Kitty Boomla, the South-East Asia Youth Conference: Memories

This narrative goes back to almost sixty-five years in the past. I had just crossed into my twenties and prided myself as a student activist at the University of Dacca. Dacca, which is now Dhaka, was the administrative headquarters of East Pakistan. It was still a bit of a backwater, but news kept percolating in, we duly got to know of the convulsions shaking the whole of Asia. The Chinese Liberation Army had already taken control over more than three-quarters of the land mass of that great country. In Korea and Manchuria too, the progressive forces were on the verge of seizing power. That ascetic-looking charismatic leader, Ho Chi Minh was rewriting history in Vietnam; his message had spread across the rest of what was described as French IndoChina. In the Malaya peninsula, Communist insurgents were winning one guerrilla battle after another, and the British masters were at their wit’s end.