I have been reading Stephen Fry’s Making History and it got me thinking about history and my hate-love relationship with it.

Growing up, there was a hierarchy of subjects at school. Maths, “science 1” and “science 2” were at the very top and history at the very bottom, bottomer even than the languages. And deservedly so, for history in my school consisted entirely of memorizing which king farted where and what were the ten benefits of having the page numbers of the Indian constitution start from zero instead of one. Unsurprisingly then, as soon as school ended, I ran as fast and as far as I could.

Things have changed of late. I no longer go to school in India, for example. The meaning of history has severely morphed for me since my school days, thanks mostly to having met people who are very different from me (this was surprisingly hard to do in India) and having read many a non-STEM book (no shit!). History has gone from being about facts to being about stories and the process of uncovering and presenting these stories. Good history books are nothing short of good detective novels; intrepid historians and journalists venturing into the unknown, going where no one has gone before. History has become more than wars and empires. That’s the boring kind of history. The fun kinda history is the history of eels, about why Europeans colonized North America and not vice versa, about McDonald’s french fries. The fun history is going in forgotten, dusty attics, it is the connecting of the dots, it looking at ordinary everyday things and understanding how they came to be the way they are.

Reading history has helped me resolve much of the frustration that I sometimes feel toward the world. If you superficially connect with the world then you only get to see its false perfection. But when you read its history(ies) you see all the murders that took place in the shadows. Even the pure and guileless Science is not without drama and wars. I loved reading about Newton and his mad-scientist contemporaries, the history of cancer research, the discovery of the retrovirus, and the history of modern science itself. When you read about how convoluted and messy the past is, when you understand the opacity and the plurality of the past, the mess that your life is no longer feels overwhelming or exceptional but just an indistinguishable part of a story that has been going on since eternity. History connects you to the things and the people around you, to the world that has been and the world that is yet to be.

History is also humbling. I recently listened to Philosophize This!, which, by its description is about philosophy but for the most part is a podcast about the history of western thought. I was frequently stunned (and a bit worried) to see how unoriginal many of my “original” thoughts were. It’s as if these thoughts have trickled down to me through the crevices of time and I have unsuspectingly absorbed them, made them my own and forgotten where they came from. Reading history makes you realize how important it is to think harder and to be more sincere, to figure out which of your thoughts are truly yours and which ones have gotten imprinted onto you by the accident of life.

The irony then is that even though growing up I loathed history with all my being, there were quite a few history books that had a big influence on me; A Brief History of Time and Men of Mathematics (which, I found much later, is a load of bollocks) come to mind. Stephen Fry says that a historian is like a prophet of the past. When you read history, you learn to predict the past, which, as I am finding out more and more, is no mean feat.