David Attenborough’s soothing voice will be gracing the Hong Kong Space Museum until August 31. The legendary British broadcaster has narrated Penguins, a documentary about the flightless birds going home to the Antarctic that will be aired three times a day in the Tsim Sha Tsui facility. Attenborough’s gentle commentaries have made him a national treasure on his home soil, and he was named among the 100 greatest Britons in a BBC poll, along with William Shakespeare, Diana, Princess of Wales, Charles Darwin and one of the country’s most infamous terrorists, Guy Fawkes …
The military veteran failed in his attempt to blow up the House of Lords in 1605. As part of the Gunpowder Plot – a revolt against increasing religious intolerance in Britain – Fawkes was put in charge of the explosives. When the police foiled the plan, he was found guarding 36 barrels of gunpowder. Fawkes’ scheme was a flop but his name has endured in annual November 5 bonfire rituals and pop culture – he was the inspiration behind the mask donned by fictional anarchist freedom fighter V …
The antihero of Alan Moore’s graphic novel V for Vendetta is a revolutionary in the same spirit as Fawkes. The masked protagonist is fighting a fascist regime that has risen to power in a post-apocalyptic, dystopian Britain. The authoritarian setting was partly inspired by the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell …
The term “Orwellian”, as in the NSA-knows-what-you-are-havingfor- dinner, is an adjective that has only become more relevant as the internet becomes more pervasive. Orwell (real name Eric Arthur Blair) knew a thing or two about authoritarianism: his first wife worked for the Censorship Department of the Ministry of War and he lived in colonial Burma and India. He was born in the latter, in a town called Motihari, the final resting place of the fairly obscure but important Azizul Haque …
The Indian mathematics student was called upon in 1892 to help develop the anthropometric system – that which tracks individual human traits such as height and weight – for the police in Bengal. Haque developed what eventually became the fingerprint classification system. However, the credit went to his colonial boss, Briton Edward Henry, who claimed the idea had come to him on a train. In 1947, India gained independence, thanks to the nonviolent civil disobedience movement instigated by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi …
In the words of Albert Einstein, Gandhi “invented a completely new and humane means for the liberation war of an oppressed country”. Time magazine once called other Nobel-prize winners, such the 14th Dalai Lama and Aung San Suu Kyi, Gandhi’s children, spiritual heirs of his non-violent methods. His life continues to inspire millions and has been documented in numerous biographies as well as the Oscarwinning biopic Gandhi, directed by Richard Attenborough, older brother of David.