Govt school students in Punjab to learn Telugu during week-long ‘Bharatiya Bhasha Summer Camp'
As per the instructions issued by State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT) to all the district educational officers, the summer camp will be held in all government schools across the state from May 26 to June 5 in which students from Classes VI to X will participate and Telugu language will be taught.
"The main objective is to encourage students to learn one more Indian language of their choice, to promote multilingualism in a joyful and engaging manner, to help students experience the linguistic and cultural unity of Indian languages and to enable students to acquire basic conversational skills in an Indian language of their choice other than mother tongue,'' reads the letter issued on May 23.
These Telugu classes will be conducted after the half-holiday on working school days and from 8 am to 11 am during the summer vacation from May 26 to June 5.
The schools have been allowed have multiple batches depending on number of students who are interested and the availability of teachers. While schools which have less than 75 students can hold this camp as a single group and others can form three groups with up to 100 students in total.
The basics will include greeting, expressions, alphabets, numbers, songs and conversations, names of local heroes, freedom fighters, armed forces, fruits, cuisines, vegetables and cultural appreciation in Telugu.
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The Wire
10 minutes ago
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Debris in Place of a Village: Three Days After Flood, Chisoti Villagers Wait for Relative's Bodies
Jehangir Ali From dawn to dusk, several earth-moving machines and stone excavators struggle to undo the plunder. Chisoti (Kishtwar, J&K): At around 11:40 am on August 14, a group of children were rehearsing for the Independence Day celebrations at their school in Chisoti village of Jammu and Kashmir's Kishtwar district when a strange and dreadful noise filled the air. 'I felt as if a VIP was coming to perform the yatra in a chopper which had crashed,' said Hukum Chand, a teacher at a government-run middle school in Chisoti. Every year in July, this difficult village some 300 kilometres from Srinagar via NH-44 comes to life when hundreds of thousands of pilgrims from different states come to undertake a nine-km hike to the temple of Machail Mata, a sacred annual pilgrimage for the Hindus deep in the Himalayas. Chisoti serves as the final basecamp of the pilgrimage which lasts more than three months and brings a lot of festivities and immense economic opportunities for the village's few hundred locals. So far this year, two lakh pilgrims have participated in the arduous journey under the watchful gaze of dozens of security personnel and disaster response officials who had been deployed in the village to facilitate the pilgrimage. Before the yatra started on July 25, a large community kitchen came up in the village square catering to more than 5000 pilgrims every day. Around the kitchen, hundreds of stalls, mostly run by local residents, had sprung up selling food, mementos, cheap bangles, chains, earrings and other items to the pilgrims. 'On the morning of the fateful day,' recalled Joginder Singh, a resident of Chaisoti who recently completed postgraduate degree in botany from a university in Uttarakhand, 'a heavy but brief spell of shower lashed the village'. Soldiers of the Indian army carrying a steel beam to make a bridge over the Bhot tributary in Chisoti village. Photo: Jehangir Ali. Sumit Solanki, an eyewitness and a small time trader from Madhya Pradesh, said that he was hawking miniature deities, toy drums and other mementos to the pilgrims when he saw a 'wall of water, mud and trees' crashing down into the village from the mountain. As the massive column of muddy water concealing uprooted trees and large boulders emerged from the mouth of the narrow Himalayan valley with a lethal force, panic broke out. The village's two temples were among the first structures to face the wrath. 'It was a 50-60 feet high wall. I ran for my life and climbed up the mountain,' said Solanki. The armageddon lasted barely a minute or two. Running for their lives, some pilgrims and local residents recorded the chaos on their smartphones. One video shows the dreadful column tearing the right bank of Bhot, spilling over and sweeping away some residential houses. Tulsi Devi, a housewife, was waiting for her turn at the village watermill with a bag of barley down at the tributary when the incoming wave swallowed her. The bustling Kali Mata temple was swept away, too, along with Bhod Raj, the head priest, who was performing his religious duties. 