LIBERATING INDIAN MIND -4
VCUUMS IN TIME

It was just a sheet of paper, neatly folded of course. He was swaying it left to right and back to forth alternatively as if it were a dagger. I enjoyed this funny gesture forewarning me of a possible attack. It was something new even to me.

“Be comfortable”, I said jeering at him, as he sat giving me a deliberate rub.

“I am going to deflate you.” He blurted out, unfolded the paper and placed it before me. “Read it to know why I invite you to come out of the cocoon of the past in the open sunshine of the present.”

The sheet contained a quote from Will Durant. It read,
“Reconstruction of the whole from a part is hazardous in history and the writing of history is the reconstruction of the whole from a part.”

“Did you understand what he said?” I asked him innocently.

“Is there any doubt?”

“Didn’t you feel annoyed that he took you for a fool and told you a halftruth?” i maintained my innocence.
“What is the complete truth in your reckoning?” He taunted as expected.

“Reconstruction of the whole from a part is hazardous not only in history but in the present as well. It shall be the same in future as well. This is a truism applicable universally, irrespective of clime and place. But what your historians did was that they reconstructed past even without a part. They created a history out of figments and produced a figmentary narrative not to pass even for a good fiction.”

He appeared to be unnerved and went into coma. Emerging from coma after a brief pause he shot back, “Isn’t your charge a self-projection. Yaar, This is exactly what you people are doing. This is what you plan to do. The history as we read and teach in our schools these days is an obstacle in your free flight of imagination which produce an aircraft made of flower, provides proof of use of nuclear weapon to cap the story of Mahabharat, and lo! what was that Dadhiichi story, I am forgetting at the moment?.”

I was not unnerved by his sudden assault. Managing my cool somehow, I asked, “Do you know who is responsible for this absurdity?

Instead of replying he waited for my answer.

“Do you you know you are keeping professional historians at par with the practicing politicians who specialize in absurdity because it pays them even when they are found to be ridiculous. Do you understand the reason? No, you are two plane headed to understand complexities. It Is, because these commissioned historians destroyed their history, their magnificent store of mythologies, their sense of history, sense of purpose and the sense right and wrong. A people who cared so much for their past that they like a somnambulant swam through the past to catch the horizon of their future and the skies intertwined, were left to be drowned at the alarm raised by them because it destroyed their sense of primacy and the sense of direction. They could not meet the demand of a prolonged learning in woken hours and forgot to exercise their limbs. You obliterated the fine lines separating myth and history on the one hand and on the other between past and present. It is you who came with beef plate at a time when a sizable number among them resented even the sight of garlic and onion in veg-market.”

He was not impressed, “My friend, I regret, you were too poetic to be reasonable.”

I was taken aback. I was swayed by emotion no doubt. But that was the core of the problem. Demanding unflinching rationality and eroding sentiments and emotions, which amounted to robotization of related section of society on the one hand and permitting free flood of emotion and total disregard of rationality in the section making it impossible for the two to live together with human dignity.

He felt uncomfortable when I explained him how I viewed it. Enthused by his reaction I went ahead. “Do you know who got Nobel in 1955 in physics?”

How could he know it. I myself recalled it as I found it curious. I told him, “It was a scientist who had proved, there are bubbles in the air. A nano-metric vacuum that could cause devastating storm.” I added from on my own without knowing or recalling if it really was the case. Call it my habit.

He listened patiently. I summed up, “There are bubbles in time as well. The vacuums caused by dismissive explanation by irresponsible historians.