Remember those long-staying, TV-remote hogging, serial TV-serial watching distant relatives who used to arrive unannounced when you were a kid. And then stopped you from watching cricket in favour of their crappy TV serial. What were your feelings towards them? Whatever it was, it did not resemble love and affection.  Now replace those crummy, intractable relatives of yore with your school subject of History or Social Sciences. Weren’t your feelings towards History kinda similar? I stake all the contents of  my nearly empty wallet, that at least for the most of you, it was.

However, There is one thing that tops the 'I hate' list by a distance

History for most of us, was always a major impediment, an obstacle, an immovable object opposing our unstoppable drive towards knowledge ( Read Maths and Science). Useless questions like  ‘how does Babar’s fun and frolic in 1476 affect my future’ were raised, without an iota of  hope for a definite answer. What we used to get was a growl or a scowl or perhaps both. What we could only do was utter the choicest expletives under our breath, memorize those never ending dates and practice our artistic talents on the unfortunate photographs of the great souls printed in our textbooks.

How will this dead dude help me get ahead in my life?

In our academic pecking order, Maths and Science always figured at the top,  subjects that we had to master. History mostly figured somewhere at the bottom of this list, lower than drawing, craft, value education and even Aayo Naga perhaps. Has our monumental indifference towards History enabled our educationists and academicians to disfigure, hell mutilate..our own history and actually get away with it?

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