'Our people have sinned,' said Meena Devi, Raj's daughter, at their rundown home, 'My father had been warning us. This is the curse of Mata Chandi. She has taken away our temples and our deities. It is a bad omen. We should not live here anymore'. A man from the security forces speaking over phone beside the roots of a massive walnut tree that was swept into the village by the flash flood on August 14. Photo: Jehangir Ali. Like Raj, Dina Nath, the head priest of Nag Devta temple, was attending to the devotees of Mata Machail when the tragedy struck. His nephew Daljit Singh who ran a food stall managed to escape the fury of nature by running into the forest. 'When I returned, neither the temple was in its place nor my uncle was to be found. Everything was destroyed. We later found his body,' Singh said. But not many victims and their family members have been as fortunate as Singh. Three days after the tragedy, the agonising wait for the dead is far from over for Raj's family and 86 other households who have reported members as missing. According to official figures obtained by The Wire, around 70 people have been confirmed dead in the tragedy. Their bodies have been recovered. Around 110 have suffered injuries. A group of state and central disaster response officials at the site of the tragedy in Chisoti village. Photo: Jehangir Ali. From dawn to dusk, several earth-moving machines and stone excavators struggle to undo the plunder. On August 17, two days after the tragedy, the army was preparing to set off explosives for disintegrating the massive boulders that have destroyed the village partially. At least two more bodies were pulled out from the debris on August 17 but little seems to have changed about the village's ruined geography. The air in Chisoti is putrid, and with the dead believed to be buried underground, there are fears that the situation could worsen in the coming alleged slow pace of rescue operations has built up anger in the village. 'For the last two days, anyone who comes here is more interested in taking photos. We don't want anything. We only want the dead bodies,' Happy Singh screamed at J&K chief minister Omar Abdullah who visited the village on August 16. In this image released by @CM_JnK via X on Aug. 16, 2025, Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah during his visit to Chisoti village after a flash flood triggered by cloudburst, in Kishtwar. Photo: Via PTI. Along with his cousin, Singh has been camping in the village since August 15 and searching for his mother and aunt along with 17 others from their native Bari Brahmna area of Jammu who are among the missing persons. As the dreadful column of muddy water crashed into Chenab river and a shallow stream of sludge replaced it, Chand guided the school children further away from Bhot and hiked up into the forest where they watched hundreds of anguished men, women and children, many of them barefooted, screaming in shock and agony, running for their lives. It was all over in less than two minutes, said Chand. When the worst had passed, the young school teacher returned to the village along with a group of cooks who were working at the community kitchen at the time of the tragedy and had managed to escape in the nick of time. The remains of a residential house on the banks of Bhot whose base was eroded by the flash flood, burying the structure partially into the ground. Photo: Jehangir Ali. The massive column of water that came down the mountain had swept away the under-construction bridge over Bhot. Across the tributary, Chand saw his and his brother's home badly damaged. When he looked down into the tributary, dead bodies were scattered on the riverbank. The injured, covered in mud, were screaming for help. 'Beneath the rubble, I saw a human hand making movements. We dug with our bare hands and retrieved a woman. She took a long gasp when her face became visible. She was lucky to have survived,' Chand said. The young teacher said that the rescue workers took an hour or so to build a river crossing using logs and planks of wood. Having finally made it across the tributary, Chand started searching for his brother, his wife and their daughter beneath the debris but he wasn't so fortunate. The dead bodies were located and recovered from the very home which had protected them all these years. With dozens of army soldiers and disaster response force officials racing against time to locate the dead, chances of finding more survivors have faded out. 'We have been working from dawn till dusk for the last two days,' said Shakeel Hussain, an official with J&K's State Disaster Response Force, 'Rain hampered our work initially and it will take seven days or even more to complete the searches'. The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments. Advertisement
The Print
23 minutes ago
- The Print
History teaching requires revision more than textbooks
