Itihasa made itihasya...

The NCERT history textbooks "Our Pasts" has been in effect for nearly 8 years now and it continues to be seen by many as best possible history textbook for school students written in post independent India. These particular set of textbooks from middle school (class VI) and above, themselves emerged in the context of the criticism of 'saffronization', that the preceding set of NCERT history textbooks, produced under the aegis of the then NDA government (in governance from 1998-2004) were seen to 'suffer' from. But with the NDA government back at the helm, and its education minister 'threatening' to once again review and change the educational policy, it is feared that history textbooks will be subjected to 'mytholization' , gross simplification in which large swathes of time and epochs under certain homogeneous cultural, social and religious categories will be 'lumped' together, like they were in its previous version. Indeed these

( A truncated version of this article appeared in The Alternative) What does it mean for a corporate (for profit company) to be socially responsible? Also what does it mean for a citizen to be socially responsible? As such we seem to be living in a society where we see number of concerned individuals and a corporate class eager to 'improve living conditions' and participate in measures and efforts to fight poverty, corruption and provide access to a better quality of life. Nonetheless most, if not all efforts, at social intervention by civil society groups (the NGO's in particular that provide avenues for conscientious individuals to do 'something for the world of have nots, oppressed and dispossessed') and corporates do so without much recognition of certain lack of social and participative qualities whose absence greatly exacerbates, if not creates most problems of dispossession and disenfranchisement in the first place. For at several levels, part - if n

We don’t really come across many “children films” in India.   I believe it was S S Vasan, the old doyen of south Indian cinema and founder of Gemini studios, who once remarked that there cannot be any children’s films.   For children enjoy what we as adults enjoy and perhaps enjoy more. So an average MGR film or a Rajkumar film is as much a children’s film as they are a film for an adult.  For even if we seek to define a children’s film as a film which has a child or children as its protagonists, would Louise Malle’s Goodbye, Children , a film about a bunch of school kids in world II France be characterized as an children’s film? It would be more appropriate to refer it as an anti-war film. Similarly Vittorio de Seca’s Bicycle Theives which explores through its neo-realism the working class world of post war Italy with a child as one of its central characters can hardly be seen as a children’s film.   But let us not get into such definitions and conceptualizations of wh