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An entire nation tuned into their radios eager to listen to the Independence Day broadcast on the midnight of August 14-15, 1947. One can only imagine the streets, buzzing with excitement as the voice of the first Prime Minister of Independent India, Jawaharlal Nehru's blared through the static. "Long years ago," Nehru began, "we made a tryst with destiny; and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom."

"A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance. It is fitting that at this solemn moment we take the pledge of dedication to the service of India, and her people, and to the still larger cause of humanity."

The famous "Tryst with Destiny" speech, delivered by Nehru before the Constituent Assembly, is counted as one of the greatest public addresses of the 20th Century and was written by Nehru himself.

A gifted writer Nehru wrote many of his speeches as and when time and occasion permitted. In fact, he would reportedly spend hours working on his speeches, much to the chagrin of his secretaries. Another one of his famous speeches - the "Light has gone out" broadcast to the nation on radio when Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated - was extempore.

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While the whole country rejoiced the freedom, Gandhiji did not join in. Although he had fought hard to win the freedom, he was on a hunger strike in Calcutta (now Kolkata), far from the celebrations in Delhi.

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The Statue of Unity is a colossal statue of Indian statesman and independence activist Vallabhbhai Patel (1875–1950), who was the first Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister of independent India and an adherent of Mahatma Gandhi during the nonviolent Indian Independence movement. 

Located on the Sadhu Bet island, near Rajpipla on the Narmada river, the Statue of Unity is located between the Satpura and the Vindhya mountain ranges. A 3.5 km highway will be used to connect the statue to Gujarat's Kevadia town.

The Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel Rashtriya Ekta Trust (SVPRET), a special purpose vehicle set up by Modi in 2011, arranged some 129 tonnes of iron implements from nearly 100 million farmers in 169,000 villages across all states to construct the base of the statue in the 'Loha' campaign. The Statue of Unity will comprise two semi-joined, composite concrete cylindrical cores, surrounded by a structural steel space frame to support the exterior cladding. 5700 Mton of structural steel and reinforcement bars of 18500Mton were used to build the statue.

The statue is a three-layered structure. The innermost layer is made of reinforced cement concrete (RCC), comprising two towers 127 metres high that rise till the statue's chest. The second layer is a steel structure and the third an 8 mm bronze cladding on the surface. The RCC towers, which at the bottom form Patel's dhoti-clad legs, have two lifts each. Each lift can carry 26 people to the top in just above half a minute.

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Raja Ravi Varma was an Indian painter and artist. He is considered among the greatest painters in the history of Indian art. His works are one of the best examples of the fusion of European academic art with a purely Indian sensibility and iconography.

Varma was born into an aristocratic family in Travancore state. He showed an interest in drawing from an early age, and his uncle Raja Raja Varma, noticing his passion for drawing on the palace walls, gave him his first rudimentary lessons in painting. When Varma was 14, Maharaja Ayilyam Thirunal, ruler of Travancore at the time, became a patron of his artistic career. Soon the royal painter Rama Swamy Naidu started teaching him to paint with watercolours. Three years later Varma began to study oil painting with Theodore Jensen, a Danish-born British artist.

Varma was the first Indian to use Western techniques of perspective and composition and to adapt them to Indian subjects, styles, and themes. He won the Governor’s Gold Medal in 1873 for the painting Nair Lady Adorning Her Hair. He became a much-sought-after artist among both the Indian nobility and the Europeans in India, who commissioned him to paint their portraits.

Varma adapted Western realism to pioneer a new movement in Indian art. In 1894 he set up a lithographic press in order to mass-produce copies of his paintings as oleographs, enabling ordinary people to afford them. That innovation resulted in the tremendous popularity of his images, which became an integral part of popular Indian culture thereafter.

Varma was criticized severely by later artists who saw the content of his work as only superficially Indian because, despite depicting mythological Indian themes, it imitated Western styles of painting. That view was instrumental in the formation of the Bengal School of Art (or Bengal school), whose members explored ancient Indian artistic traditions with a modernist sensibility.

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The Brahmo Samaj, a prominent socio-religious movement, was founded by Raja Rammohan Roy along with Dwarkanath Tagore and others on August 20, 1828. In total, about 40 such documents were put on display.

The Brahmo Samaj does not accept the authority of the Vedas, has no faith in avatars (incarnations), and does not insist on belief in karma (causal effects of past deeds) or samsara (the process of death and rebirth). It discards Hindu rituals and adopts some Christian practices in its worship. Influenced by Islam and Christianity, it denounces polytheism, image worship, and the caste system. The society has had considerable success with its programs of social reform but has never had a significant popular following.

