At some point in your life you would have heard of traveling
through time. When you read about a
faraway place, enchanted lands, fascinating characters, there’s a part of you
that wants to visit, wants to meet these amazing people in the flesh and so
on. That’s natural.
It’s not about stories only.
We learn history and we learn geography.
We read about the Himalayas, Mount Everest, Tenzing Norgay and Edmund
Hillary, we search for text and pictures on the internet and wonder how cold it
must have been. We read about heroic
feats and wonder what it would have been like to live in that time. How was it like at the Last Supper of Jesus
Christ? If you were there, would you
have done something to save that Prince of Peace? Do you wish you were watching from behind
some tree as the Ascetic Siddhartha attained Enlightenment?
The truth is that we can visit these places and those
times. If we want to. All it takes is a good imagination and some
pieces of information about the period, the events and the personalities. The only time machine one needs is the
mind. You can sit back, close your eyes
and take off.
You can imagine the moment when Prince Dutugemunu decided he
would leave the Royal Palace. You could
follow him, be with him through those long, lonely years of self-imposed exile,
shared his food, listened to his plans, his regrets and resolve. You could accompany that other great king,
Elara, to his chambers immediately after giving the order to punish his son and
recount his grief.
Do you not feel sorry for Princess Vihara Maha Devi as she
is cast out into tempestuous seas? Can
you not feel the heat on the sand as her boat approached kinder shores? Do you not see the surprise, confusion and
sorrow in the eyes of Julius Caesar the moment he feels Brutus’ knife on his
skin?
Isn’t it easy to imagine growing up with Harry Potter, Hermione
Granger, Ron Weasley as friend and playmate in some pre-school in that other
world where everything is real and nothing is fiction? It’s the same with Katniss Everdeen, Peeta
Mellark, Gale Hawthorne and other characters in the ‘Hunger Games,’ is it
not? You can, if you want, have
breakfast with characters from ‘Divergent’ such as Tris Prior or Tobias
Eaton. You can tag along, stand shoulder
to shoulder or even make the key decisions.
This time machine is not something that can take you into
storybook worlds and histories you’ve read about. It can take you to the future too. You can go to the worlds you’ve read about in
science fiction, in machines not yet invented.
You can forget all the science fiction you’ve come across and visit a
world where people are not dying of hunger even when there’s a feast going on
the other side of town, a world where trees are not seen as ‘timber’ but as
vital to the health of the planet, a world where people talk instead of ‘chat’,
people meet instead of ‘tweet’ and have real life, real time and real space
conversations.
You can imagine a time where technology allows us to
understand the language of dolphins, where birds don’t chirp but actually tell
us of faraway places they’ve been to, what they had for breakfast and how nice
it would be if kids didn’t break their nests or stole their eggs.
You can go anywhere you like, with whoever you like, meet
anyone you want to meet, explore, discover, be amazed and return to the present
all the more richer for the experience.
And the best thing is that you don’t have to wait until science gives us
a time-machine. Better still, it’s
free.
This is the twelfth article in a series I am writing for the JEANS section of 'The Nation'. The series is for children. Adults consider yourselves warned...you might re-discover a child within you!
Other articles in this series
It is cool to slosh around
You can compose your own music
Pebbles are amazing things
You can fly if you want to
The happiest days of our lives
So what do you want to do with the rain?
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