As someone who is interested in history, I have the habit of reading "On this Day..." of NYTimes. Some things get repeated every year and it never fail to interest you, like Aug.15 1947. (You would be amazed to see how the paper's attitude towards India is still unchanged though India has changed dramatically.) One of those things that interested me was the Russian revolution's high point, the murder of Tsar Nicholas' family on July 17. Reared in a milieu where the word "tyrant" was prefixed to the title "Tsar", the event still posed me an uneasy moral question. Did it have to be that brutal? or anything for that matter. Without fail I read that archive this year and recently without any link to any of this, I rented Dr.Zhivago.

A passive observer Dr.Zhivago, when his father-in-law asks the same question, explains "this is to say there is no going back". Recently the killing of Saddam's sons come to mind and American media on behalf of Bush, were offering the same logic. A sensitive poet Zhivago, later in the film talks to a little girl, who says to him as taught in the school, that Tsar was the enemy of the people (alongside a picture with his mousche twisted upwards) . He suggests may be he didn't know that. It kicked up more interest in the whole subject and I rented Richard Pipes book about the revolution. Actually in photos , Nicholas looks normal like a Swedish naval officer sans the funny moushe.

I jumped on to the pages of Nicholas' murder. It is so sordid. The murder of his 4 daughters,wife and a young son and some cooks and assistants, in total were done in a 5 x 6 room. At 1:30 am in July 17, Nicholas was informed he is taken somewhere else so was asked to get ready. His family washed and got ready and came down, young Alexis in Nicholas's hands. They were lead to a room with no chairs, the smart Queen asked why there were no chairs. 2 were brought. The executioner then informed them of the "decision". Nicholas asked "what? what?" and then the 10 marksmen who were briefed previously on whom to shoot, aimed at their hearts. Shots rang and the bullets richocheted. You would have thought it was over in a jiffy. Alexis was still moaning and the girls were alive. It apparently took 20 minutes to kill them all with one of the daughters who lingered on covering her chest with a pillow had (!) to be bayoneted.

But I have been asking, am I moved by the countless million murders of Tsar's apparatus? Was I influenced because I am able to put faces, very pretty ones at that, to the victims ? Why is it that numbers in abstract fail to produce visceral reactions and individuals with faces and stories do invariably? Do all faces and stories elicit the same outrage? Why is it that some do more and some less?