I guess, most of you guys might have seen the movie ‘300’ (based on novel by Frank Miller). If you haven’t, well, watch it. I wont tell that its a master piece but its certainly one of its kind. Extreme boredom on a fine day resulted in watching the movie for the second time and doing a small research on the story line.

Well, these are the important points …

* Its about Battle of Thermopylae
* Mostly shot before blue screen (read it as lots of graphics)
* A huge hit at the box office (what do you expect when 300x6 packs are on the screen fighting like …… uhmm … Vijaykanth or Balayya babu ?)
* Spartan King Leonidas is the Hero of the story
* Persian ‘God King’ Xerxes is the villian
* Fight is between 300 spartans + some guys joined in between And > 1million persian soldiers

But, there are few other things I learned from Wikipedia and Google ….

* Persian Army is about 2.6 millions in size
* Persian king is actually called as Xerxes, The Great
* 300 is not really 300 spartans, they are 300 spartans + 1000 Lacedaemonians +
3000 other greek soldiers + 700 Thespians + 1000 Melians +
400 Thebans + 1000 Phocians + few other Opuntian Locrians
* The number is around 6400 to 6700 which is NOT equal to 300

Ah, well, after reading the complete article, I started to believe in the story. Before that .. unless each one of them are like Rajini in Shivaji or Chiru in Tagore or Keanu Reaves in Matrix Reloaded (each fight huge number at a time) they wouldn’t have had stopped the persian army for 3 days.

Okay, now going back to the title, while reading the article about Battle of Thermopylae, few interesting words flashed on the page … Battle, Saragarhi, and Sikhs. This is an interested story, which has roots from India. This is about a battle which is often compared to the Battle of Thermopylae. The Battle of Saragarhi. The battle happened on 12th of September 1897, when India was under British Rule.

The Battle was between 4th Battalion (then 36th Sikhs) of the Sikh Regiment and Afghan and Orakzai tribesmen. It is between … 21 Sikhs and 10000 Afghans. Sikh soldiers managed to stop Afghans till their death and by the time Afghans cleared resistance, reinforcements saving some critical points for British India. The Afghans later stated that they had lost about 180 killed and many more wounded during the engagement against the 21 Sikh soldiers, but some 600 bodies[7] are said to have been seen around the ruined post when the relief party arrived.