Past, Present and Future

Without a proper understanding and appreciation of the past, we do not know who we are or how we came to be, like victims of collective amnesia standing at the crossroads of time not knowing where to go. All basic human groupings- countries, religions, classes- and all the loyalties attached to these have been created by historical events. The past deserves to be studied to make sense of our consciousness and our cultural milieu. The present is only a fleeting instant and everything we are conscious of is already in the past. Thus, cognisance of the present and any attempted vaticination of future events will axiomatically necessitate an appreciation of the past. The necessity of comprehending the past to prepare a roadmap for the future has sired the evolution of different disciplines in the Humanities and the Social Sciences from unifaceted discourses set within disciplinary boundaries to an interdisciplinary one invariably entailing the addition of various heterodox disciplines as well as some of the physical sciences, absorbing and incorporating numerous approaches and methodologies in the process. The present course is imbued with similar motivation. This is an embracive course chiefly concerned with exercising all the essential aspects of intellectual activity- it seeks to enrapture our inquisitiveness, discipline the faculty of reason, cultivate ingenuity and the art of self-expression grazing the societies, polities, economies, cultures, sectarian beliefs, literary compositions, and artistic creations that elucidate humankind’s intellectual evolution and daringly attempting a harmonious concoction of meta-disciplines like history, archaeology, political science, sociology, environmental studies and future studies et al.

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