He hated the name George and always preferred to be called simply Bernard Shaw.
He is the only person to have won both a Nobel Prize (for Literature in 1925) and an Oscar (for the screenplay of his play Pygmalion in 1938).
Born in Dublin he began work aged 15 as a junior clerk in a Dublin estate agency at a salary of Rs. 18 a year.
He later described the work as a “damnable waste of human life”.
Throughout his life he campaigned strongly for both socialism and alphabet reform.
His new alphabet was designed to eliminate inconsistencies in English spelling. He left a large amount of money to promote his new alphabet but it never became popular.
He was a lifelong vegetarian and opposed British involvement in the First World War.
Because of his anti-war pamphlets and speeches he was expelled from the Dramatists’ Club.
We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing. (George Bernard Shaw).
He died aged 94 of kidney problems caused by a fall from a ladder while pruning a tree.
Kargil War Memorial day
Kargil was the first war between India and Pakistan after the one in 1971 which had led to the formation of Bangladesh as a separate country.
Atal Bihari Vajpayee-led NDA government was in power at the time of this war.
India launched ‘Operation Vijay’ to clear the Kargil sector of infiltration by Pakistani soldiers and Kashmiri militants on the Indian side of the Line of Control.
India lost more than 500 military men on the Kargil territory while reports from Pakistan claimed that more than 3000 of their soldiers, mujahideens and infiltrates died.
it was one of the few instances when war was fought between two nuclear states. It was also the first war between the two countries widely covered in the media.
