In the Name of Nationalism – An Indian Exploration

Nationalism is a mysterious ideology that has been used to help create almost every country on planet Earth. It can help improve government, make the country a better place, or single-handedly ruin a nation. Events happen in wild, crazy ways, that can be methodically thought out, or just free-wheeled. No one can tell if it happens for better or for worse, so our class decided to figure it out for ourselves. 

At the beginning of April, all PLP 9 students were faced with a new and daunting assignment. We all must pick a country to study, learn about its history during nationalism, and make a 4-5 minute video displaying our knowledge on the topic. There were many different countries to choose from, but I wanted a challenge, so I picked the place I thought would that would do just that; India. Now, I know absolutely nothing about the history of India, so I was excited to start this project, and as soon as we were given the green light, I dived right into the research. 

Before even doing any research, the teachers taught us how to find a good, reliable source, and how to cite our sources. It was a really useful lesson, and it helped me later on, but I was having a hard time finding things to source from. Locating information about Indian nationalism was super difficult because every page I looked at had differing interpretations of the event. I looked for a solid 3 days, but eventually, I gathered all my necessities and started forming a script. After having all my notes, writing was the easiest part of the whole process, as I used my notes as the starting point and turned them into proper sentences, after I was finished, double-checked for errors, and headed in, it was time to move on to the video. 

The video was slightly less stressful than the research but was a challenge as well. Since nationalism in India happened quite a bit later, I thought it would be easier to find, but a lot of important dates occurred during WW1, in which India did not take part. I had to use so much media to create my video from many various places, and thankfully I had all of them in my search history so I could accurately source them all. After many hours of editing, some slight procrastination & many snacks later, and I finished my video! Honestly, I’m proud of this, and I hope you all enjoy!