Happy New Year 2021

 

What a strange year 2020 was. I remember encountering the words "the past is a foreign country" somewhere in the writings of historian Sir Richard J Evans. One day, we woke up to find that the world we thought we knew was a foreign country. Some said that what was happening was "unprecedented", but it was not: the Spanish Flu of 1914-15 killed between 50-100 million people. There had been people warning that one day we would have a recurrence of something like the Spanish Flu pandemic again, and it was a matter of not "if", but "when". Those voices that had warned us had simply been ignored and history forgotten. These warning came true in 2019.

History  never progresses linearly but rather progress in sudden seismic shifts. The French Revolution, WWI, these were sudden and cataclysmic changes after which the world was never quite the same.  Some might have said that about the 11th of September 2001, attack on the New York twin towers but in retrospect that was not as big as a change. It started a Second Gulf War and was the culmination of decades of escalating tensions between America and the Middle East. 

COVID-19, however, represents a more seismic shift because it had much wider ranging structural impacts from a socioeconomic and geopolitical perspective. How the world will look after COVID-19 is anyone's guess.

It seems that my last post here was in 2019 and throughout 2020 I was too dumbfounded by all that was happening to want to blog about it all. That should change in 2021. I still owe the world a book on Wagner and I think about it daily. I can't take this thing with me to the grave without sharing it with everyone. But it is a book written from the point of view of a historian (and to a lesser extent a political philosopher) rather than from that of a musicologist. So, that is why I am again today talking about the history that is taking shape around us as we speak. 

In the meanwhile, Happy New Year to all, hoping the 2020 will see more interesting blog posts.