When she was born in the year 1926 as the princess of a great nation called the Great Britain, it was a maritime superpower who prided on "the Sun never set over the British Empire". Back then Social media was strictly fantasy. Face and Book were two separate words with two distinct meanings, juxtaposing them to form a social media platform was still a greater fantasy, until Mark Zuckerberg made it a reality in the next century when she was still alive (In fact I came to know of her death from a post on Facebook).
Whatsapp then sounded more like "What's Up", a way to greet rather than a mode of message sharing. Twitting then was that ignorable sound from the window made by a little birdie in Spring time or on those dog days of summer, rather than a celebrity's message to the world or Donald Trump's tool to massage his gargantuan ego. Web was weaved by a spider, not designed by a programmer. No one then knew what world wide web was then.
When she was just a 3 year old toddler, the great depression started in the richest nation in the world called the United States on the other side of the Atlantic - a nation separated from her country England by the common language of English. Companies in America collapsed like a pack of cards on that fateful Tuesday of October, 1929 when the most prized share certificates of Wall Street became the brightest wall papers, many of their millionaire owners became paupers overnight (Milion dollar had a great value then) and committed suicide. She was there to see it.
She was just a 7 year old kid when a diminutive man with funny moustache named Adolf Hitler was giving fiery speech in a Beer Hall in Munich, yelling - "The German race isn't dead, nor we will ever allow it to die" as he was dismissed as just another beer guzzling brawler in an anemic Germany still suffering from the aftershock of its humiliating defeat from World War I.
She stepped into her teens when Hitler's blitzkrieg stepped into the European plain ravaging one nation after another before the German warplanes started bombing London incessantly. Its V2 rocket raids put her city under seize and the fall of her city of London looked imminent. As a scared teen one day she came to know a bomb fell on Prime Minister Churchill's 10 Downing Street residence, destroying a good portion of it and nearly killing him.
Words of this attack on British Prime Minister spread like wild fire. Without heeding to his trusted advisors who suggested him to leave his official building, Churchill went to its basement. Sitting there he made the famous Radio address to the nation - "We shall fight in the air, we shall fight on the sea, we shall fight on the beach, and we shall fight on the hills.... But we shall NEVER EVER SURRENDER". He just spelt out the British grit.
This speech was enough to rally the British moral which at that time was at its historic low. The war ravaged nation whose legendary gritty character lied dormant due to German Blitzkrieg was suddenly aroused. The Royal Air Force fought back bravely, making a spectacular comeback. The war slowly started to turn around. The yet invincible Luftwaffe (German Air Force) started suffering heavy losses, enough to force Hitler to abandon his Britain mission.
She was in her late teen when the war ended with Hitler killing himself after being responsible for killing so many. She saw sun started to set over British Empire. Though defeated, Hitler handed the English a pyrrhic victory. Unable to manage its colonies the post war England was forced to relinquish them. One of them was the British crown jewel of India.
When she got married at the age of 21, currently world's 3rd largest GDP holder Japan's chief exports were fish and raw silk. The present 2nd largest GDP China and an aspiring Superpower was a war plundered nation, its women raped by in impunity by the invading Japanese. Singapore was a sleepy fishing township. Russia was a superpower engaged in Cold War to continue for half a century more.
And she saw many more historic events, a world of transformational changes, many of them cataclysmic. When she passed away today at the age of 96, so also passed an era. RIP Queen Elizabeth.
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