LIBERATING INDIAN MIND -24
History versus Histrionics

Those who consciously avoid history opt, unknowingly, for histrionics. Some of my friends complain, why I am so obsessed with history. I tell them I am talking of the present and trying to understand its complexities. I am trying to salvage those suffering from histrionics. Those who feel disturbed by existing problems but instead of solving it play their blame game, shifting the onus on events and characters they themselves hold mythical, unhistorical, suffer from spells of histrionics. It is they who charge distorted stories with disruptive power to create ugly scenes in order to further aggravate the problems. They in fact play in the hands of those who know the art of using their ignorance and abhorrence for the past to their advantage.

The man with some knowledge and sense of history is likely to see the same problems differently. Recounting the progress made from the yore days of social injustice he can suggest how to proceed to fully resolve the problem.

Ironically, those refraining from the past spend more time in imaginary past and live in imaginary present, than those who know history. Knowing history amounts to knowing the new and the immanent, knowing the surviving redundant past, and at the same time the forgotten past that can play remedial role.

Those who plead that by ignoring past they save time so as to know the present more deeply and widely, in fact know it more superficially and more narrowly.