India, March 25 -- Last week, a momentous anniversary in the history of our city quietly passed us by. The only public marker of that date is inscribed on a plaque embedded into a stone wall in a bustling part of the old city adjoining the Victoria Hospital, well above eye level, rendering it effectively invisible to the crowds that surge impatiently past it. "Through this breach," reads the plaque on the Delhi Gate, the north-eastern entrance into, and the last vestige of, the erstwhile Bangalore Fort, "the British assault was delivered - March 21, 1791".

Rewind to 1781, Yorktown, Viriginia. Six years after the Declaration of Independence by the American colonies in 1776, fierce fighting between the Continental Army led by Gen George Wa...