about her before he went back to his unit. They told him she was stable, that she would be placed with a relief organization, that she would be taken care of. He went back to his unit. He went back to the war. The Sixty Years James Whitaker came home to Georgia in 1945. He married. He had three children. He farmed and then he worked in hardware and then he retired. He thought about the baby for sixty years. Not obsessively — he was a practical man, not given to obsession. But consistently. On certain mornings. On certain nights. A presence in the back of his mind, an open question he had never been able to close. She would be in her sixties now, he would calculate. He did not know her name. He did not know if she had survived the war, the occupation, the chaos of postwar Italy. He did not know if she had a family, children, a life. He knew only that he had carried her forty miles and handed her to a nurse and never found out what happened next. In 2004, his granddaughter Sarah — seventeen years old, working on a school project about WWII — asked him if he had any war stories. He told her one. Sarah put it on the internet. The Finding Three months later, a woman in Bologna, Italy, contacted Sarah's email address. Her name was Maria Conti. She was sixty years old. She had been told, by the Italian family who had raised her, that she had been found as an infant during the Anzio campaign by an American soldier who carried her to safety. She had been looking for that soldier for forty years. James Whitaker was eighty-four years old when Sarah showed him the email. He read it twice. He looked up at his granddaughter. "She's alive," he said. "She wants to talk to you," Sarah said. They spoke by telephone first — Sarah translating between English and Italian. Then by letter. Then, in 2005, Maria Conti flew to Georgia. She was sixty-one years old. She was a schoolteacher. She had three children and five grandchildren. She walked into James Whitaker's living room and he stood up — slowly, at eighty-five, he stood up — and they looked at each other. Maria crossed the room. She took both his hands. She said something in Italian. Sarah translated: "She says she has wanted to say thank you her whole life. She says she is sorry it took sixty years." James Whitaker held her hands. He said: "Tell her sixty years is nothing. Tell her I just needed to know she made it."

Primeminister of India, Narendra Modi, would not take my question, I was not expecting him to. Norway has the number one spot on the World Press Freedom Index, India is at 157th, competing with Palestine, Emirates & Cuba. It is our job to question the powers we cooperate with.