Itihasa made itihasya...

Globalization as a conceptual category to explain various facets of change that this contemporary world defined by fractions, attritions, divisions  (and much of it violent)  is witnessing, emerges as a useful shorthand. Indeed the very bloody attritions and convulsions, widening social, economic, gender and cultural schisms and disparities themselves are undoubtedly aggravated, if not precipitated, by it.  But then being a shorthand,  many of the actual and finer workings of globalization's negative impact is often missed and inadequately understood. I for one particularly feel that the educational consequences in general and globalization's cognitive impact has not been adequately and sufficiently recognized and understood. That globalization with its determining attribute of single division of labour, not just in the context of the developed world like North America or Western Europe but even for a country like India, results in "white collarization" of our econ

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