After all, how often do Indian households encourage history as a job? A base-level problem here is: how do you support the study of history when it isn't even clear what a historian does? Yet, despite this range of work, one question almost always follows when we explain what we do: 'Okay, but what is your real job?' The question says as much about our profession as it does about how history itself is perceived in India. What does it mean to be a historian in India? Both of us have formally studied the subject. In the years we've spent working as public historians, we've told myriad stories of India's chequered pasts through heritage walks, museum trails, cultural events, podcasts, an annual journal, book reviews, articles, and social media posts. We've pored over archives and conducted on-ground research. We've also translated scholarship into language and experiences that anyone, from an academic to a casual listener, can connect with. In childhood, history may occasionally bask in the dreamy, cinematic glow of Indiana Jones and Night at the Museum. Or Bharat Ek Khoj, Akbar-Birbal adaptations, the delightfully gory Horrible Histories, and Amar Chitra Katha. In adulthood, though, it either fades into collective amnesia, gets wrapped in nostalgia, or turns into a battlefield of contested claims. Where is the middle ground where we carry forward that childlike curiosity, tempered with adult discernment, to engage with the past with the depth and nuance it deserves? A polarising debate has recently been sparked after yet another round of revisions in NCERT history textbooks. But more than textbooks, history teaching requires revision. Also Read: Indus Valley to Mughal Empire—How illustrated history books guide us in polarising times Updating isn't the problem What do you remember from your history classes? For most, the answers fall into familiar buckets: rote learning of names, dates, dynasties, and wars. 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It is perplexing that post-pandemic, too, the NCERT has failed to offer academic explanations for revising humanities textbooks. 'Rationalised' textbooks remain prescribed, with intermittent 'revisions' still trickling in. In its latest revision of history textbooks for eighth grade students, the NCERT introduces Mughal emperors as 'brutal' and 'ruthless', Delhi Sultans' policies as 'public humiliation' for non-Muslims, and Maratha leadership as 'visionary'. Earlier textbooks covered the most notable features of each of these polities, minus the adjectives. A reading of Our Pasts – II, the medieval history text prescribed to seventh grade students from 2007 to 2021, allows useful comparison. The text discussed administrative successes and failures, economic policy, and societal changes, and tested students' critical thinking skills based on their understanding of objective details. The most telling aspect of the history textbook revision is the NCERT's inclusion of a 'Note on Some Darker Periods in History'. Here, a disclaimer reads that 'no one should be held responsible today for events of the past', which appears to be an admission of the provocative nature of the updated content. Students as young as the eighth grade — studying history as part of a wide curriculum spanning science, mathematics, and languages — ought to be introduced to history in a manner that shapes them into informed citizens, and perhaps, optimistically, stimulates deeper engagement with the discipline later in their lives. The goal should be to teach students that history, and the humanities more broadly, are about thinking more, asking better questions, and becoming sharper citizens. What students need is not less complexity, but more clarity on how complexity functions. But the kinds of revisions we're seeing strip that away. They remove the very skills that make historical thinking meaningful, and the result is a citizen who either dismisses history entirely or defends it without support, often overwhelmed by louder, ahistorical voices that dominate discourse. Also Read: India's new search for Hindu warrior kings to celebrate. Vikramaditya, Suheldev to Agrasen Teaching history for the future Perhaps the most important revision we need is in how we frame history — it should be less a closed book of facts and more a lens to view the world. In 2025, it's worth asking, how can we teach history as a subject that helps carve a path forward? How do we make sure students don't feel like history is either just for nostalgic glorification or adversarial defence? How do we make its dissemination promising enough for students to be able to say they wish to become academics, curators, conservators, archaeologists, museologists, or historians? Through our public history platform Itihāsology, we repeatedly highlight the foremost issue with history as a school subject — that it is 'boring', unappealing to young learners. A