Question

• In what ways does looking through the history lens enhance your understanding of diversity?
• Consider a current event in the news that has a historical counterpart. How does looking through the history lens influence how you perceive both the current and historical events? Please share a news link to your events.
• How does analyzing the relationship between history, culture, and diversity have an influence on your discipline of study or chosen profession?

Answer 1

Lens of history basically refers to the perspectives through a completed set of events can be observed and revised as a whole in order to identify a new set of elements in the possible perceptibility. It does not project an objective analysis necessarily but, it is capable of generating certain views that would be accessible under certain assumptions and considerations. The current events of Indian General Election 2019 can be drawn parallel against the first Democratic elections in 1951 for a historical lens comparison. The interdisciplinary influence is basically indicative of practicality of life since in reality, the conceptions of cognition, history and culture are inevitably overlapping.

Explanation:

Historical lens basically offers the freedom to view an event from any perspective in order to identify key elements through the certain ideology. This helps us break free from the confinement of viewing the world under the narrow radar of one's own culture and hence remain pungent and unreceptive towards others. The lens would help us understand lives from others' perspectives and then respect their own existence in order to reach a consensus of mutual identity where the individuals ultimately reach the stage of diversity acceptance. This is predominantly exhibited by multicultural societies that leave in co-existence, barring the occasional disruptions of struggles.

India as a nation expresses this notion, accounting for the unified presence of different communities such as Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians and so forth who live together on a daily basis owing to different times of regime the country held. Without the lens, people would be confined to the tunnel vision of their own culture and be invested in uprooting other cultures from communicative existence, defeating the idea of diversity.

The General election of the world's most populous democracy in 2019 is basically the trending event of recurrence that decides the fate of a nation owing to multicultural dynamics. This event can be drawn parallel to the first General election of Republic of India in 1951-52. Drawing parallels between the situations, the fundamental differences can be observed in the composition of the population where voting was quite an opaque conception in the past with most of the masses being unaware of its importance. This can be attributed to the lack of media and the lack of national potency to create a median in mid twentieth century to reach everyone. However, the modern scenario is driven by social media and a significant young population. The historical lens helps us identify the socio-economic differences between the different timelines and the significant impact on voting patterns. The distributional difference towards a stronger presence of youth mobilization in the modern era that brings in the people's wishes at a stronger scale in the present day scenario. The orthodox rigidities of not voting beyond one's own religion, caste, creed and so forth are relatively diminished owing to leaders from different religions, lower castes and even transsexuals contesting the elections and winning in certain cases. This presents the differences in the evolution of era and subsequent dynamics of a recurrent, democratic process that emerges in a new form along the arrow of time.

Culture is basically social foundation of a nation and van result from compound composition of different singular elements that come together. The cultural singularity observed in the above case owes to the different regimes of Hindu kings held in the early ages, succeeded by the Mughal regime and the British business led governance. People who have lived through these times tend to capture the elements and preserve them in their culture to be propelled forward. This is critical to social psychological analysis because it is the basis of group formation and group identity dynamics. This governs the identity part of the individual in light of the shared cultures that brings the national identity. Cultural identity is also a crucial element in the mental health of an individual since the fear of being ridiculed as a minority and lower class can lead to stress and anxiety while perceived diversity would ease the psychological dynamics of possible apprehension. Therefore, the culture constructed by history is crucial to identity and mental health as defining realms of psychology.