Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
Showing posts with label history. Show all posts

Wednesday 30 May 2012

Gramophone Days

"Rusty noticed the sounds because he was happy and a happy person notices things."



There is a gramophone that has been lying here in shimla for I don't know how long, lets just say it's been around for many many years. But yesterday was the first time I ever heard music from it. 

We dusted it and placed it in the middle of the room, then very patiently took out all the records lying in the cupboard. Just reading some of the titles and holding things so old made my heart so full with joy. There were old urdu songs and qawwalis, old punjabi and urdu comedy records, Mohammad Rafi songs, some cliff richards tracks and I was so thrilled when I found an old Beatles one which had eight days a week on it.  





We sat for an hour or so, all on the drawing room carpet, experiencing something that was probably the a routine part of lives some years ago. This is what I love about history. When you scale it down, forget civilisations and cultural patterns, focus how one life lived, how they stood where we are at the present standing, what they must have felt viewing the same things we are. I love this one on one, this immediate connection that forms when you see something so old. 
A little part of that history becomes us and lives on longer through us. 






Tuesday 16 November 2010

History.

A few reasons why I love history/my history class

1. I have an amazing history teacher who loves her subject, even in a school full of people who hate humanities and frown upon history.

2.I finally have a place where I can discuss Romans, Aztecs, Greeks, Egyptian.......and actually get feedback.

3.Some people love history and use it in their own way for their own creative process.Some who make history fun for me are: Eddie Izzard, Asterix comics, Percy Jackson novels, horrible history books.

4.The finding of a connection between an ordinary fact or thing and an ancient civilization/time period blows my mind.

5.The fact that the same species can live so differently at the same moment.

6. The process of finding the reason for your existence and your lifestyle.

7. The fact that my history teacher is the only person I know to date to actually use BY JOVE to exclaim.

I love history. I can't describe the excitement it creates in my tummy. But these are the reasons I could put into words :) 


   (The Council of Gods- Raffaello Sanzio)

Saturday 13 November 2010

You've got to love history

I avoid things. Quite a lot of them.
Today it happened to be studying history for a test on Monday.
I dodged, ducked, ran (and any other word you can think of) away from it.


Then I remembered what I was supposed to be studying.
Renaissance. The change. The time when people to renew themselves did something extraordinary.They went back, back to what they used to have and do what had originally made them, themselves.


They did what the liked. All of what they liked.Worked on it.
Lived it, smell it, felt it and breathed it.


They were free.
And they flew.