March of history: B'luru's fateful vernal equinox

Last week, a momentous anniversary in the history of our city quietly passed us by. The only public marker of that date is inscribed on a plaque embedded into a stone wall in a bustling part of the old city adjoining the Victoria Hospital, well above eye level, rendering it effectively invisible to the crowds that surge impatiently past it. 'Through this breach,' reads the plaque on the Delhi Gate, the north-eastern entrance into, and the last vestige of, the erstwhile Bangalore Fort, 'the British assault was delivered — March 21, 1791.'

- Roopa Pai

Rewind to 1781, Yorktown, Virginia. Six years after the Declaration of Independence by the American colonies in 1776, fierce fighting between the Continental Army led by Gen George Washington and the British has left both sides exhausted. In the fall of 1781, Gen Charles Lord Cornwallis of the British Army occupies Yorktown, a port on the River York, awaiting much-needed supplies and reinforcements from the Royal Navy to re-equip his 9000-man army. Around the same time, in New York, Gen Washington receives word from his French allies that a French fleet will be available for critical naval support in Virginia, and begins to march south.