Quick glance of 4 April in the pages of History

April 4: Here are the major events that occurred on 4 April….

• 4 April, 1818: Congress decides on the US flag: 13 red & white stripes & 20 stars.
• 4 April, 1904: Kundan Lal Saigal, aka K L Sehgal, was born on this day. He could be described as the first superstar of Bollywood. Born in Jammu in 1904, Sehgal was a budding singer and this encouraged him to move to Calcutta and hone his talent. He started singing at the “New theatres” which was a Calcutta based film studio. KL Saigal moved to Mumbai in 1941 where he acted and did playback singing in numerous Bollywood movies.

• 4 April, 1905: An earthquake occurred in Kangra valley on this very day in 1905 which decimated almost everything in the Kangra region which used to come under Punjab province. Measuring 7.8 on Richter Scale, this earthquake caused major destruction in the towns of Mcleodganj, Dharamshala and Kangra.
• 4 April, 1932: George Bernard Shaw’s “Too True to be Good” premieres in New York City.
• 4 April, 1944: The Battle of Kohima, a turning point in the Second World War that halted Japan’s advance into Asia, started on 4 April 1944. Sometimes called the “Stalingrad of the East”, it ended on 22 June 1944 with the defeat and retreat of Japanese forces.
• 4 April, 1949: Parveen Babi, an Indian actress, appeared in 60 feature films in Bollywood and was mostly remembered for her glamorous roles during the movies in 70s and 80s. She was born on 4 April 1949 in Junagadh, Gujarat.

• 4 April, 1956: Death of Manilal Mohandas Gandhi. He was was the second son of Mahatma Gandhi. He was born in Rajkot in 1892. He travelled to South Africa in 1897 and worked at Phoenix ashram near Durban for some time. He later worked in “Indian opinion” a Gujarati-English weekly publication. In 1920, he was promoted as the editor of the publication.
• 4 April, 1968: US civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee.
• 4 April, 1973: New York’s World Trade Center The twin towers of the World Trade Center rising 1,350 feet above Manhattan officially became the world’s tallest buildings.
• 4 April, 1975: Microsoft is founded as a partnership between Bill Gates and Paul Allen to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800.

• 4 April, 1979: Pakistan’s former Prime Minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, has been hanged in spite of international calls for clemency. Many believed his trial and the sentence were manipulated by the ruling military regime, led by General Zia ul-Haq,. He was sentenced to death for the murder of a political opponent following a trial which was widely condemned as unfair.
• 4 April, 2008: A letter written by Abraham Lincoln is sold at auction for $3.4 million in New York. The 1864 reply to a petition by 195 children asking for the freedom of “all the slave children in this country” has beaten the national record of $3.1 million. Sotheby’s have said that it was bought by an American collector by telephone.