Okay, this happens to me whenever I am reading about/working with non-causal systems. I start thinking a lot about time-travel. Wouldn't it be great if we could travel back in time and set right many of our wrongs? Or if we could travel to the future and see how our great-grand children would look? Practicalities aside, it is an amazing concept.
Time-travel has been a pet subject for sci-fi movie makers, for a long time, and it does not seem to get old at all! There used to be this series telecast on the Sci-fi channel. A man is tossed from one body to another body and another, all in different times, so that he can set right the wrongs done by other people, and finally return to his own body to the present. He has only one friend throughout this exercise - Al (I think), who appears to him as a hologram. It was an enjoyable series. Fi, yes, but Sci? I should think very little Science was involved :)
And there are those gadgets that have invited a lot of speculation but have always eluded serious research for practical reasons - the time machines. H.G. Well's book 'Time Machine' was even made into a movie starring Guy Pearce. I still have to read the book. A more famous movie and a personal favorite involving time machines, is the 'Back to the Future' trilogy. Who can not love the bungling 'Doc' and the spirited young Michael? And there is another good movie called 'Frequency', where a man communicates with his father from the past and saves his parents from fatal accidents. Even the famous 'Star Trek' has a few episodes on time travel. Coming to Indian cinema, we have 'Aditya 369' which is a pretty good movie too.
There is this theory about how time-machines may work. I had read it someplace, years ago. The events happening on the earth can be seen from the Sun eight minutes later, because the light from the earth takes eight minutes to reach the Sun. So, if you can travel faster than the speed of light (Ah, there is that limit again!), you can 'view' the events that happened eight minutes ago, first hand. There is no way of checking it because we still have not found a way to travel faster than light. And interfering with the past still cannot be explained.
Traveling to the future only gets trickier. There is absolutely no explanation that even remotely makes sense, of how one can travel into the future. Some argue that there are millions of futures etched out for you, and you just pick one each nanosecond of your life. Keep choosing futures one after another and - well, you can travel to the future! However, this argument is not even worth considering. There are just too many unknowns in the equation.
Theoretical physicist Kip Thorne suggests that wormholes, which are allowed by the laws of Theoretical Physics, can be used for traveling in time. Something that comes from an eminent physicist like him cannot be disregarded. But we have to continue being in the present, and see what direction research takes.
As far as I know, the concept of time-machines and time-travel is quite recent. I have not come across that in Indian or Western mythologies that I have read. From all practical observations, our conclusion is that Time flows only in one direction. That is what our ancients also seem to have thought.
That is the sensible thing to think, too. As a subhAShita goes -
गतशोकं न कुर्वीत भविष्यं नैव चिन्तयेत्
वर्तमानेषु कार्येषु प्रवर्तन्ति विचक्षणाः ।
Showing posts with label Movies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Movies. Show all posts
Monday, April 02, 2007
Monday, June 28, 2004
Japan and India
As I was watching the movie "Last Samurai", I sensed this uncanny similarity between our (Indian and Japanese) cultures. Though my knowledge of Japanese culture is limited to a couple of movies, a couple of visits to the Japanese sections of some good museums and some websites, I feel strangely one with this people; it is the kind of sense of oneness I felt with the Rajputs.
Perhaps what impressed me so much was their respect for honour. Probably, in my most subconscious mind, that is what I seek to achieve, and that is what endears these people to me. Being a woman, I identify myself with Rajput women. It is not just the Rani Padminis and the Rani Durgavatis, but the ordinary peasant women, the wives and daughters of warriors that inspire me to better myself constantly. To me, these are the epitomes of womanhood; affectionate, dutiful and proud. They make me proud of being a woman. And surprisingly, the woman Taka in the movie too, made me feel the same way.
When I browsed the www for articles on the Samurai and the Meiji revolution, I found many similarities between our situations through the centuries. We, Indians were a composite mixture of warring kingdoms and allowed Islam and the West to take advantage of us in the name of trade and modernisation, respectively. Consequently, we lost respect for ourselves and became worshippers of white skin. While I do not know if the Japanese are as rootless as we are, from my googling, I saw many articles that eulogised the Meiji revolution and few about the honourable ways of the Samurais. The supporters of the Meiji revolution have a lot in their favour. It is because of this revolution that Japan is a developed nation now. But my argument is that this revolution did not have to do away with all the great things that Japanese culture stood for, in the name of modernisation! Their counterparts in our country, the "liberal" leftists, also eulogise the British and Islamic invasions, saying that they are the reason we developed trade (we let every invader plunder our resources), we became modern (meaning that we learned how great the English were), and pluralistic (that is, we learnt to bend over backwards to please our pseudosecular "intellectuals"). From what I saw, the same is true of the Japanese too. The western countries took advantage of Japan and robbed its soul through meaningless modernisation. The same happened to India at the hands of the British. While Emperor Meiji helped the West in Japan, our own Rajas and Nizams did that in our country.
