YOUR HIGHNESS HISTORIAN SIR!

YOUR HIGHNESS HISTORIAN SIR!

Inaccuracy in articulation and expression is the order of the day. This stems from shallow knowledge, poor concentration, hyper-estimation of one's intellectual capacity and the glaring greed for seeking the limelight at any cost. 

In an age of proliferating online avenues of self-expression it is but natural that much of what will be dished out as history will in reality be garbage. Romila Thapar, notwithstanding her leftist leanings which may irritate neonationalists, was right when she remarked that today there are two types of historians, the real historians who are trained to study the sources of information and do their due analyses, and the social media historians who peddle a whole lot of unverified data that then is poorly analysed to arrive at half-baked inferences. This is nothing but the truth. Today what is doing the rounds as dished-out history online is ill-digested stray bits of information gleaned online and reproduced imperfectly with an assumed authority of sorts. Prior to this recent trend in the popular presentation of history, never heard a historian call himself a historian in public repeatedly nor a professor shamelessly publicise himself as professor. 

What a age of self-advertisement this has been reduced to! What an age of superficiality indeed! What an age of raucous television journalism! Alas, what an age of plummeting culture!

Written by Sugata Bose