Grade 6-civics-L1-understanding diversity-DIVERSITY IN INDIA-session 3

Session 3:

• DIVERSITY IN INDIA : India is a country of many diversities. We speak different languages, have various types of food, celebrate different festivals, practise different religions. But actually, if you think about it, we do many things that are similar except that we do them in different ways.
• How do we explain Diversity? A little more than two hundred years ago or long before the train, aeroplane, bus or car became a part of our lives, people travelled from one part of the world to another, in ships, on horses, on camels or on foot.
• Often, they went in search of new lands, or new places to settle in, or for people to trade with. And because it took so long to travel, once they got to a place, people stayed there, often for a long time. Many others left their homes because there were famines and drought and they could not get enough to eat. Some went in search of work while others left because there was a war. Sometimes, as they began to make their homes in new places, people began to change a little and at other times they managed to do things in the old ways. So their languages, food, music, religions became a mix of the old and the new, and out of this intermixing of cultures, came something new and different. The history of many places shows us how many different cultural influences have helped to shape life and culture there. Thus regions became very diverse because of their unique histories. Similarly diversity also comes about when people adapt their lives to the geographical area in which they live. For example living near the sea is quite different from living in a mountainous area.
• Not only do people have different clothing and eating habits, but even the kinds of work they do are different. In cities it is often easy to forget how closely people's lives are tied to their physical surroundings. This is because in the city people seldom grow their own vegetables and grain. Instead they depend on the market to buy all the food and other goods that they need. Let us try to understand what we mean when we say that historical and geographical factors influence the diversity of a region. We can do this by reading about life in two different parts of the country, Kerala and Ladakh.
• Look at the map of India in an Atlas and locate Kerala and Ladakh.
• Can you list three ways in which the different geographical location of these two regions would influence the following?
• The food people eat:
• The clothes they wear:
• The work they do: