Bollywood finds a place in textbooks

Even academics is not immune to the charms of Bollywood. The NCERT is using themes of acclaimed movies as reference material in Class XII political science textbooks to make the learning process more lively.

Even academics is not immune to the charms of Bollywood. The National Council of Education Research and Training (NCERT) is using themes of acclaimed movies as reference material in Class XII political science textbooks to make the learning process more lively and help students grasp the fundamentals with relative ease.

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As many as eight prominent movies have been introduced as reference material. For example, the 1973 movie ‘Garam Hawa’, which is based on Partition, has been introduced under the chapter “Challenges of nation building”.

Likewise, the 1973 box office hit ‘Zanjeer’, that portrays the erosion of moral values in the system, has been incorporated in “Challenges of restoration of the Congress system”.

A couple of regional movies have also found their way into the textbook. “This attempt makes a departure from the legacy of bookish learning, which continues to shape our system and thus causes a gap between the school, home and community,” sources said.

The Class XII Political Science book, “Politics in India Since Independence” has Satyajit Ray’s masterpiece ‘Pather Panchali’ as a reference source for understanding the chapter “Politics of planned development”.

The team of Hari Vasudevan of the Calcutta University, Yogendra Yadav of the Centre for Studies on Development Societies and Suhas Palshikar of the Pune University were involved in preparing it.