NEW DELHI, NOVEMBER 16: ``If you go on killing me, I will no longer be there. Let us live together and enjoy this earth, which belongs to you and me.''Thus speaketh a tiger in one of the English language textbooks that the Jammu and Kashmir State Board of School Education (J&KBSE) is introducing in primary schools in the state next academic year. Love, ecology and harmony are motifs that will suffuse the textbooks, as will chapters on Habba Khatoon, papier mache, hanguls (deer), apples and echt Kashmiri rugs.The books have been prepared by the British Council, and are designed keeping the reality of Kashmir in mind. The J&KBSE approached the British Council in 1988 for help in writing the school curriculum, since they have ``expertise in writing material'', says Bashir Ahmad Dar, deputy director of the Board and head of the programme.According to the manager of English Studies at the Council, Rajni Badlani, the effort is to put the Valley's students on par with those from other states. ``The quality of English in the state was quite poor, we were told, and their students failed to make the grade once out of the state.''The council conducted several workshops across the state in Jammu, Srinagar and Leh. Consultants worked with 150 master trainers for the middle level and 250 for the primary level. ``Since we wanted them to emphasise cultural identity, we took them around Ladakh and other places,'' said Dar.The board asked the council to instil a sense of pride in the state by incorporating local issues. ``If we openly spoke of issues like insurgency openly and said this is bad or that is good, these books would not reach the market,'' says Dar. So, the authors took a different approach. Anju Saigal Gupta, who worked on the Class III textbook, says themes of love and harmony were used to drive home the point. She points to a lesson called They all came first, about a handicapped person: ``It shows that being handicapped or being from different communities does not matter, it's just important to help each other.''There's a chapter on renowned Kashmiri poet Habba Khatoon, who was the wife of Prince Yusuf Shah Chak. The textbooks also draw on inputs from Kashmiri educationists. ``That was important as certain phrases which we consider harmless were unacceptable to them,'' says Badlani.Even as the text-books get printed, another project with UNESCO is in the pipeline, which would deal with training teachers to deal with conflicts on a small scale. ``If teachers are trained to handle conflicts in the classroom, then the child is brought up with a better orientation,'' said Dar. Educationists in the Valley were worried about the state of their children since ``they see bloodshed everyday.''``We have to instill in the children the need to preserve their beautiful natural surroundings,'' said Gupta. ``We've tried to give them happiness and let them realise that the world is a happy place.''
