Friday, August 14, 2009

A coincidence

Yesterday I just found this three piece documentary called "The story of India" - presented by a historian called Michael Wood. And today it is Independence Day. What a coincidence!

If you have the time (like more than 6 hours) on a lazy rainy weekend (like how it is today here in Bangalore), then I would recommend this series. Very insightful and passionated documentary. Michael Wood's approach towards History appealed to me, as he puts forth the story of India right from the Dawn of Indus Valley Civilization till the Indian Independence.

The first series talks about the the Africa=>Mid East Yemen=>Kerala migration of humanity to Kerala and about the original gene preservation in some Kerala tribes (because of marriage between first cousins) and then moves over to the IVC (Indus Valley Civilization and the Aryan Invasion and Sanskrit.

The second series talks about the thinkers in Ancient India namely Budhdha and Jainism and the existence of caste system and how it worked in ancient india.

The third was about the Silk Route. Did not know much about this and enjoyed this episode the most...I was particularly fascinated by a king called "Kanishka" whom I had heard during my school days but was not aware much about him.

I could get only three episodes of this 6 episode series.

I would like to read "The Discovery of India" by Nehru someday but, you need both time and energy , so such a series is good enough for the time being :)

3 comments:

direkishore said...

coincidence indeed!! I have been watching the exact same series for the last two weekends, courtesy, netflix. It was aired on PBS a few months back.. a very good documentary indeed, a lot of things, i had no clue about..

sudeep said...

oh ok.. need to check up what is this netflix thing...i have heard a lot of people discussing abt it :-)

direkishore said...

it's a subscription based online dvd rental store in the US.