Itihasa made itihasya...

The class VII NCERT history textbook Our Pasts has a very interesting conceptualization of chapters. While the first few chapters i.e. 2,3 and 4 deal with the political history of medieval India in a more conventional fashion the remainder of the chapters dwell on the social, economic, religious and cultural changes that unfolded in the same period of time. The latter chapters are in effect further elaborations of the first few where it seeks to unravel the processes that shaped medieval India. In that sense the chapters dovetails rather seamlessly into one another. But at another level,  not just the continuities in the chapters but such an arrangement of chapters in a textbook, which is largely thematic, in itself may be puzzling. I have tried to look at chapters 6, 7, 8 and 9 i.e. Towns, Traders and Craftspersons; Tribes, Nomads and Settled Communities; Devotional Paths to the Divine and The making of Regional Cultures as one unit. A synopsis of these chapters - To summarize

A presentation by Bunker Roy the founder of Barefoot College, Tilonia in Rajasthan at a TED conference whose arguments and contentions and the way his vision and convictions have so actually panned out, materialized and converged at his college, only augments and further bolsters the perspective I had tried to put across in my previous post. Three cheers for Barefoot college !!! I would imagine colleges such as these appear to be far more relevant in terms of its cognitive appropriateness and sociological relevance than an IIT, an IIM or even a JNU for that matter. Hope one day I get to visit this place and glean more about its pedagogic processes and the cognitive and social implications of its curriculum. Here is the video: Its inspiring. 

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