For our final session at Chowringhee High, we brought the discussion to India, and specifically to the Gujarat riots of 2002. We referred to an article by the The New York Times, along with the Wikipedia page about the riots to give the students an idea about what happened and the subsequent controversies. We then…
For this session, we decided to speak on the Armenian genocide. An event that is sometimes considered to be the first genocide of the 20th century, has been systematically erased from memory. Our first challenge was to make the students familiar with Armenia: a country they did not know exists. After a brief introduction to…
On the 5th of March, as part of our ongoing discussion about genocides in the African continent, we focused our attention on Rwanda and Sudan. After shedding some light on the history of the relationship between the Hutus and Tutsis, we played a video by Step Back History, a popular history channel on YouTube, on…
Having only substituted in the temporary absence of interns under the Human Rights Defenders Programme before, Akshar—among Kolkata’s best known integrated schools, would technically be ‘my first’ school and class. Forty-five students in a post-lunch (read: siesta time) session—I had my fair share of doubts regarding how the first class would go. A few minutes…
Like the unravelling of a detective plot backwards, this year, for our fifth annual history conference, it seems only logical that the Idea of Nationalism, the Idea of India and the Idea of Culture should pave the way for a conference around the Indian Constitution. We live in times when critical thinking and questioning have…
