  There could be thousands of Introductions/Surveys of representation theory,
given that it is an enormous field. This is just one of them, quite personal
and informal. It has an increasing level of difficulty; the first part is
intended for final year undergrads. We explain some basics of representation
theory, notably Schur-Weyl duality and representations of the symmetric group.
We then do the quantum version, introduce Kazhdan-Lusztig theory, quantum
groups and their categorical versions. We then proceed to a survey of some
recent advances in modular representation theory. We finish with twenty open
problems and a song of despair.
