my musings...

In my last blog post I spoke about my growing appreciation of history. I also spoke about the relation that history and geography have which is very evident in India. India's history usually starts with the Indus Valley civilization (accurately called as the  Indus-Sarasvati Civilization ). Then it transitions to the emergence and spread of Hinduism. I had already read about this in my school History textbooks. But when I was getting reacquainted with history with a new perspective I realized that I know so little about my own religion. And since a large part of India's history deals with the rise of the Hindu religion, its evolution, the good and the bad elements that crept in, its political nature and so on, I felt that I should start reading about my own religion and get to know it better. Hinduism is a very complex religion to get to know. The sheer school of thoughts that range from one extreme to another and still coexist relatively peacefully makes it hard to study Hi...

The first thought that comes to my mind when I read or hear this word is about school. I was formally introduced to history in my Third grade, I think (my history is very weak hence the uncertainty). And I hated history soon after our first encounter. History, a subject which deals with things which are (usually) old and ancient, surprisingly brought many new things in my life, like the realization that there are questions which have to be answered in more than one line. Till then I only knew 'Answer in one line' type of questions but the dawn of History introduced me to 'Answer in brief' type of questions which had a page long answers. One more interesting thing about these answers was that though they say 'Answer in brief' there was nothing brief about the answers for me. One page answer - that was 'huge' for me. Hence the word 'brief' became synonymous with 'big' for me. It took me some years to realise that it actually means quite...