Whenever some big historical change takes place, whenever people start to move and bring change in their existing circumstances and whenever somebody promises change and people criticize him putting more radical or reactionary demands, I remember the following observation made by a great thinker one and three quarters of a century ago.
"Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language."
Whenever I look at the events in the most populous country of the world particularly in the Punjab, I find this observation true overwhelmingly confirmed and feel like accepting it as another great law of history!
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