When a news anchor of a popular channel said, “I am the sufferer”, what she had in mind was the constant bickering and blame game being played between her panel that was debating the issue of revamping history textbooks. But in truth, she hit the nail on the head and echoed the sentiment of the entire nation, barring the fringe groups who need such chaos to be able to exist.
Whether the history books used by our children are being redone or not is not the all-important question. Rather it is the question of whether political agendas and personal ideologies are interfering with the rewriting, because if that be so, then it defeats the very purpose of any kind of review or revamping.
Someone else said on the programme, “I am neither saffron, nor red, but only want the best for my children”. How far are we from achieving this? Why is it so hard to present history in an objective manner without letting personal feelings and leanings corrode the very facts and spirit of the issue? Maybe its genuinely a difficult problem faced by those who write the books, for after all, how do you disassociate your own ideas from the ones that you pen down? In that case, in today’s highly emotive world, is ‘objectivity’ no longer a word or a notion that has any true practitioners, thereby reducing it to a state of redundancy and as with everything that is no longer a living truth, is it now a word that can only be misused and lobbed by one party at another?
This is a question which we needn’t leave for the intellectuals of the education world or stalwarts of history to answer but instead look upon as something very personal to each and every one of us, for we have all at some stage or the other, been introduced to our personal history, our national history and the history of humankind. Can we now, move on and look at history from the point of view of the future?
