Forgotten 2017 Quotes

What truly matters is not which party controls our government, but whether our government is controlled by the people. January 20, 2017, will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again. The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer. —Donald Trump

Four thousand miles away in France, the old boys from the Haute-Loire Resistance wrote to each other to share the devastating news. They had enjoyed nearly forty years of freedom since spending a mere couple of months in Virginia’s presence in 1944. But the warrior they called La Madone had shown them hope, comradeship, courage, and the way to be the best version of themselves, and they had never forgotten. In the midst of hardship and fear, she had shared with them a fleeting but glorious state of happiness and the most vivid moment of their lives. The last of those famous Diane Irregulars—the ever-boyish Gabriel Eyraud, her chouchou—passed away in 2017 while I was researching Virginia’s story. Until the end of his days, he and the others who had known Virginia on the plateau liked to pause now and then to think of the woman in khaki who never, ever gave up on freedom. When they talked with awe and affection of her incredible exploits, they smiled and looked up at the wide, open skies with “les étoiles dans les yeux.

(A Russian television series called Sleepers, in which the United States is plotting to overthrow the Russian government, began airing in the fall of 2017. In the show, the U.S. ambassador is blond; his name is Michael. They haven’t forgotten about me yet!)

What is funny though is how, with time, people seem to have forgotten that it was this period that really made Rahman what he is. The man is Tamil and Tamil music was how he started out, and some of his best songs are in Tamil. On 8 July 2017, AR performed at Wembley Stadium in London, a concert titled Netru, Indru, Naalai (Tamil for ‘yesterday, today, tomorrow’). Soon after the concert, Twitter went berserk with a number of fans who’d attended the concert taking to social media to attack the composer, accusing him of playing ‘too many Tamil songs’. Some claimed that they’d walked out of the show in protest. AR addressed the issue politely and diplomatically. He reasoned that he had ‘tried his best’, was grateful to his fans and loved them for all they’d given him. As for the walking out bit, he said that some people always tend to leave the venue before he finishes a concert. He said there would always be pockets in the seats, here and there, by the time he got to the end of a show. His actual response though was quite brilliant. For his next set of concerts in Canada, AR cleverly released two posters for two different shows—one of which would be Tamil songs only and the other Hindi songs only. That one move said more than all his statements to the media.