Broken Bangles: Life, Stories, Thoughts

  Revisiting history is how we understand the present and keep alive the memories of the mistakes of the past. Those memories are our precious heritage that encourages us to become better people.  Today, I am reading about the Spanish colonists' conquering of the Aztecs. What an eye-opening tale with equal doses of human greed and innocence, but it is not fictional! We, humanity, did it to ourselves. We are the victims and perpetrators.  It does not matter to us which category we belonged to if we lived in that era because, on both sides, there were people like us who wanted to live in peace and people like us who wanted to conquer the world's riches.   It begins to matter when we put the past against the present and introspect. Then we realise that we are the perpetrators, or we are the ones who must feel the survivor’s guilt and act upon it before it is too late. Or we will go down in history as one of the cruellest people to ever inhabit Earth.  How the ...

  A World Hidden Inside the Woods Mayan and Inca civilizations of the South and North Americas always evoke a mysterious charm, which also keeps hidden beneath it, the colonization and genocide that the native people of the Amazonia had to undergo through centuries. Both these civilizations emerged in their full glory around the 1400s and 1500s, but the sun set over them too soon, when the Europeans arrived on the shores of the Americas.  According to ‘The Handbook of South American Indians’, written in the late 1940s by J.H. Steward, the South American indigenous people can be broadly categorized into four groups- the nomadic hunter-gatherers, small farmers who lived in the farming villages inside the Amazon forest, irrigated cultivators of the Central Andes region, and the local chiefdoms of the Caribbean area. Steward was an anthropologist who concentrated his studies on the subsistence of people. He introduced to the world, the concept of cultural ecology. Indigenous tribe...