lack of interest in history during the formative years of schooling manifests in detachment from scholarly debates, and an unfortunate turn toward distorted, coloured versions of the past in adult life. This becomes relevant because history frequently comes up in popular discourse and debates, with socially and politically active adults justifying current stances by drawing on the past. Since the problem of subscribing to ahistorical renderings of the past is rooted in studenthood, the solution lies in devising more effective ways to communicate history to young learners so they grow up knowing there is indeed a future with a past — one that they need to protect from falling into the pit of homogeneity. Eric Chopra and Kudrat B. Singh run Itihāsology, an educational platform dedicated to making Indian history and art inclusive and accessible. Views are personal. (Edited by Asavari Singh)
Scroll.in
4 hours ago
- Scroll.in
From the memoir: How a boy born in a courtesan's quarters became a writer
My mother entertained the thought of killing me. A few hours before I was born. In the hierarchy of noble thoughts, I ranked second in priority. Her own life claimed the top spot – and with good reason: She had to survive before any of this, whether my story or even hers, was possible. Bachcha jaane do, mujhe bachaao, she cried. Let go of the baby, save me. To her credit, she did not use the more actionable words bachcha maar do. Kill the (damn) baby. She could not have possibly said that. Was her God testing her? Let go, as in let it slip away. Jaane do. A first-time mother – but a murderess? Oh no, she was incapable of that. No gestating mother wants to be a baby killer. But what if it involves a deliver-and-die scenario? Mujhe bachcha nahi chahiye, she frantically repeated, trying to make herself heard loud and clear to the nurses treating her. I don't want the baby. She was pleading mercy to the surgeon gods. She did not mean to kill the foetus. But in this dire situation, she did not want it, especially if saving it meant her own life would be exterminated. She was being wheeled into the operation theatre for a messy delivery. She had overheard the lady doctor Bohra confide to a nurse that they would have to do a Caesarean. Cut her stomach into two and piece her back again, like an illusionist's trick. A normal delivery was ruled out. There was a high probability of losing one of us. Her pelvis was too fragile to push the baby out, her vagina too small to yawn or regurgitate it like a food disagreeable with her sensitive stomach. I had turtled and turned my face away inside her womb, unwilling to leave the comfort of the warm amniotic fluid I was floating in. She was in great pain – a scrawny young woman who was in the hospital for six months, carrying a foetus her body could not bear the weight of. My najayaz, illegitimate, father, Rehmat Khan, used to visit her infrequently. His chamchas, sycophant friends, visited my mother, filling her ears with gossip about how he frequented the kothas of other tawaifs in her long absence. Woh Meena ke kothe pe hain. Woh Geeta ke kothe pe hain. Woh Malka ke kothe pe hain. Rehmat Khan had quite the appetite for entertainment. Mother had not married him. Khan Saab, as she called him, was her patron in the kotha where she worked as a tawaif, performing mujras. They had quarrelled about the baby. She wanted it. He agreed for her to have it. But he wanted no other responsibility. He was already a family man with a wife in purdah and three happy children. They were clueless about his secret life in the kothas, or helpless, as most Indian households are when they discover their hostile dependency on a serial adulterer. Main apna naam nahi de sakta, he said. How could he give his name to a tawaif's child? La haul bila kuat! Ironic for a man whose name, Rehmat, means compassion, kindness, mercy. His double standards aggravated her labour pain to a dirge she was singing at her own funeral. My mother had conceived a baby because she wanted to get back at the sniggering tawaifs in the kotha who mocked her, calling her baanjh, infertile – a woman who would have no legacy. So she demanded a child when my father was courting her. Mujhe bachcha chahiye, she tempestuously said to him one day. It was an order, not a request. She knew he was married. She had spent enough time in her profession to understand that no bachelor was going to arrive at her kotha with a colourful, noisily musical baraat. That is a rather early plug for the funereal but hopeful climax of Pakeezah, where Allama Iqbal's sher is aptly read aloud: Hazāroñ saal nargis apnī be-nūrī pe rotī hai Baḍī mushkil se hotā hai chaman meñ dīda-var paidā. Unadmired, the narcissus weeps a thousand years For an aesthete to cherish its inimitable beauty Miles from being an aesthete, my illegitimate father was only too