Whoever controls the story controls the future. My students check the sources.

I became a history teacher because of a lie — a beautifully told one, in my own school textbook, which my grandfather quietly corrected with a shoebox of letters from 1947. Realising that history had drafts, and that ordinary families held the evidence, rewired me completely. I've been handing children that shoebox feeling for eighteen years.

My classes run like tribunals. We've retried Aurangzeb with actual farmans, audited the East India Company with facsimile ledgers, and built a Partition oral-history archive of 214 recorded interviews that a university has asked to preserve. Board results hold — 96% at peak — because a student who can weigh evidence writes devastating answers.

If your school wants history taught as a discipline rather than a bedtime story — sources on desks, arguments in the air, grandparents on the syllabus — send for me. I arrive with my own document trunk.