EMOTIONAL FACET OF HISTORY

As Charles Dickens said,”it was the best of times. It was the worst of times”. It is, if we are not oblivious to our surroundings. If I ask, what history is to you or atleast how you look at it, some of you might take some time to gather your wits to answer me.  Thinking deep for a moment, I feel, history is life. A life with so many layers. Try digging deep beyond the skin of a nation, you find blood, flesh, wounds and memories.
                                               From early Mesapotamian civilization to the present day Microsoft, Newton’s apple tree to today’s Apple Inc, wars, battles, empires, kingdoms, blood and bullets of the past; everything is history.  But, only a part of the picture is being taught and otherwise exposed to the world. The image is different behind the curtains, different in an ineffable way. This truth should be told to the prosterity without false interpretations and false prestige.  It’s not the matter of victory of a country, but the agony of a soldier who fought for his and what he was left with. When I think about, for instance, foreign invasions of any country, millions of my questions remain unanswered. Imagining an individual of some country which was invaded by the the ruthless, what has he to do with those peoples. Is living in a nation lead by a weak ruler his mistake? Moving onto countries from the empires, the question of nationality rose. It was to such an extent that sacrificing life was the only way to show his patriotism or otherwise chauvinism. This shows how people were cornered without even giving space to think about the purpose of their lives. Pulling in, some science of unstoppable force and the immovable object, which can be partly related to the force of blinding ideologies in history, we see that the innocents have lost lost their lives unknowingly. The only difference between that science and the innocents is that these people were easily movable, unfortunately. The intention is not to point out the inability of those people but the way they were misguided and used. For that matter, even I can’t resist a nation’s pressure because of its policies.
                                                         If we have to divide history into two parts many of us would say, before and after the world wars. Such is the affliction of both the world wars. Every human was moved either by the urge to have a hand in the war or by the bloodshed. Wit was overshadowed by foolishness. Even a Nobel laureate like Rudyard Kipling (ofcourse, most of us won’t agree with his wit of white man’s burden) had sent his son (who was a minor having a poor vision) to the warfield. He lost his life the very first day. Yes ofcourse, taking a white feather offered by young girls is a shame(this happened during  WW1) . But its not as worst as dying. Tagore predicted it right by saying, “ Men are cruel. Man is kind”(in “stray birds”). The So called father of our nation, who is know for his non violence theory also encouraged our peple to have a hand in the war. So where’s humanity. For that matter every human is insane.The hands which dug the grave for those martyrs are still muddy, the blood stains are still wet, millions of letters are waiting to be read and the smell of the rotten bananas sent by the grand parents to the soldiers in the warfields is still in the air. The question is , who did this?
                    I think that there’s a need to know the mental stress a soldier had. We also need to know the ground realities bound by emotions and feelings rather than boundaries and bullets, the realities of the thankless job of a soldier. High school history has become a big bluff.Textbooks just remind us of the dates and years of the nation’s events in the past.   A lot more is forgotten, along with people of the nation, feeling and emotions.                                
Its time to tell the untold.