Being a part of history

History had always seemed something alien—text you read in school books and part of the reminiscences from our elders. Yesterday, as Barack Hussein Obama became the first black American President-elect, I felt a sense of being a part of history being made. Not just in terms of the U.S. The world is moving and progressing (a relative and subjective context) at such a fast pace that the geniuses I read are actually alive and some pass away in my lifetime. I read copies written by Paul Krugman, Thomas Friedman, Pico Iyer and who-not. Years later or okay, maybe not so many years later, the younger generation will learn about Paul Krugman’s Nobel Prize, Thomas Friedman’s ‘flat world’ and I will feel ridiculously old (An exaggeration since I might most probably be dead by then or too old to care.)

The conflicts that are happening across the world, from Georgia to Lebanon, from Timbucktoo to Jhumri Talaiya, are the deciding factors in the polarity of the world. The bipolar era of the Cold War which had ended in 1990 to become a unipolar era dominated by the U.S. has made way for a new age multi-polar way of life and governance. And to think that I was alive during all these crucial shifts of polarity.

Today, the Second World War might seem like a forgotten event of the past. But twenty years hence, I say that I was born forty one years after the end of the war and will emerge as an almost-witness to that devastating experience. I know that it does not actually have much of an impact as my father was born four years after 1945 and I do not think that the war occupies much of his mind space, if at all.

I raise a toast to myself and the inmates of my generation – we are all history in the making, if we choose to be.