The Hindu Business Line : Horrors that history can sober us with

THERE are many mails that have come in response to the previous piece `If only banging our heads can make us saner...', which was about our ineptitude in handling calamities such as the one that struck in Kumbakonam.

While many suggestions may simply fail the test of practicality and financial feasibility, it has still been worthwhile to put heads together at least as a show of camaraderie.

Perhaps, we now see our children in new light, as if they have all become suddenly more valuable.

At least for a few weeks, we may be scolding the kids at home less frequently, and less harshly.

I find parents taking a little more interest in their wards' activities. For instance, a few days back, I found a friend of mine looking for some info about Hitler, to help his child finish a project.

"Never seen you taking so much interest before," I teased him. He nodded, "Thought I could sort of participate."

Well, I could see that it was tough for those not used to such involvement to find themselves engrossed in a school activity, not by choice but by some sort of involuntary affinity that overwhelms them after seeing ghastly video clips and images - the ones that refuse to go out of our mind-screens and we wince even to think about them.

So, over lunch-break, we were searching Google for Hitler and there was no paucity of information.

Hitler as a child, as a soldier, his rise, the dictator, Holocaust, photos, paintings, and oh, I was already clutching my belly in discomfort.

Distanced by so many decades, yet to see history is shocking. It left me without appetite for the rest of the day and killed my sleep too.

Heaps of bodies, bones, concentration camps, and almost everything from registration of prisoners to washing them, from hanging to shooting them against the wall with a gun positioned below the neck from behind - the more one sees all these, the more one does feel that it is sheer luck that we are separated by history and geography.

It's all free on the Net and see for yourself; and don't blame me if you grow sick or throw up.

I'm not sure if my friend finished the project, but looking back at the world's story has a sobering influence, when we are usually lost in the day's happening, and market movements.

But history is a low-priority subject in most schools. You may not find many putting their life into teaching this subject.

For grownups, however, there is a wealth of info - assuming culture distorters didn't rewrite the books too differently - in the history books of children at home. After all, once you finish reading about Hitler, your boss may look like an angel.

Okay, moving on, there is a mail from a reader who notes that he attended a brief function at one of the foreign consulate offices in the city. "At the end, national anthem was played," he writes. Quite normal, I nod. "But it started from the third line, not from Jana Gana Mana." That's not normal. "Is this proper?" he asks. No, not at all.

E&OE@thehindu.co.in

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Horrors that history can sober us with

A future for derivatives

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Fertiliser subsidy