Right-wing is Right

  Ask any Indian on the street who gave us our national cry, ‘Jai Hind!’, & 9 out of 10 will say Subhash Chandra Bose. But decades before Netaji marched with the INA, 2 simple, electrifying words were uttered in the cold streets of Berlin by a teenage fugitive from Kerala. A man who fled British spies, forged an alliance with the German Kaiser, commanded a warship that set colonial Madras ablaze & stood up to Adolf Hitler himself. Born in 1891 in Trivandrum, Chempakaraman Pillai grew up under the heavy shadow of the British Raj. While other children played, young Pillai was already organizing schoolboys, printing anti colonial pamphlets & leading secret meetings under the banner of the Dharma Poshani Assembly. By 1908, he was just 17 yrs old & his name was circled in red on British Intelligence watchlists. Colonial officers were closing in to arrest the young rebel. In a plot straight out of an espionage thriller, a friendly foreign traveler named Sir Walter Str...

  Virendranath Chattopadhyay-Chatto In 1915, British intelligence sent a secret service to Zurich with orders to kill him. He never fired a gun in his life. Yet he was one of the most dangerous men in Europe. His name was Virendranath Chattopadhyay aka Chatto. History remembers his sister better — Sarojini Naidu, the poet who'd one day govern a free province. Europe remembered him differently. Feared him. Chased him across three countries and never quite caught him. He arrived in London in 1902, meant for the Indian Civil Service. He failed the entrance exam and found something else instead — a house on Cromwell Avenue where Indian students gathered under Shyamji Krishna Varma, reading sedition over tea, dreaming of a country none of them could return to. By 1907 he was writing for their journal. By 1909 one of their own had shot dead a British official on English soil, and the hunt began. He fled to Paris. Even there, the ground wasn't stable. In 1910 he pulled his own s...