FOX History & Entertainment goes on ground with My City My History

As part of the first edition of an annual nationwide school contact programme, the channel encouraged students to come up with untold stories of heritage sites in their cities

History lessons in school have for long borne the brunt of being labelled as boring and tedious. One of the reasons for this is the inability to find a connection between the readers of history and the topics in the books. With channels such as FOX History & Entertainment dedicated to the subject, students are now waking up to the interesting and appealing side of history.

Recently, special interest channel FOX History & Entertainment launched My City My History, a school contact programme aimed at spreading heritage awareness amongst school children in 25 cities across India. As part of this, a contest was started in November 2009, where students from various schools were asked to write untold stories about a historical place in their city in not more than 750 words. The students had the option of filing their stories in either English or Hindi.

FOX History & Entertainment goes on ground with My City My History

The challenge was to find something unique about a particular monument or site and not to come up with something well known in the public domain or lifted from the Internet. For instance, the foundation stone of the Golden Temple was laid by a Muslim saint called Mian Mir, at the request of Guru Arjan Dev, the 5th Sikh Guru. Thus, it is a special place where a person from another faith had the privilege of laying the foundation stone.

Sudha Sadhanand, vice-president, programming, FOX History & Entertainment, tells afaqs!, "History will be followed more by the viewers when it is contemporary and relevant. These two factors add credibility to history. We encouraged students to come up with little known facts about famous monuments."

The programme was rolled out in association with Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH), a nationwide, non-profit membership organisation set up in 1984 to protect and conserve India's vast natural and cultural heritage. In the contest, judged by the representatives of the channel and INTACH, five entries were chosen as winners after scrutinising 3,700 entries received from 800 schools across India.

Besides providing the database of schools to the channel and conducting sessions and postering activities related to the contest, one of the crucial roles of INTACH was to ensure the accuracy of the facts in the stories.

The winning stories from Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Kolkata and Kathua will be made into 15 minute short films to be broadcast on the channel in March.

All other participants have received certificates of participation and merit based awards. The maximum entries were received from Delhi. The contest was promoted online and Big FM was the radio partner for on-air promotion.

The channel refused to disclose the spends incurred in conducting the programme. This was the first edition of My City My History, which will be an annual property of the channel.

Have news to share? Write to us atnewsteam@afaqs.com

Bartronics