Before people accuse me of being an old fogy who loves to live in the past, let me make one thing clear. I am all for modernisation. But the modernisation should be meaningful. Any modernisation that makes us forget who we really are, is despicable. If modernisation provides food, water and education to families which could not afford them otherwise, it is good. But if the same modernisation makes these people think lowly of themselves it will have very bad consequences.
I can see the ill-effects of modernisation in India. Schools in India do not teach respect for Indian culture. I studied at a not-so-well-known school in Bellary, a large town. The name of the school was in Kannada. In this school, our prayers were all in English. Not one Samskrita shloka or a Kannada prayer was taught. We used to speak in English all the time. I love the English language, but I hate not knowing my own language. My parents taught me to love Kannada, but what about hundreds and thousands of other kids who studied in that school? If this is the state of Kannada in Bellary, what will it be in Bangalore? These days, when we visit MG Road, salespeople in shops do not respond to you unless you speak in English. Do we need this kind of rootless modernisation?
If people are educated only with facts and not biases, things will improve. Japanese should have been taught the greatness of the Samurai, along with the greatness of the West. We should have been taught about Aryabhata and Brahmagupta's theorems along with Pythagoras' theorem. I do not know the situation in Japan, but in India, barely 1% of the people know about these things. I sincerely hope that things change for the better.
Perhaps what impressed me so much was their respect for honour. Probably, in my most subconscious mind, that is what I seek to achieve, and that is what endears these people to me. Being a woman, I identify myself with Rajput women. It is not just the Rani Padminis and the Rani Durgavatis, but the ordinary peasant women, the wives and daughters of warriors that inspire me to better myself constantly. To me, these are the epitomes of womanhood; affectionate, dutiful and proud. They make me proud of being a woman. And surprisingly, the woman Taka in the movie too, made me feel the same way.
When I browsed the www for articles on the Samurai and the Meiji revolution, I found many similarities between our situations through the centuries. We, Indians were a composite mixture of warring kingdoms and allowed Islam and the West to take advantage of us in the name of trade and modernisation, respectively. Consequently, we lost respect for ourselves and became worshippers of white skin. While I do not know if the Japanese are as rootless as we are, from my googling, I saw many articles that eulogised the Meiji revolution and few about the honourable ways of the Samurais. The supporters of the Meiji revolution have a lot in their favour. It is because of this revolution that Japan is a developed nation now. But my argument is that this revolution did not have to do away with all the great things that Japanese culture stood for, in the name of modernisation! Their counterparts in our country, the "liberal" leftists, also eulogise the British and Islamic invasions, saying that they are the reason we developed trade (we let every invader plunder our resources), we became modern (meaning that we learned how great the English were), and pluralistic (that is, we learnt to bend over backwards to please our pseudosecular "intellectuals"). From what I saw, the same is true of the Japanese too. The western countries took advantage of Japan and robbed its soul through meaningless modernisation. The same happened to India at the hands of the British. While Emperor Meiji helped the West in Japan, our own Rajas and Nizams did that in our country.
Before people accuse me of being an old fogy who loves to live in the past, let me make one thing clear. I am all for modernisation. But the modernisation should be meaningful. Any modernisation that makes us forget who we really are, is despicable. If modernisation provides food, water and education to families which could not afford them otherwise, it is good. But if the same modernisation makes these people think lowly of themselves it will have very bad consequences.
I can see the ill-effects of modernisation in India. Schools in India do not teach respect for Indian culture. I studied at a not-so-well-known school in Bellary, a large town. The name of the school was in Kannada. In this school, our prayers were all in English. Not one Samskrita shloka or a Kannada prayer was taught. We used to speak in English all the time. I love the English language, but I hate not knowing my own language. My parents taught me to love Kannada, but what about hundreds and thousands of other kids who studied in that school? If this is the state of Kannada in Bellary, what will it be in Bangalore? These days, when we visit MG Road, salespeople in shops do not respond to you unless you speak in English. Do we need this kind of rootless modernisation?
If people are educated only with facts and not biases, things will improve. Japanese should have been taught the greatness of the Samurai, along with the greatness of the West. We should have been taught about Aryabhata and Brahmagupta's theorems along with Pythagoras' theorem. I do not know the situation in Japan, but in India, barely 1% of the people know about these things. I sincerely hope that things change for the better.
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