Whereas Ram Mohun Roy wanted to reform Hinduism from within, his successor, Debendranath Tagore, broke away in 1850 by repudiating Vedic authority and making reason and intuition the basis of Brahmanism. He tried, however, to retain some of the traditional Hindu customs, and a radical group led by Keshab Chunder Sen seceded and organized the Brahmo Samaj of India in 1866 (the older group became known as the Adi—i.e., original—Brahmo Samaj). The new branch became eclectic and cosmopolitan and was most influential in the struggle for social reform. It sponsored the Band of Hope temperance society, encouraged the education of women, and campaigned for the remarriage of widows and for legislation to prevent child marriages. When Keshab arranged for his daughter to marry the Prince of Cooch Behar, both parties were well under age. He was thus violating his own reformist principles, and many of his followers rebelled, forming a third samaj (“society,” “association”), the Sadharan (i.e., common) Brahmo Samaj, in 1878. The Sadharan Samaj gradually reverted to the teaching of the Upanishads and carried on the work of social reform. Although the movement lost force in the 20th century, its fundamental social tenets were accepted, at least in theory, by Hindu society.

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Rabindranath Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 for his poetry collection Gitanjali.

Rabindranath Tagore, India's first Nobel laureate, was born in Kolkata on May 7, 1861. He was a poet, writer, playwright, composer, philosopher, social reformer and painter. In 1913, Tagore became the first non-European to win a Nobel Prize in Literature and second non-European to receive a Nobel Prize after Theodore Roosevelt for Gitanjali, his best-known collection of poetry.

Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize "because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West."

The Bengali poet was awarded a knighthood by King George V in 1915, however, he repudiated it after the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre.

Renouncing the knighthood, Tagore, in a letter addressed to Lord Chelmsford, the then British Viceroy of India, wrote, "The disproportionate severity of the punishments inflicted upon the unfortunate people and the methods of carrying them out, we are convinced, are without parallel in the history of civilised governments...The time has come when badges of honour make our shame glaring in their incongruous context of humiliation, and I for my part wish to stand, shorn of all special distinctions, by the side of my countrymen."

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Sitting on horseback, with her adopted son and heir strapped to her back and her sword pointing skyward, ready for battle, Rani Lakshmibai is one of the most inspiring figures of India's freedom struggle. Fondly known as Jhansi ki Rani, the valiant queen refused to cede her kingdom of Jhansi to the British. Instead, she played a pivotal role in the 1857-58 uprising against the East India Company rule, considered to be India's first battle for independence.

Born in 1828, Lakshmibai's name was Manikarnika Tambe. In 1842, she married Maharaj Gangadhar Rao Newalkar of Jhansi. However, after her husband's death, the British refused to acknowledge her adopted son Damodar Rao as the legal heir to the throne, citing the doctrine of lapse. This policy was introduced by the British to gain control over princely states.

But Lakshmibai was not one to give up easily. She trained and raised an army to fight the British. When an army led by General Hugh Rose attacked Jhansi, she thwarted the forces with the help of Tatya Tope. She did not surrender even after her troops were overwhelmed. Lakshmibai seized the city-fortress of Gwalior. Dressed as a cavalry leader, she fought fiercely against Rose's army in Morar in 1858 and lost her life in the course of the battle. Lakshmibai's example inspired others to stand up against the British.

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The all-women combat force of the Indian National Army was called the Rani of Jhansi Regiment in honour of Rani Lakshmibai, one of the earliest feminists and revolutionary leaders. Led by Captain Lakshmi Swaminathan, the unit was raised in July 1943 with volunteers from the expatriate Indian population in Southeast Asia. The aim of the Indian National Army was to overthrow the British rule in India with the help of Japan.

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Around 1192, Qutub-ud-Din Aibak envisioned Qutub Minar, but he only got to complete the basement. The construction was later taken over by his successor Iltutmish who constructed three more stories of the tower.

The magnificent Qutub Minar has a height of 73 meters. It has a base diameter of 14.3 meters which narrows down to 2.7 meters at the top. The structure also includes a spiral staircase of 379 steps. There are many other historical edifices around the minaret which, together with the main tower, form the Qutub Minar Complex.

It is widely believed that the tower, which displays early Afghan architectural style, was built taking inspiration from the Minaret of Jam in Afghanistan. Each of the five distinct stories of the minaret is adorned with a projecting balcony supported by intricately designed brackets. While the first three stories are built in pale red sandstone, the fourth one is purely made of marble, and the fifth one is a mix of marble and sandstone. The architectural styles from the base to the top also differ, thanks to the many rulers who constructed it part by part.

There are bands of inscriptions on different sections of Qutub Minar that narrate its history. Carved verses adorn the inside of the tower.

Qutub Festival, an annual cultural event, is held at this complex every year during the month of November-December. This three-day long festival witnesses a lively gathering and various mind-blowing performances by musicians, dancers, and artists.

The Qutub Minar complex is under the protection of the Archeological Survey of India under its Delhi circle of monuments.

