THIS IS MY STORY—30
MY JOURNEY THROUGH THE ERA OF AYUB KHAN TO THE TIMES OF IMRAN KHAN.
GHULAM AKBAR
My Romance with Napoleon
I have narrated this incident to give my readers an idea of how permissive liberalism and orthox conservatism were already at war in the early 1960s. In America too a revolution of values was taking shaps at that time which was adequately depicted by Grace Metalius in her best-selling novel Peyton Place, A Hollywood blockbuster too was produced based on this novel. Another great novel that came out in that era from America was Edna Ferber’s Giant in which racism of the conservative Americans was beautifully depicted. A movie was also made under the same title which starred Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean. It was the era of the Civil Rights movement in America which was led by Martim Luther King who was to get assassinated in the same decade.
I think I should mention here three books that had great impact on me at that time. One was Napoleon Bonaparte by Abbot that was virtually an eye witness account of the life of the great man. The book had remained out of print for several decades because of the British ban on it. Uncle Nasim Hijazi gave a copy of it to me in Abbottabad where I read all the 1800 pages of it in a kind of hypnotic spell. I was practically mesmerized by the towering personality of the Little Corporal. Here was a man who had virtually shaped his destiny from nothing. After his military academy days he had fallen into deep depression because of the gap between his ‘insignificant reality’ and his towering dreams. He had decided to commit suicide. The night he was roaming along the River Seine, determined to jump into its waters and get drowned, he came across an old friend who had come for a walk there alongwith his wife.
“Hello Bonaparte, where have you been? How come you are roaming here and not commanding an army? “Napoleon’s friend had asked good- humouredly.
Napoleon stared at his friend’s face for a while, then said: “I had come here to drown myself buddy. But you have reminded me that I was born to command armies. Thank you for pulling me back from the brink.”
After that night Napoleon never looked back.
I believe that Napoleon is the most distorted figure in history. British propagandists have distorted his character so extensively that many thrilling and fascinating aspects of this French Wizard are not known.
I was lucky to have laid my hands on that book.
