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23 August 2024 at 4:29:04 pm

Olympic Speed Climbing Champion Sam Watson to Visit Mumbai

Mumbai: When Sam Watson sprints up a 15-metre wall, the world seems to slow down. The 19-year-old American speed climber, an Olympic medallist from Paris 2024 and current world-record holder at 4.64 seconds, has become the face of one of the world’s fastest-growing sports. On November 2, he will trade competition arenas for Mumbai’s High Rock in Powai, offering a rare day of workshops and conversations with India’s burgeoning community of climbers. Speed climbing, once a fringe pursuit of...

Olympic Speed Climbing Champion Sam Watson to Visit Mumbai

Mumbai: When Sam Watson sprints up a 15-metre wall, the world seems to slow down. The 19-year-old American speed climber, an Olympic medallist from Paris 2024 and current world-record holder at 4.64 seconds, has become the face of one of the world’s fastest-growing sports. On November 2, he will trade competition arenas for Mumbai’s High Rock in Powai, offering a rare day of workshops and conversations with India’s burgeoning community of climbers. Speed climbing, once a fringe pursuit of mountaineers, now stands as one of the Olympics’ most electrifying disciplines. The sport demands not just power and agility but precision measured in hundredths of a second. Watson, often hailed as the greatest speed climber of all time, has repeatedly rewritten the record books. His visit marks a milestone for India’s fledgling climbing scene. High Rock, the city’s first commercial climbing facility, opened its walls in December 2024 and has since drawn more than 10,000 enthusiasts. It represents the country’s growing fascination with vertical sports and a reflection of a global shift toward adventure and athleticism fused with technology and training science. During his visit, Sam Watson will conduct Masterclasses for both Kids and Adults, offering a rare opportunity for amateur climbers to learn directly from a global champion and experience his unmatched energy and technique up close. Watson will be joined by Matt Groom, the Official Lead Commentator for the International Federation of Sport Climbing (IFSC). Known as the voice of IFSC World Cups and World Championships, Groom will host a 30-minute talk at High Rock on ‘The Evolution of Climbing in Competitive Sport.’ His insights promise to provide a deep look into the transformation of climbing from niche adventure to Olympic spectacle. Event: Sam Watson, Olympic Medalist and current World Record holder at High Rock Date: November 2, 2025 Location: High Rock, Powai, Mumbai

Truth Restored

For decades since Independence, India’s history textbooks have walked on eggshells by tiptoeing around uncomfortable truths, bowdlerising the blood-soaked Islamic conquest and airbrushing the fanaticism of medieval invaders. Now, at last, the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) has chosen the path of intellectual honesty. Its new Class 8 textbook, Exploring Society: India and Beyond, marks a long-overdue rupture with the saccharine distortions of the Nehruvian-Marxist school of historiography.


For too long, a clique of ideologues masquerading as historians, many of them nurtured in India’s elite universities and lionised in American academia, peddled a version of the past in which India’s Islamic invaders were ‘civilising’ agents. Mughal emperors were painted as benevolent pluralists, not as despots who drenched the subcontinent in blood. The Delhi Sultanate was reduced to a series of dynastic squabbles, with little mention of temple desecrations and forced conversions that accompanied their expansion.


The unspoken rationale behind this cover-up has been to avoid ‘offending’ minorities or disrupting the fragile secular consensus. The NCERT’s new volume does not indulge in vengeance. Instead, it adopts what ought to have been the guiding principle of any historian: clarity without rancour, candour without blame. Babur is recognised for his military brilliance, but the textbook explicitly notes his destruction of temples and religious motivations. Akbar, long held up as a paragon of syncretic rule, is not deified. His sacking of Chittorgarh in 1567 and the mass killings that followed, along with his early religious zealotry are not swept under the rug.


Aurangzeb, the most controversial of Mughal emperors is no longer cloaked in the evasions that made earlier history textbooks unreadable. His reimposition of jizya, his puritanical bans, his destruction of temples, his persecution of Hindus and Sikhs are for once, not sanitised.


Predictably, such honesty will offend the usual quarters, especially the so-called ‘progressives’. Why mention such things, some ask, when they may inflame passions? The question is patronising in the extreme. Do Germans today deny the Holocaust for fear of offending their citizens? Why, then, should India bury the crimes of the Tughlaqs, the Lodis, or the Mughals?


Today’s Indian Muslims are not responsible for the crimes of their supposed forebears. But nor should they be expected to venerate Aurangzeb, who cruelly murdered Guru Tegh Bahadur and Chhatrapati Sambhaji. The myth of a Mughal golden age, endlessly recycled by historians with ideological axes to grind, concealed the realities of autocracy and economic exploitation. What cultural grandeur existed in form of architecture and miniature painting was produced in the shadow of arbitrary violence and social stratification in which Hindus were reduced to a second-class citizenship.


India’s public memory has long been warped by self-flagellation. It is why cities still boast roads named after plunderers, why Aurangzeb’s tomb is treated with reverence, and why for decades, even mild criticism of Islamic rule was taboo.


The new NCERT textbook finally encourages students to grapple with history in all its complexity. India, finally, seems ready to confront its own.

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