- Homepage
-
What Schools Don’t Teach Us
It’s easy to complain about what schools don’t teach us. After all there are infinite things to learn, and a school — whether we like it or not — can only focus on a handful of them. Still, we can talk about some of the key ingredients of education which schools either leave out or…
-
The Story of Indian Muslims Part 4: The Two-Nation Theory and Its Consequences
The fate of Indian Muslims was sealed in 1947 when, based on two-nation theory, they got divided in two countries: India and Pakistan, which later became three, adding Bangladesh to the list. It had come at the cost of bloody civil riots in which hundreds of thousands of people were slaughtered and millions were left…
-
Indian Mystic Poets and Their Poetry
India is known for its mysticism. Throughout ages, Indian mystic poets have created surreal poetry, taking us into the spiritual realm and treating us with their music and words. For instance, this is what Jim Corbett wrote in his book The Man-Eating Leopard of Rudraprayag: In India, where there are no passports or identity discs,…
-
The Story of Indian Muslims Part 3: Ganga-Jamuni Tehzeeb
Indian history is coloured with endless stories of Hindu-Muslim conflicts, as we have seen in previous episodes. However, somewhere in the middle of it, there was a time and place when the two groups intermingled and created a culture which is known as Ganga-Jamuni Tehzeeb today. According to K. Warikoo, Professor at the Centre for…
-
The Story of Indian Muslims: Part 2
Note: To read the first part of The Story of Indian Muslims, click here. The decline of the Mughal state provided “one of the strong boosts” to strengthening the hold of orthodoxy and hastening the pace of Islamisation. Muslim divines widely attributed the loss of Kingdom to religious and communal laxity and pressed for a…
-
John Stuart Mill on Freedom of Expression
The question of freedom of expression is not something that only our generation has been grappling with. It has a long history. Endless times it has been discussed and debated, and yet, here we are, unsure about how to answer this simple question: why is free speech important in a modern democracy? As Jonathan Haidt…
-
How First Humans Came to India
Recently we learnt how India moved from Africa. What about its population? Where did it come from? As you probably already know, our ancestors, just like the landmass, came from Africa. Pranay Lal, in his book Indica: A Deep Natural History of the Indian Subcontinent recounts the story of how first humans came to India…
-
How India Moved from Africa
That’s right! Not only did Indians — like everybody else — originally come from Africa, but the landmass too, which we today call India, moved from Africa. In fact India, Australia, South America, and even Antarctica were once not just neighbours, rather, they were joined together. It is only in the last three or four…
Kalampedia 