He's always been my guy. :)
Featured in the much touted 'Rang de basanti', he influenced me years before.
My grandmom was a little girl in Lahore they day he was hanged. By the British rulers, at the tender age of 23. He gave himself up to the Brits, after exploding a sound bomb in the Lahore Assembly and shouting 'Inquilab zindabad'(Long live the revolution), which became the slogan for the anti-imperialist movement, which brought down the British empire.
A towering intellectual, poet and revolutionary, his prison writings, from Urdu and Perisan poetry to European revolutionary thought is eye-opening. His essay 'Why I am an atheist' shakes one up and makes one think..again.
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'By Revolution we mean that the present order of things, which is based on manifest injustice must change. Producers or labourers, in spite of being the most necessary element of society, are robbed by their exploiters of their labour and deprived of their elementary rights. The peasant who grows corn for all, starves with his family; the weaver who supplies the world market with textile fabrics, has not enough to cover his own and his children's bodies; masons, smiths and carpenters who raise magnificent palaces, live like pariahs in the slums. The capitalists and exploiters, the parasites of society, squander millions on their whims.
- Bhagat Singh, Indian revolutionary, 1907-1931
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