Journey of India…. Where to?

The other day I was watching an episode of Story of India on Discovery. An engrossing, informative and very well researched series; it was also enlightening for me, in many aspects.

It attempted to answer questions like ‘How did the Harappan civilization end?’ What made the Indus change its course? And even some seemingly bizarre questions like ‘Did Mahabharata actually happen?’ or What do Rigvedas actually tell you? It was very well researched and logically presented hence engrossing. Though it’s a pity that with a million dollar media industry thriving in India, it took a foreign channel like Discovery to come up with this concept, I must applaud the effort and the novelty with which it was presented.

‘India’ usually brings up images of rustic life, holy rituals, pilgrimage centers, festivities, elephants, population, malnourished children, low per capita income and more recently BPO and IT sectors. Quite frankly, I was bored of seeing the same old concepts redundantly being packaged in a different cover and put forth as authentic Indian story.

Discovery has mastered the art of looking sideways at a seemingly redundant topic and that’s the beauty about this series. The presentation hardly varies with a foreign presenter taking the viewers across the streets of these places and divulging ancient stories while attempting to answer the many myths that surround them.

It traces the Journey of India… literally! The last episode had been on the Dravidian culture and this time it was the existence… peek and then extinction of Harappa and Mohenjodaro civilization. It was the largest civilization in existence then with flourishing business in trade, cattle rearing and agriculture. This was surely enlightening. Apart from the fact that they were very advanced and had many sophisticated mechanisms like drainage systems for the whole village in place what’s amazing is that even today in rural India, most of the blue-print is followed exactly the way it was then. They even traced the Aryans origin to Central Asia, near Turkmenistan. They even traced an archeological site with mostly similar layouts and civilization!

By the end of this series I realized one thing strongly. Our ancestors were more democratic and logical thinkers than we are today! I mean they exchanged culture and ideology or thinking easily, learned from each other and helped the other evolve in the process, they were seemingly more tolerant to settlers from far away country and ended up having a rich and vibrant tapestry dotted with amalgamated wisdom.

Today we are either ashamed of claiming the same knowledge that was the root of a prosperous India in the ancient times or are plain ignorant. What is worse is that people who do know a little about it have suddenly assumed the position of flag –bearers of Indian civilization and are vandalizing and resorting to hooliganism in the name of civilization and customs.

There is so much to learn and know in this country - the thought itself leaves me overwhelmed. However series like these restore a faith that probably these mark the beginning of an informed research of that lost knowledge.