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:

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

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...
2 comments
Read more

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...
16 comments
Read more

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...
18 comments
Read more

Truths of various colours

You have your truth and I have mine. There shouldn’t be a problem – until someone lies. Unfortunately, lying has been elevated as a virtue in present India. There are all sorts of truths, some of which are irrefutable. As a friend said the other day with a little frustration, the eternal truth is this: No matter how many times you check, the Wi-Fi will always run fastest when you don’t actually need it – and collapse the moment you’re about to hit Submit . Philosophers call it irony. Engineers call it Murphy’s Law. The rest of us just call it life. Life is impossible without countless such truths. Consider the following; ·       Change is inevitable. ·       Mortality is universal. ·       Actions have consequences. [Even if you may seem invincible, your karma will catch up, just wait.] ·       Water boils at 100 o C under normal atmospheric pressure. ·    ...
11 comments
Read more