Today I saw the movie Alexander. The battle scenes are shot well, especially the conquest of Babylon. However, it's a three-hour long movie that oftentimes seems like some documentry on Alexander's life rather than a movie. There are two things that one realizes on seeing the movie. First is Alexander's unprecedented military success. The second is his failure of conquest of India.

It was India that first broke the will of his army and then Alexander's own will to fight. For the first time Alexander's forces were opposed by armies mounted on twenty-feet tall elephants that instilled mortal fear in them. Alexander tried hard to motivate them, but after bloody battles in dense and trecherous forests, his own resolve weakened. He gave up his dream of conquering the world and declared, "We will not go futher. We will go back all the way to Macedonia".

The movie tells us that it was only India that he failed to conquer. Unfortunately we are not told the story this way. We are only taught about Alexander's victory over King Puru (or Porus as the Greeks called him). We consider Alexander as our conquerer. Because Indian history is written by people who have no pride in this great nation and her achievements. That is why we are not told to be proud of Alexander's failure to conquer India and Chandragupta Maurya's subsequent unification of our country from Khadahar to Bengal.