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Born in 1889 in a small village in Midnapore district (now in West Bengal), Khudiram Bose was drawn towards revolutionary activities from a rather young age after being inspired by public lectures delivered by Sri Aurobindo and sister Nivedita.

After actively participating in protests following the partition of Bengal, Bose joined organisations behind revolutionary activities and learnt how to make bombs.

Along with another revolutionary, Prafulla Chaki, Bose was tasked with the assassination of a British judge, Douglas Kingsford. Kingsford had earned the ire of the revolutionaries following his clamping down on revolutionaries.

In April 1908, Bose and Chaki threw a bomb on a carriage that they suspected carried Kingsford. Kingsford, however, was not in the carriage. Those in the carriage - the wife and daughter of another barrister named Pringley Kennedy - died.

Bose was arrested in a railway station called Waini, a place he had reached by walking 40 km. While Chaki killed himself to avoid being arrested, Bose went through a trial before being eventually executed in August 1908.

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As a teenager who was executed, Khudiram Bose is among the youngest revolutionary freedom fighters to have been executed.

Unaware that Prafulla Chaki had shot himself, Bose initially tried to take the entire responsibility for the incident himself in the hope that he could protect Chaki. Only after realising that Chaki had died that Bose revealed that both of them were involved in the event.

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Letters from a Father to His Daughter is a collection of letters written by Jawaharlal Nehru to his daughter Indira Priyadarshini, originally published in 1929 by Allahabad Law Journal Press at Nehru's request and consisting of only the 30 letters sent in the summer of 1928 when Indira was 10 years old. He arranged a second edition in 1931 and subsequently, further reprints and editions have been published with adapted titles, additional letters and prefaces and forewords by Indira Gandhi, Sonia Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra.

The letters were education pieces on the subjects of natural and human history. At the time of the letter's writing, Nehru was in Allahabad, while Indira was in Mussoorie. While original letters written by Nehru were in English, they were translated into Hindi by the Hindi novelist Munshi Premchand under the name Pita Ke Patra Putri Ke Naam. In 2014 was edited a Cuban translation to Spanish of this book, using the tile "Cartas a mi hija Indira" (Letters to my daughter Indira), performed by Rodolfo Zamora. In that edition, other 5 letters were published. An amplified new edition was released in 2018, also in Cuba, honoring the 100th anniversary of the correspondence between Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi.

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Children’s Day is celebrated each year on the birth anniversary of India’s first prime minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, which falls on November 14. On this day, many educational and motivational programmes are held across India for children which advocate for their rights.

Before 1964, India celebrated Children’s Day on November 20 (the United Nations observes it on this day.) However, after the death of Pandit Nehru in 1964, it was decided that his birthday be celebrated as Children’s Day.

Along with being a stalwart of the freedom struggle, Jawaharlal Nehru oversaw the establishment of some of the most prominent educational institutions in India post-Independence. His vision led to the establishment of All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), and left behind a legacy of higher and technical education for the young.

On Children’s Day, schools organise various events such as essay writing competitions, music and dance performances to celebrate the occasion. Government and non-government organisations, NGOs, private bodies and other forums conduct a variety of events for the children to let them known about their rights and make them happy and cheer.

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Jawaharlal Nehru, byname Pandit Nehru, (born November 14, 1889, Allahabad, India—died May 27, 1964, New Delhi), first prime minister of independent India (1947–64), who established parliamentary government and became noted for his neutralist (nonaligned) policies in foreign affairs. He was also one of the principal leaders of India’s independence movement in the 1930s and ’40s.

Jawaharlal was the eldest of four children, two of whom were girls. A sister, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, later became the first woman president of the United Nations General Assembly.

Until the age of 16, Nehru was educated at home by a series of English governesses and tutors. Only one of those—a part-Irish, part-Belgian theosophist, Ferdinand Brooks—appears to have made any impression on him. Jawaharlal also had a venerable Indian tutor who taught him Hindi and Sanskrit. In 1905 he went to Harrow, a leading English school, where he stayed for two years. Nehru’s academic career was in no way outstanding. From Harrow he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he spent three years earning an honours degree in natural science. On leaving Cambridge he qualified as a barrister after two years at the Inner Temple, London, where in his own words he passed his examinations “with neither glory nor ignominy.”

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C.S. Lewis, in full Clive Staples Lewis, is Irish-born scholar, novelist, and author of about 40 books, many of them on Christian apologetics, including The Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity. His works of greatest lasting fame may be The Chronicles of Narnia, a series of seven children’s books that have become classics of fantasy literature.

