Having reaped the benefits of posting about Chuck Norris on a day that he became one of the leading Trends on Twitter, I figured it would be wise to do so again. This time, I entered the realm of Twitterfall, looking for another subject and saw one of today’s trends being Jyoti Basu.
Who?! I thought. So I looked it up on Wikipedia and saw that he was quite the figure in Marxist India for about 50 years. And again… an idea was born. There must be more people like me not knowing what the hell everyone’s tweeting about on Twitter, so I’ll try to pick a daily trend, learn about it and post my findings here.
Yes, it’s a brilliant idea, I know.
By the way, Jyoti Basu is the man on the left in the picture above.
Jyoti Basu † (8 July 1914 – 17 January 2010)
- Twitter Trend date: January 17th, 2010
- What’s the word: Jyoti Basu passed away 11:47 AM IST (Indian time zone)
After years of die hard studying, our friend Basu achieved his honors in the the English language, to move on and make a difference. Apparently ever since the start of his career he felt like standing up for the working man, the simple man. He was quite the figure in he Union for railway workers back then.
From his first day in politics he tries to focus on students to go studying abroad (the UK preferably) to widen their minds, learn English and learn the ancient ways of sipping Earl Grey. It is in England where Basu comes in touch with communism and feels totally connected with the ideas. Being a Lefty in politics, he knew that returning to India could be problematic, as the Communist Party in the motherland were banned and spat on.
Our Jyoti is a determined guy and joined the Communist Party Of India anyway (CPI). From here on end he landed in jail every now and then for either opposing Congress, or sporting ideas that did not suite them. Tough luck.
Determined as he was though, Jyoti Basu just hobbles along and becomes chief minister of the United Fronts Government and held this position for 23 years (!). Actually it seems Jyoti did not do a whole lot of exciting stuff, but from what I’m learning now he definitely managed to avert things like violent independancy clames of the Indian state Darjeeling.
Unfortunately for him, his party turned down the idea to run for Prime Minister, which he’d always considered a dumb, tactless decision.
Anyhow, even in death, Basu still holds the record for longest-serving Chief Minister in the history of Indian politics.
The end
Christ.. I must be honest: this was quite a boring subject to cover, but I’m glad I learned something about a prominent man in history. One I hadn’t even heard of before.
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