Itihasa made itihasya...

This I got as a forward. Please read it for more than a good laugh. I for one, felt it is in many ways a 'smart' and 'creative' reading and re-reading of India - past and present. It is very similar to the world history post I had published few years back in the humour section. Now could a IX standard kid really do this or someone of the likes of Gautam Bhatia behind it...?? A Brief History of India As written by a Std IX schoolboy, with all the original spellings . The original inhabitants of ancient India were called Adidases, who lived in two cities called Hariappa and Mujhe-na-Darao. These cities had the best drain system in the world and so there was no brain drain from them. Ancient India  was full of myths which have been handed down from son to father. A myth is a female moth. A collection of myths is called mythology, which means stories with female caricatures. One myth says that people in olden times worshipped monkeys because they were our incestor

There is this fascinating chapter in Our Pasts, the NCERT history textbook for class VII titled ‘Rulers and Buildings’. It tries to contextualize art and architecture in terms of its political and social import. Number of important features are highlighted to underscore the fact that monuments and buildings were built by monarchs across India , across religious denominations to make political statements. Some of the aspects that this chapter highlights are the following (the last one is my own reading which can also be added since coins can themselves be seen in terms of its artistic attributes) : a. Access, controlling and facilitating water supply…. b. Building places of worship, palaces and monuments in all grandeur which invokes the monarch’s claimed proximity to the divine … c. Incorporating symbols and methods of architecture from different cultures to indicate accommodation and tolerance…i.e. use of brackets in pillars by Mughals which was influenced by the brackets seen in

This was yet another effort to contextualize certain epochs and specific events that transpired in such epochs - let it be accomplishments of a monarch in a battle, construction of monuments, development of arts etc. In this instance it was to bring about the wider social, environmental and economic processes to relief to the advantage of students of class VIII in the school I was teaching some months back. We had taken them to what was during the reign of medieval Cholas i.e. Chozhas, an important urban centre i.e. Thanjavur, which is located in the Kavery delta region of Tamil Nadu. Today as well Thanjavur is an important town and headquarters of its eponymous district but continues to derive much of its fame and glory from its medeival past where its famous Brihadesvara temple built by Rajaraja Chozha occupies centre stage. Incidentally this year also marked the 1000th anniversary  of the temple celebrated by government with a 1000 member dance performance within its precinct. (whic