Sagar Sir helped us perceive all the historical characters from the point of view of a regular person.
Be it old buildings, historical monuments, old people with stories of wars or glossy pictures in my history book – history has always fascinated me. Ever since I was a child, history was my favourite subject. I could never understand how anyone found such an interesting subject boring. Later I realized that a fair share of the effect is due to the teacher. I was lucky enough to find the best history teachers all through school, and even in college.
Definitely the best part of the entire semester was the course ‘Milestones in World Civilizations: Egyptian civilization to the World Wars’ taken by Sagar Sir. I remember how the entire batch was left amazed after sir’s first lecture. All through school, we were so restricted by a syllabus that our curiosity never got any answers. But here, no matter how many questions you asked, sir was more than happy to explain and invoke more questions. The best part was that it never seemed that he was just trying to finish the syllabus.
I really loved the fact that we also learnt the applicability of all the topics we studied in today’s context. I never had a very clear understanding about the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) as I never found completely unbiased sources. The lectures conducted by sir helped me clarify the numerous doubts I had.
We have always looked at people like Hitler, Mussolini, etc not as people but as historical characters as if it was only their political sphere that made up their life. Sagar Sir helped us perceive all the historical characters from the point of view of a regular person. Be it Vlad- the Count Dracula, Genghis Khan, Mary Antoinette, Mara or Hitler, we now looked beyond the reason they made it into the history textbooks. Textbooks never told us about the rough childhood that Genghis Khan had, which made him ruthless. It didn’t tell us that Mary Antoinette never actually said ‘let them have cake’.
There was not a single lecture which did not leave the entire class boggled and compelled half the class to continue asking sir innumerable questions till the next lecture started.
I never thought that I would look forward to doing assignments until it came to history assignments. Of course, who wouldn’t want to imagine themselves as a soldier under the Kaiser of Germany?
Article By: Anwesha Basu (Batch of 2019)
Photograph By: Nairika Lodhi (Batch of 2019)