In his youth Lewis aspired to become a notable poet, but after his first publications—a collection of lyric verse (Spirits in Bondage) in 1919 and a long narrative poem (Dymer) in 1926, both published under the name Clive Hamilton—attracted little attention, he turned to scholarly writing and prose fiction. His first prose work to be published (except for some early scholarly articles) was The Pilgrim’s Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason, and Romanticism (1933), an account of his search to find the source of the longings he experienced from his early years, which led him to an adult acceptance of the Christian faith. Lewis had rejected Christianity in his early teens and lived as an atheist through his 20s. Lewis turned to theism in 1930 (although Lewis misdated it to 1929 in Surprised by Joy) and to Christianity in 1931, partly with the help of his close friend and devout Roman Catholic J.R.R. Tolkien. Lewis described these changes in his autobiography Surprised by Joy (1955), an account of his spiritual and intellectual life through his early 30s.

In 1950 Lewis published what has become his most widely known book, the children’s fantasy The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. He went on to write six additional stories, and together the series came to be known as The Chronicles of Narnia. The series, which describes the conflicts between good and evil that occur in the kingdom of Narnia, is unified by Aslan, a noble lion, which is the form in which the Son of God usually appears in Narnia. The books were hugely popular, and numerous television and film adaptions appeared. The Narnian chronicles were followed by his last work of fiction, the one he thought his best, Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold (1956), a retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche from the viewpoint of one of Psyche’s sisters, whom Lewis names Orual. It is the least popular of his novels but the most highly praised by literary critics.

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Anne of Green Gables, children’s novel by Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery, published in 1908. The work, a sentimental but charming coming-of-age story about a spirited and unconventional orphan girl who finds a home with elderly siblings, became a classic of children’s literature and led to several sequels.

Matthew Cuthbert and his sister, Marilla, live in Avonlea on Canada’s Prince Edward Island. Needing help on their farm, Green Gables, they apply to adopt a boy from an orphanage. By mistake, however, a red-haired, freckle-faced 11-year-old girl named Anne Shirley is sent to the siblings. While Matthew instantly takes to Anne, Marilla is unsure about keeping her. However, the cheerful and highly imaginative Anne gradually transforms the joyless lives of shy Matthew and prim Marilla, and they come to view her as a daughter.

Anne of Green Gables was inspired by a newspaper story, and Montgomery infused the work with her own girlhood experiences and the rural life and traditions of Prince Edward Island. Although initially rejected by several publishers, the novel was a huge success upon publication. Mark Twain called Anne “the most lovable child in fiction” since Lewis Carroll’s Alice. Anne of Green Gables was adapted for film, stage, and television. Although Montgomery was not interested in continuing the story, she wrote several sequels that traced Anne’s life from girlhood to motherhood. However, they were less popular than the original novel.

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.B. White, in full Elwyn Brooks White, American essayist, author, and literary stylist, whose eloquent, unaffected prose appealed to readers of all ages.

White graduated from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, in 1921 and worked as a reporter and freelance writer before joining The New Yorker magazine as a writer and contributing editor in 1927.

In 1941 White edited with his wife A Subtreasury of American Humor. His three books for children—Stuart Little (1945, film 1999), Charlotte’s Web (1952, film 1973 and 2006), and The Trumpet of the Swan (1970)—are considered classics, featuring lively animal protagonists who seamlessly interact with the human world. In 1959 he revised and published a book by the late William Strunk, Jr., The Elements of Style, which became a standard style manual for writing in English. Among White’s other works is Points of My Compass (1962). Letters of E.B. White, edited by D.L. Guth, appeared in 1976, his collected essays in 1977, and Poems and Sketches of E.B. White in 1981. He was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom (1963) and a Pulitzer Prize special citation (1978). 

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Madeline is a media franchise that originated as a series of children's books written and illustrated by Ludwig Bemelmans, an Austrian-American author. The books have been adapted into numerous formats, spawning telefilms, television series and a live action feature film. As a closing line, the adaptations invoke a famous phrase Ethel Barrymore used to rebuff curtain calls, "That's all there is, there isn't any more." The stories take place in a Catholic boarding school in Paris. The teacher, Miss Clavel, is strict but loves the children, cares for them, and is open to their ideas.

Madeline was written by Ludwig Bemelmans and published in 1939. Bemelmans wrote five sequels between 1953 and 1961. Later books in the series were written by Bemelmans' grandson John Bemelmans Marciano. The books focus on 12 girls in a Catholic boarding school in Paris. Madeline is the smallest of the girls, only seven years old and the only girl with red hair. She is the bravest and most outgoing of the girls. The images seem classical and show scenery and landmarks of the location where the story takes place such as the Eiffel Tower and the Seine River.

In the first book, Madeline gets sick, is taken to the hospital and has her appendix removed to the envy of all the other girls. In Madeline's Rescue she falls into the Seine River and brings back the dog that saved her life.

Dell Comics published a Four Color Comics issue in 1942 titled "Ludwig Bemelman's Madeline and Genevieve"

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