History
“The historian always oversimplifies, and hastily selects a
manageable minority of facts and faces out of a crowd of souls and events whose
multitudinous complexity he can never quite embrace or comprehend.” Will Durant
in The Age of Faith
"History isn’t a single narrative, but thousands of
alternative narratives. Whenever we choose to tell one, we are also choosing to
silence others." Yuval Noah Harari in Homo Deus
We have had, as a people, no sense of history. We do not
have works on history save exceptions like Rajatarangini, which also may not be
true history. Some people claim Puranas to be history, but that is not worth
discussing.
The Indian mind, perhaps, did not believe in history
because everything is repetitive and cyclical. It may also be due to the dreary
metaphysics of liberation from the worldly toil, which though rich in content
and allurement was lacking in meaning and purpose, being transient and
abounding in misery.
History was constructed by the colonisers mostly. Indians
picked up the thread and many followed in the groove set by the westerners.
Now, desi historians try to rewrite it to make it sound grand. People circulate
guesswork as history to refute what the western historians have concluded and
the likes of Thapar and Guha parrot about.
I am a true Indian and have no inclination to history, to
put it mildly.
Chasing the Past
Civilization of mankind produced several benefits. One of them is preserving enjoyment and a dubious one is the capacity to postpone enjoyment.
Civilization meant more leisure and development of avenues for occupation of the leisure, including postulating existence of god (existence of god is a different issue from man’s concept of god, which is the mental creation of man), worship, rituals, metaphysics.
Sense of history, which is innate to the evolution of brain from purely a biological angle of survival, food and procreation, has been developed as to external events and it has created emotional upheaval at the injustice that occurred within a society or between societies. We see a lot of effort directed to correct that injustice though in the current context, it may be quiescent. We seethe about the injustice reminded to us by dubious history as if it has befallen us just. We want to take steps that will prevent such future injustice. The hard fact is that there is so much current injustice, graft and sexual violence for instance, which we have no clue how to avoid. Maybe chasing history is a pleasant diversion from real issues.
A friend of mine said in the eighties when video recording was a craze that he did not want to go for it because there simply would not be time to catch up. Today we have archival and retrieval technology. We have time because the basic needs are met. So we have the luxury to live in the past.
When people go sightseeing or when a wedding takes place, more attention is paid to capture it in still or video pictures than be part of the moment and its mirth.
There was a poser in a group in FB, ‘What is the aim of technology?’ Perhaps, it is to enable living in the past.
November 22, 2015 ·
A rash comment:
I feel that if history and newspapers are not there, the world will be free of half its crimes. Both fan the spirit of revenge.
If we draw lessons from history, it will be laudable, but we want to correct history and settle scores more than learn.
July 05, 2014
Pining for the past
Once upon a Time...
When Window was a hole in a room and Application was something written on a piece of paper,
When Keyboard was a Piano & Mouse just an animal,
When Cut was done with knife and Paste with glue,
When Web was a spider's home and Virus flu,
&
When Apple & Blackberry were just fruits...
That was when,
We had a lot of time for family and friends..
Kv Chellappa When family is strewn far and wide, internet connects us instantly. That is the way to count the blessings.
Yash Soni But those were good days, in many ways. Life was simple, water was potable, soil had the power and was attractive so that we could play with it, people were gentle and we had the liberty of knocking at any door at any time of the day or night. We were all a family, not now..we are individuals even within the family, everyone busy with his own gadget..there was pleasure in that misery too. May be my memories are coloured as I was a child in those days and now almost at the other end of life..I am happy with this life too, sitting in my room I can do whatever needed in running normal life including having a perpetual company of friends..
Yash Soni Very impressively said. First thing is, no use crying over what is gone, more so since we have moved on so on and on, not only in terms of time but more technologically such that our past of a few decades old looks as if a century separates it from our present. In the process of advancement we have smothered the nature whose bliss is more powerful than any thing else. The Mother Earth may be crying in silence the way way we have treated it. Life is devoid of fresh air and water in some areas in the country-we are sucking, drinking and eating chemicals. The comforts of today are at a cost; we need not move out of the bed to run our life including in terms of socialising. At the end of the day, though, we take comfort from the fact that life longevity has gone up. This may be the result of easy access to knowledge which is no more a preserve of a chosen health therapists. Also, it's a stray thought though, looking at the kind of clothes our youngsters wear, the music and dance they indulge in these days, I feel the nature seems to be preparing us for a bigger change in future.
Reinstatement of the past is neither an option nor a desideratum.
It is just a fiction of the mind that some past was hunky dory and that things have gone awry now. There is no reliable way to know how well people lived in the past. Opinion leaders create an illusion based on some not so-defining evidences.
It is the way things are that future is continuously spun from the raw material of the past in some pattern that is rarely an exact replica of the past. Human intelligence has no potential to reorder the script. We can influence the future in a limited, maybe an intended desirable, way, but it cannot be status quo ante. Life will have no charm either with continuation of a static scenario.
Much as it is a cliché that change is the only constant, people in various walks pine for something to be static.
In music, there are some doing painstaking work to unfathom the way a raga or song was sung originally and bring it to life, and the efforts to change or create something new out of the existing is deprecated. When I listened to punngavarali sung a century ago, I was aghast. It was not punnagavarali! Music and taste go with acquired sensitivity. As a musician said, the course of change might land it in an old form but we must accept the inevitable changes that come to stay for the moment. Change is gradual and we do not feel a break, but when we take it forward or backward in some catapulting, it looks rather ugly except to those who have decided to like it before they heard it. While research into evolution of music is a genuine historic project, to bring it back is foolhardy. We may learn that we evolved from apes, but I do not think we make conscious effort to revert to being an ape.
There are those who dream of Rama Rajya being ushered in. First of all, we do not know how far there was once a Rama Rajya of the splendour that is poetically set. Rama Rajya is not one where everyone will chant the name of Rama. Much objection to this idea seems to come from such an interpretation. It stands for a just rule. In any case, we can never have an impeccable governance as a system creation. It is a human arrangement and only human beings can ensure good governance. It is not something that will be achieved and will hold on its own.
There is concern and craze to preserve the past – recording everything for a future enjoyment, missing perhaps current enjoyment, protecting heritage structures, etc. Such history-centric pursuits are the luxury of a society that is enjoying abundance, but if basic things are threatened, the present viability will overrule the sanctity of the past. History is less important than continuity of life.
Living this life in its stride adapting to change as indeed our cells have been doing all along may be beneficial.
As Harari puts it in Homo Deus, “Evolution means change, and is incapable of producing everlasting entities. .. DNA molecule is the vehicle of mutation rather than the seat of eternity.”
Wisfulness
‘Antha naaLum vandidaatho?’ (Will not that day return?) A good reverie and theme for poetry, but the simple answer is that it will not. Of course, nobody looks for an answer. The pining itself satisfies the singer.
9/10/18
அந்த நாளும் வந்திடாதோ (Will not those days come again)
It is a usual wistful thinking, remembering the past in nostalgia, that those were better days and that things have gone to seed. It is pleasant rather, not really regretful. Apart from its impossibility, it is doubtful whether we would really love it again. An experience is a composite of the times and our minds. Both change over time and the new composite becomes the reality. Each generation would have felt likewise and in future also it would happen. Still, the charm of recollection is a luxury not to be missed.
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