Skip to main content

Jurassic World

T-Rex Tastes the Rainbow is a painting by Olga Shvartsur


In the Jurassic world of the movies, man-made monsters go out of the control of their creators and become lethal to the creators themselves or their fellow human beings. Something similar is happening in today’s India. Certain skeletons of a bygone civilization are disinterred by some self-proclaimed nationalists. The skeletons slowly acquire life. Then they move out of the control of their excavators and behave like the dinosaurs in the Jurassic World movies.

One of the most lethal actions of these dinosaurs is on the school curriculum. A lot of history is being deleted. New history is created gradually. The Mughals who ruled most of India, including Pakistan and Afghanistan, for three whole centuries, were swallowed by the dinosaurs some time back. Now the freedom fighters are chomped on. Not even Mahatma Gandhi is spared. His killer is all set to be hoisted on a pedestal. Even chapters like ‘US hegemony in world politics’ and ‘The Cold War Era’ have disappeared. ‘Rise of popular movements’ and ‘Era of one-party dominance’ too vanished. ‘Central Islamic lands’ and ‘Confrontation of cultures’ made an exit from class 10. Even ‘The Industrial Revolution’ was put to rest. So were the chapters on ‘Democracy and Diversity,’ ‘Popular struggles and movements,’ and ‘Challenges to Democracy.’ Oh my god, the list of deletions seems endless!

There is no doubt that textbooks and curricula need to be revised and updated from time to time. How the changes are made and what the objectives of the changes are matter as much as the content-revision.

As the editorial of The Hindustan Times on 8 April 2023 said, academics should not be contaminated with political biases and intentions. School curriculum should help students to engage with diverse perspectives. Brainwashing the students with a tunnel vision is severely detrimental for the future of any nation. No nation can create an alert, aware and empathetic generation without allowing them to be in touch with different perspectives and possibilities. The editorial ends with the warning that “whenever ideology has been allowed to take the upper hand, it has proved detrimental to social progress and developing young minds.”

We are living in a world which provides information literally at fingertips. You can Google and get all possible information on almost anything under the sun. In such a world, how much can a government really shut out from people? But school students are a different matter. They don’t get the opportunity to learn from so many diverse sources. Hence what is given to them in classrooms is important. Let us not kill their imaginations by populating them with ancient dinosaurs.

Now the Indian government is also planning to play the censor on social media. The Press Information Bureau [PIB] has been asked to check the contents appearing on social media. Anything that is critical of the government will be removed in the name of ‘fact-checking.”

India is already sinking on the press freedom ranking. A lot of honest media people have lost their jobs and some of them are in jails. A friend joked the other day that the criminals are moving out of India’s jails by becoming members of the BJP and their places in the jails are being given to journalists, social activists and critics of the government. Has India already become a Jurassic World?

PS. This post is part of #BlogchatterA2Z 2023

Previous Post: The Idiot and the Ideal Human Being

Coming up tomorrow: Kentucky Fried Chicken

Labels

Labels:

Comments

  1. Yamini MacLeanApril 11, 2023 at 10:06 AM

    Hari OM
    When you put it like that... YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
  2. DeepikaApril 11, 2023 at 10:10 AM

    Government should not tamper with history. You are right we will very certainly become a jurrasic world

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalApril 11, 2023 at 10:23 AM

      What they're doing will come back to haunt them sooner rather than later.

      Delete
  3. CareenaApril 11, 2023 at 10:28 AM

    Terrifying future ahead for us. It hasn't been that long since i last read those chapters in school myself! Those were the most exciting ones and now this...When will this all end!?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalApril 11, 2023 at 11:19 AM

      We have a chance in 2024, but will India vote wisely?

      Delete
  4. JaiApril 11, 2023 at 11:40 AM

    It is all being done as a concerted effort towards the creation of a Hindu rashtra Tom. They are polluting the minds of young children with false ideology. And I am appalled that even educated sensible people are falling for it.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalApril 11, 2023 at 12:12 PM

      The educated people being brainwashed so easily is something that confounds me too.

      Delete
  5. Rajeev MoothedathApril 11, 2023 at 12:09 PM

    A truly disturbing trend!