happy to serve a challenge and perhaps prove his own worth. Patrons love flaunting their virility in a kotha where only a few get the opportunity of intimacy with a tawaif. It is unlike a brothel, where they can pay and have a limitless choice of sex workers to pick from. A kotha is for entertainment. And to tawaifs, sex work is not entertaining. It is never part of their performance. Their mujra of song and dance is conducted in a mehfil, a gathering of several patrons. The patrons go back home to their wife and children, after kite-flying crisp currency notes for the tawaif's special attention – where they get a thenga, a wiggly thumb, for nothing in return. The tawaif chooses a patron she likes. Flashing money will not get her attention – as they say, tawaifs see more money falling at their feet each night than they see morals in the eyes of men truly valuing them. The lucky patron she picks can be her only one for as long as she wishes him to be – for a night, a week, months, years or even a lifetime, in some cases. Who am I fooling? No patron returns the loyalty as favourably. The tawaif can choose to have a child or not with her favoured patron. She is fortunate if that child is a girl, who can carry forward her name in the trade. But what about a boy? Turn him into a tabalchi, a tabla player, or any other musician—a baajawala or a sarangiwala. What use would such a child be in the world, my mother thought, if the foetus could not have its father's name in the likely event that its mother died in childbirth? Was there a more cursed life than to be born an orphan? She knew perfectly well how difficult it would be for me. She had seen a worse fate – as a child, she had been used to pay off a debt to a Bedia family, dressed as a child bride, raped by her husband and then sold to a kotha. When a family offered no guarantees, could one be better off without it? No mother wants to give birth to an orphan. The Caesarean was a success. Dr Bohra dangled me by an ankle after cutting the bloody umbilical cord of uncertainty and said to my mother, Dekho Rekha, ladka hua hai! See, Rekha, you have a boy! My mother looked at me and fainted. She could not believe I was stubbornly alive. Like her. She had no energy left in her to remain conscious. She had prayed for a girl. Maybe the disappointment made her collapse. I was immediately put into an incubator. When she woke up after two days, she asked the daiyya, midwife Pushpa, Mera bachcha kahaan hai? Where is my child? Pushpa told her that I, a premature baby, was weak and had been kept under watch. A week passed. I was not shown to my mother. She panicked. She had a vision in her dream. The Sufi saint of Ajmer, Khwaja Moinuddin Chisti, and Goddess Kali instructed her to take her child away, or Yamraj, the God of Death, would do so. Yep, that sounds like the dance-off of the thunder-clapping gods. Apparently, according to my mother, the morning I was born, there was a violent hurricane in Calcutta. Bahut badaa toofan aaya tha, she said with astounded eyes. As it so happens in every thunder and lightning oral story, which sounds as hokey as a Hindi-film flashback. Achanak se kaale badal hatey aur tu subah ki pehli kiran jaise nikla. You shot out like the first ray of dawn as the sun emerged from the dark clouds. Her ignoble thoughts may have been those nebulous clouds. Her sentiments, however, sweeten the comical. Mother fought with the hospital staff, signed a patient's risk form and dashed out of the compound, hailing a taxi to take me home. She was an emotional heroine on the run from her well-wishers. The hospital staff was almost certain she was going to kill her baby. Her mother, Gullo, the tobacco-chewing hard nut of a woman who carried a sarota, a nutcracker, in her ghagra, which doubled as a self-defence weapon, was waiting for her at the kotha. The staff had informed Gullo that Rekha would recover soon, but that the child's future was uncertain. Rekha would now have to dodge and survive the weaponised sarota flying through the kotha doors, risking even the newborn. She pressed her infant tightly to her chest. Both of us breathless. A Tawaif Smothers Her Newborn with Love. Killer headline in The Telegraph. I can rewrite my beginning as my end. As thrilling as all of this sounds, I would have preferred to remain incubated in the hospital. She acted rashly in blind faith – no, actually, blinded by faith. I could have died. She almost killed me. Twice. But she gave me life instead. Twice as much. Hers and mine. Our resilient lives. How did she intuit? Probably grasped from her own early experiences when life pushed her off the cliff. She found the courage and the derring-do to endure its twists and turns, like a fledgling songbird falling from its nest learns to soar before it touches the ground. No training, no practice, just killer instinct.
