Ravi S. Iyer: Worldly

Day before yesterday's The Hindu newspaper (May 2, 2015) carried this article, The Indo-Danish connect, http://www.thehindu.com/features/magazine/the-indodanish-connect/article7164265.ece , which I shared with a Danish-American correspondent of mine. Thought it may be of interest to others too. A few short extracts & comments: [In response to what must have been a request from king Christian IV of Denmark, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_IV_of_Denmark , in the year 1620:] A letter by Raghunatha Nayak on a gold-foil asserts: “We order the creation of a port named Tharangampadi here and allow the export of pepper to that country (Denmark) as it is rare there.” [Ravi: I had not really noted this part of South Indian history. The colony was known as Tranquebar in European history but is now known as Tharangambadi (its old Tamil name). Its wiki page, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tharangambadi , states, "It was a Danish colony from 1620 to 1845, and in Danish it is ...

First some background. I put up a Facebook post on the Baltimore riots, https://www.facebook.com/ravi.s.iyer.7/posts/1613794142170490 , on April 29th 2015. That resulted in comment exchanges with Ms. Terry Reis Kennedy. In one comment she mentioned the "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" being a very important speech of Dr. King. I had heard about it before but had not read it. Later she put it up on her Facebook page. I have given below my response to her post (slightly edited) which includes a link to her post. This is a long response comment to the Facebook post titled, "Letter from a Birmingham Jail [ Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr.]", https://www.facebook.com/terry.reiskennedy/posts/10206744496509833:0 . Very enlightening letter/article about non-violent "direct action" in USA civil rights movement in the 60s! Thank you so much for telling me how important it is, which led me to make the time to read it. No wonder it is so famous. Some extracts th...