Somebody rightly said that history has been written by those who won the war. While it is good and beneficial to know the history of one’s land, we should also realize that history is nothing but an account of happenings as seen from the eyes of the one narrating it or writing it. History does help us get a fair understanding of where we have come from and how things in the past have shaped the present. India in particular has a very varied and vivid history full of all the possible things like wars, battles, the rise and fall of empires, revolutions, natural calamities, epidemics, love, hatred, politics, and so on. It is a mix of everything, both good and bad. However, why do we always have this intrinsic urge of associating history only with the bad that has happened? When we say history why is ‘war’ the first word that comes to our mind, like it did in one of my earlier sentences?
Our country in recent times has undergone a sea of change in all aspects; economical, political, industrial, etc. And presently what we are facing in terms of the political climate is something that brings the ‘bad’ history to mind. We are slowly turning on each other, and violently! There is no sense of respect towards coexistence or individuality, and everyone is trying to impose their own belief systems on others. We seem to be in the middle of a not-so-cold war in the name of religion. Half-baked conspiracy theories seem to take center-stage, hence instigating gross misunderstandings among the masses. The poor level of education in the country, and the fact that most of the country is rural, without sufficient exposure to the outside world, is making things from bad to worse. The poignant truth is that the vulnerability of an average Indian today has increased in such a big way that it doesn’t take long to create a wild fanatic of a normal layman. Unemployment and poverty is so widespread across the country, as a result of which, mob-culture has spread like wildfire.
We take immense pride in our cultural diversity and in the fact that we have so many languages, and such other things. But at the cost of maybe sounding ‘anti-national’ I would say that it seems that this same diversity has become a bane of our existence in the world today. We are fighting each other trying to prove whose culture and religion is older or better or more ‘valid’. What we fail to notice is that the seed of conflict is planted into us very conveniently by those who want to exercise their control over us. It is a classic case of divide-and-rule. Our tolerance levels have hit a record low in the last few years, and any spark, however small, leads to riots, lynching, and maybe even genocides. It appears as if we are trying hard to rephrase a popular adage, “United we stand, divided we fall!” to now read “United we fall, divided we stand!” Our diversity is no longer as harmonious as it used to be. Our naivete is being taken undue advantage of. In a way, evil has colonized our way of thinking and captured our way of life.
One would think that the advancement that the country has made in the realms of technology, education, and industry, would extrapolate into a more advanced breed of people. But it seems things are on the contrary moving in reverse. Instead of driving ourselves forward towards progress we are shockingly and consciously making an effort to push ourselves backward into the dark ages. We are using our history against each other. If one looks through the social media space today everything is rife with quotes, posts, and tweets about how somebody’s ancestors had traumatized and demonized the others and how that should be avenged today. So today I want to smack the daylights out of you because some centuries ago your ancestors had colonized my ancestors and inflicted terror on them. Wow!
All the ‘bad’ history is being shovelled up and being made optimum use of against the others. It is as if we don’t have enough of problems already. And the powers that be are not helping one bit. In fact our so-called leaders are doing a wonderful job of adding fuel to the already raging fire. Today we have leaders with all kinds of archaic mindsets. There are some who believe that women of a particular religion should be raped and killed, some who believe that certain religions are alien to our country, and some who say that coconut palms are grass, and the list continues endlessly. What a marvelous lot we are! And time and again we keep electing into power the same morons who we later despise. Fool us once, shame on you; fool us twice, shame on us! And what a shame on us! We just don’t seem to learn. Not even the hard way.
Why don’t we capitalize on our ‘good’ history? The history of unity and reverence for each other; the history that united us in our struggle for independence. The same history that led us to be one of the fastest growing economies of today. The history of communal harmony and religious well-being.
Along with the good however, there is also some amount of bad. We will have to agree that we also have our dark secrets that we are not particularly proud of. But that is a part and parcel of any land’s history, isn’t it? We need to know about this dark history along with everything else simply because we need to learn from it. It is what I would call ‘good-to-know’ information. We need to know what we shouldn’t be doing. We shouldn’t make use of it as a weapon to instigate a communal wildfire like it is done by many today. What is the point of resuscitating the ghosts of the past? Why should we stir the communal cauldron with the spice of hatred?
Our history is what has shaped us into who we are today. And we should know how to inculcate the good things and eliminate the bad things so that we can build a better tomorrow. We should be conscious about the kind of legacy we are leaving to our future generations. Tomorrow when our great-grandchildren open their history books they should preen with pride reading about the wonderful history that their great-grandparents had created. They should not have to grimace when they read about our ugly exploits of communal craziness. Their eyes should gleam with the zeal to carry on a legacy of peace, of happiness, and of clarity. That is my dream!
And to quote a very famous personality: “I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past!”
