Sreenath the Lion
Sometime in November 2005, I read Leon Uris's novel "Exodus". This novel is about the birth of the Jewish state of Israel which became an independent country on May 14, 1948. The heroine is Miss Karen Fremont, an American nurse looking after Jewish children on the island of Cyprus. There, she meets an Israeli freedom or resistance fighter Ari Ben Canaan. The novel had been made into a 1960 US feature film bearing the same title starring Paul Newman, directed by Otto Preminger, as well as into a short-lived Broadway musical (12 previews, 19 performances) in 1971. It was a worldwide best-seller, translated into a dozen languages.Every able-bodied Israeli citizen(both genders) aged between 18-60 years should enlist in the Israeli armed forces to serve their nation during an attack or invasion or war from external aggressors. I appreciate this policy of the Israeli government. This is not the case in India.
When I was 13 years old, i.e., sometime in 1980, I read "Roots" authored by African American author Alex Huxley. The book is about a 16 year old Gambian teenager abducted in 1767 from the Gambian village of Juffure, West Africa taken on board the American ship " Lord Ligonier" bound for Maryland and sold to a Virginia planter. This book is based on fact and not on fiction. It has all the elements of a Hollywood movie; however, no US filmmaker has come forward to adapt it to the celluloid screen.
Still vividly remembering the stories after he grew up and became a writer, Haley began to search for documentation that might authenticate the narrative. It took ten years and a half a million miles of travel across three continents to find it, but finally, in an astonishing feat of genealogical detective work, he discovered not only the name of "the African"—Kunta Kinte—but the precise location of Juffure, the very village in The Gambia, West Africa, from which he was abducted in 1767 at the age of sixteen and taken on the Lord Ligonier to Maryland and sold to a Virginia planter.
Creation of Israel, 1948 On May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion, the head of the Jewish Agency, proclaimed the establishment of the State of Israel.