    ReplyDelete
  6. Harshita NandaApril 11, 2023 at 8:17 PM

    Those of us who have learnt history beyond school textbooks know the parallels between India and Germany of 1930s...but then as you said, our country seems to be headed in a direction none of us want, but are unable to stop

    ReplyDelete
  7. ArtiApril 11, 2023 at 9:04 PM

    Your reply to Harshita's comment above brings me hope. Otherwise, it's rather dire.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Deepti MenonApril 14, 2023 at 11:23 AM

    It is not only in History, but in Literature as well that changes are being made. The latest move was Penguin trying to amend the writings of Roald Dahl! Sad, but true!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalApril 14, 2023 at 3:58 PM

      Dahl had his terrible eccentricities. But who has the right to edit him now? I am not able to answer because I don't have sufficient knowledge on the matter.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ayodhya: Kingdom of Sorrows

T he Sarayu carried more tears than water. Ayodhya was a sad kingdom. Dasaratha was a good king. He upheld dharma – justice and morality – as best as he could. The citizens were apparently happy. Then, one day, it all changed. One person is enough to change the destiny of a whole kingdom. Who was that one person? Some say it was Kaikeyi, one of the three official wives of Dasaratha. Some others say it was Manthara, Kaikeyi’s chief maid. Manthara was a hunchback. She was the caretaker of Kaikeyi right from the latter’s childhood; foster mother, so to say, because Kaikeyi had no mother. The absence of maternal influence can distort a girl child’s personality. With a foster mother like Manthara, the distortion can be really bad. Manthara was cunning, selfish, and morally ambiguous. A severe physical deformity can make one worse than all that. Manthara was as devious and manipulative as a woman could be in a men’s world. Add to that all the jealousy and ambition that insecure peo...
39 comments
Read more

Bharata: The Ascetic King

Bharata is disillusioned yet again. His brother, Rama the ideal man, Maryada Purushottam , is making yet another grotesque demand. Sita Devi has to prove her purity now, years after the Agni Pariksha she arranged for herself long ago in Lanka itself. Now, when she has been living for years far away from Rama with her two sons Luva and Kusha in the paternal care of no less a saint than Valmiki himself! What has happened to Rama? Bharata sits on the bank of the Sarayu with tears welling up in his eyes. Give me an answer, Sarayu, he said. Sarayu accepted Bharata’s tears too. She was used to absorbing tears. How many times has Rama come and sat upon this very same bank and wept too? Life is sorrow, Sarayu muttered to Bharata. Even if you are royal descendants of divinity itself. Rama had brought the children Luva and Kusha to Ayodhya on the day of the Ashvamedha Yagna which he was conducting in order to reaffirm his sovereignty and legitimacy over his kingdom. He didn’t know they w...
30 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
16 comments
Read more

Liberated

Fiction - parable Vijay was familiar enough with soil and the stones it turns up to realise that he had struck something rare.   It was a tiny stone, a pitch black speck not larger than the tip of his little finger. It turned up from the intestine of the earth while Vijay was digging a pit for the biogas plant. Anand, the scientist from the village, got the stone analysed in his lab and assured, “It is a rare object.   A compound of carbonic acid and magnesium.” Anand and his fellow scientists believed that it must be a fragment of a meteoroid that hit the earth millions of years ago.   “Very rare indeed,” concluded the scientist. Now, it’s plain commonsense that something that’s very rare indeed must be very valuable too. All the more so if it came from the heavens. So Vijay got the village goldsmith to set it on a gold ring.   Vijay wore the ring proudly on his ring finger. Nobody, in the village, however bothered to pay any homage to Vijay’s...
47 comments
Read more

Empuraan – Review

Revenge is an ancient theme in human narratives. Give a moral rationale for the revenge and make the antagonist look monstrously evil, then you have the material for a good work of art. Add to that some spices from contemporary politics and the recipe is quite right for a hit movie. This is what you get in the Malayalam movie, Empuraan , which is running full houses now despite the trenchant opposition to it from the emergent Hindutva forces in the state. First of all, I fail to understand why so much brouhaha was hollered by the Hindutvans [let me coin that word for sheer convenience] who managed to get some 3 minutes censored from the 3-hour movie. The movie doesn’t make any explicit mention of any of the existing Hindutva political parties or other organisations. On the other hand, Allahu Akbar is shouted menacingly by Islamic terrorists, albeit towards the end. True, the movie begins with an implicit reference to what happened in Gujarat in 2002 after the Godhra train burnin...
9 comments
Read more