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A historical battle

by The Opti Mystic

While Murli Manohar Joshi may have used his term to tinge the history textbooks with the ideologies of his political masters, Arjun Singh seems to be going overboard in his overzealous drive to reverse Joshi’s excesses. Arjun Singh is attempting to fire shots at the Sangh parivaar by placing his gun on the shoulders of school-children.

Instead of learning history, all that children seem to hear, these days, are words like ‘Saffronisation’, ‘Detoxification’, ‘Northernization’, etc. Everybody seems to be out to implement their own agenda. But then, what are the options?

  • Create a joint parliamentary committee to analyse ways in which neither party sees red while coming up with multi-coloured history text books. (well, with all those various colours, at least no one will be able to claim that history books are boring!)
  • Let the government of the day decide on what really happened in history and who did it! (Heroes and villains in our history would switch places every five years!)
  • Let the government withdraw from this history text books business once and for all, leaving it to ‘eminent historians’. (Well, the eminence of these historians is usually decided by the government of the day!)
  • Let the corporate sector do it! (History will go to the highest bidder!)
  • Last but not the least (my suggestion!), stop teaching history in schools. Categorize all history text books under ‘fiction’ and arrange for more library periods during school hours. ;-)

These education ministers have created a big mess for themselves to contend with! One can only hope for a solution fairly quickly. Though I wonder why the Prime Minister, a techocrat himself, hasn’t stepped in to intervene. Perhaps, he’s emulating what Atal Bihari Vajpayee did during his tenure!

What do you think?

2 comments

1 Harini Calamur { 08.13.04 at 9:16 am }

like your suggestion the best - categorize it as fiction.
alternatively - rather than focus on battles and victorirs - focus on the individual and their life and learnings. Have categories for saints, sinners, and ordinary mortals. Saints would be people like Gandhi, sinners would be people like Hitler. Everyone else would be ordinary human beings - some good, some bad.

2 The Opti Mystic { 08.14.04 at 1:36 am }

Harini >> Battles and victories are hard facts, are they not? One cannot refute that X has won the fight against Y just because its inconvenient for them to digest X’s victory. So battles could well stay on in books.

I’d much rather have children reading history and enjoying it!