Teachers Day!

Most nations would like to lie and that is a fact. Either they would like to gloss over shameful events or parts of history that seem so unpalatable that they would rather distort than square up to. Master's at distortion of history are our immediate neighbours and cousins the Pakistani's. They have made it a fine art, so much so that their history seems to start in 712 AD when Mohammed Bin Quasim, the Arab landed in Sind, rather than Mohenjo-Daro and the civilizations of the Indus, because that seem to be too Hindu and so Indian. Many would like to trace their genesis to Arabia rather than the sub-continent.A greater sham has not been perpetrated by so few on so many! Moving forward Pakistan has again distorted their books indicating that eventually they were the victors in their four wars with India, so much so, that the loss of East Bengal is no big deal and hence has lead them to a pass where they might have a repeat in Baluchistan which is protesting shameful neglect, abuse and exploitation just as the Bengali's of Bangladesh did and eventually broke away to form a new nation. Nations are not vaudeville players and are expected to learn from painful lessons in history. The question is how do you fool a nation into believing the drivel that you dish out? The easiest way would be to blatantly lie in school text books or even worse highlight certain areas while glossing over others. Hence you incept thoughts into young minds that are fertile grounds for ideas, true or otherwise. You need to catch them young and most importantly you need the teacher to be part of this nefarious agenda. The other day I bumped into a lady from a state of India, in course of a workshop. The agenda was to discuss, what of our achievements we were proud of. While I was contemplating what I could gas about ( my friends say I blow my own trumpet ), the lady without batting a shapely eyelid said, I'm proud to have been born in .........state.Nothing else, just that she was born at a place!!!!!! I was flummoxed and have a sneaking suspicion that many of our text books at the state level are jingoistic enough to have ideas that are carried through to adulthood. A tragedy, as far as I'm concerned! Can you be so foolish to pretend that you and your people are a cultural fountainhead in a nation as old and diverse as is India? If nothing else we ought to learn from Pakistan and teach our youngsters the right things without being parochial or jingoistic. As a maturing and forward looking nation we owe that to our young and even more so to ourselves as teachers around what is yet another Teachers Day in India.