TRIKALL

I still remember those days – I was in Standard VI. I always enjoyed our history lectures in school, the teacher told us stories

to explain key concepts to us and made the lessons thoroughly enjoyable. Most of us were rather attentive in those classes.

However, a couple of my friends and I were never able to answer the questions our teacher asked us. And that always led to

trouble. Some form of punishment or the other. Usually, detention after school hours. We would have to stay back after the

sixth period and revise the lessons with our teacher before we could go home. I've been through this drill innumerable times

throughout my school life.

I'm still not too good with dates, can't quite remember them; but I have a keen interest in History – or, what some people call

the Past. And that is how I stumbled on a word which is frequently used when talking about the past, or about history –

civilization.

What is civilization? What does it mean? Different people have defined this word differently – historians, experts, scholars.

We have some interesting names by which we now refer to ancient civilizations: the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, or the Iron

Age, for instance. Eventually, scholars divided these ages into sub-periods: socio-cultural periods, technology-driven periods,

war-and-crisis periods, mythological and astrological time periods, geologic time periods, and cosmological time periods.