India, Oct. 1 -- Mahatma Gandhi was killed in January 1948. British literary giant George Orwell wrote an altogether brilliant essay - an obituary-style assessment - titled Reflections on Gandhi in January 1949. Orwell died in January 1950.

The two years between those three Januarys saw a post-Partition India lose territory and population but gain a great Constitution that proclaimed it a Republic. A post-World War II Britain shrank dramatically as an empire but through the landmark London Declaration of 1949, became renewed as the Commonwealth of Nations. And the world as a whole, chastened by its searing experiences of the Holocaust and of Hiroshima-Nagasaki, came to adopt the Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaimed by the UN....