History is a favorite subject of many students including me. What history signifies if I wonder? It is not more than memory or time whose reality is fathomed through imaginative zeal. Many social scientists love archeology to excavate the truth in its marginal existence without relating it to the grandiosity of teleological imagination. And most of the historians chose few key words and exclude many others to create a thread of narratives which become a part of curriculum for the younger minds so that they may feel connected to its past, whether glorious or a matter of shame. In the end, to say, that history is not found or discovered but created is not an untrue statement. History is discursive like many of our sciences are, as hegemonic as medical science in form of Allopathy, which doesn't allow the marginal voices of medicine, in fact, most of them are silenced through myticalization as if one form of science has all the rights to subjugate others through otherization.
Past centuries have been the age of history. I mean, look at the historians across all the genres; be it sciences, social sciences, economics, or philosophy, history dominated the discourse of 18th and 19th century of Europe. To start with Nietzsche, Hegel, Marx, Foucault to the historian of science like Thomas Kuhn, each of them loved history, though named it differently like archeology, genealogy and what not.
History is used as a technique to build the narratives of civilization. Many people prefer history as a teacher, which demonstrates the mistakes we committed in past so as to learn the lessons not to repeat it. Many like history to repair the state of helplessness exists in contemporary moments. History gives a sigh of relief that one was so glorious and wonderful once upon a time, and it awakens the possibility of future as glorious as past. But this sense of nostalgia robs the ecstasy of the moments happening now. Patanjali once wrote that to increase the mindfulness one needs to focus one work at a time. In our age, we want to be robotic but in fact lags behind machines in its efficiency. We all love wandering in past and future but do not like the present and its momentariness. In reality, past is dead and restored in memory. Future is all about imagination. It simply doesn't exist. And what exits is less cared for!
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