You read that exactly right. I just referred to ourselves as "Technologically Backward". No, I'm not crazy. Um, no, my mother did not have me tested. And by the way, Sheldon Cooper is equally technologically backward.
This revelation came to me when my dad had one of his whacko conversations with me. I've always thought of daddy as a genius to the point of madness but I cannot deny the sheer brilliance behind what he said to me today. Consider this-
The idea of a cell phone would have been preposterous some 50-60 years ago. Owning cameras was a big deal in itself. People would have thought it mad to take pictures indiscriminately AND distribute it to the world FOR FREE. Bloody Nonsense! And making calls from anywhere? On a tiny device? Unthinkable!
And did you just notice how I put the camera before calling while talking about a phone? I must get my priorities straight!
So you would think- if people could not think of cell phones half a century ago, they were probably worse before that. Somewhere between the wheel and the cell phone, you can only see the arrow of progress pointing in one direction. Fine. Let's go by what you're thinking and we'll rewind a little bit.
Let's go back to 1916. Einstein published the theory of general relativity. He said that energy equals mass times speed of light-squared. When I parroted the equation to daddy, he grinned his widest grin and he said "Child, The Gita says that Matter and Energy combines with Light to form Life. Einstein? He's just paraphrasing."
Normally, I'd say "Up Top!" but I just wound up snorting on my rasam rice. Daddy looked at me, puzzled. He said- You talk of the Pushpak Viman, the Akshaya Patra, or the disrobing of Draupadi- people laugh at it, exclaim in disbelief and call it fiction. The Pushpak Viman is no different from the modern jet plane in concept. God is the guy who installed CCTV cameras everywhere and teleported to the place that sent out a distress signal. Draupadi had a tracking device in her Mangal Sutra, so Krishna knew what was up with her. People these days bluetooth songs to each other and the connectivity is lost beyond twenty-five feet. At the most, you Whatsapp something as measly and two-dimensional as a photograph. The Akshaya Patra received real, solid food everyday. How is that surprising? Maybe they were just more technologically advanced than we are.
Methinks that there is too much truth in what daddy said. We're all too happy to talk hours on end about the X-Men and cosplay at Comic Con but we cringe a little inside when we think of what our stories say about Asuras. It is so unfair to say that Ravan is a myth and Batman is literature. Maybe Ravan isn't a myth. Maybe he's just a mutant whose species was so statistically insignificant that it died out. Maybe Gods lived the way the stories claim they did. Maybe they had a Brahmastra which was more powerful than our nuclear missiles.
We're a technologically backward generation with no imagination. We are unable to acknowledge the ideas and the concepts behind the various things in our literatures. We are a generation that hopes to march ahead without looking back and learning from the past.
How did this happen to us, I wondered. Then the answer came to me-
We stopped innovating and started blogging.
