Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Blast from the Future


It was Monday evening, an evening that I hate the most. I was sitting in my cubicle, with my eyes staring at the screen of my PC. The black background filled with green text, and a blinking cursor captured all my attention. Well, almost all, as there still was that Windows taskbar at the bottom of the screen, which is just enough to deviate the concentration from your usual work. A friend pinged me on the Office Communicator. And next to communicator icon was the PC clock, which incidentally grabbed my full attention at that very moment. And the next moment, a few questions crossed my mind:

Quest 1 - Will I, or any other mortal for that matter, ever have the capability to control this clock, and the role it plays in our lives?

Quest 2 - Will I ever be able to change all my weekdays into Saturdays or Sundays, so that I do not have to come to office ever again?

Quest 3 – Would anybody ever be able to create a time machine, which would enable us to travel from one era to another, just like the way they show in some of the super hit Hollywood movies and some of the super flop Bollywood movies?



A super hit Hollywood movie based on the concept of time travel


And a super flop Bollywood movie based on the concept of time travel. There are many more.
And a super flop Bollywood movie based on the concept of time travel. There are many more.

Quest 4 - And the most important question of them all – Would I miss my last bus home today ‘coz it is already 9:12PM, and the bus leaves at 9:15?

Out of all these questions, I had the answer only to the last one, which had a greater weightage over the others at that point of time. However, I am a long time MBA aspirant, and just like other members of my fraternity, I have that zeal within me to solve each of the un-attempted questions from the question paper, when I return home after the test. So I started pondering over questions 1 thru 3, and try to think if I have the answer to any of these. And here are my answers to these questions:

Answer 1 – No idea. None of the options selected from ‘Yes’ and ‘No’. Zero marks.

Answer 2 – Again, no clue at all. But that would be a nice situation to have. None of the two options selected again. Zero marks.

Answer 3 – Cannot say with certainty. My answer would be ‘No’, because of plain logic – If somebody creates time machine in future, let us say 50 years from now, wouldn’t that person ever test it or further use it to travel into past? And by past in future, what I mean is present in present. Have we ever encountered or heard of any time travelers from future, who used their time machines to reach our present? Or have we ever read of time travelers in our history text books? Is there any real life Marty McFly who rode a DeLorean DMC-12 to reach his past, or our present? If there was one, a sudden appearance of him in public would definitely have made the headlines of all the newspapers. Mr McFly and his machine would have been on the cover of all the magazines, be it Discover or Autocar. Or the most common picture engraved on some of the caves discovered from stone-age would have been Mr McFly riding his car, instead of the primitive man using stone-made tools to hunt down a deer. Unfortunately, this is not the case. This only strengthens my belief that invention of time machine is impossible.

On second thoughts, could those UFOs encountered in recent past by several Americans, in actual, be the time machines? Do time machines look more like rotating flying disks, rather than sports car? And could those strange looking aliens actually be the humans from future whose bodies got deformed during time travel because of the combined action of gravity, centripetal acceleration, some yet to be discovered forces of nature and travel sickness. If the answer is yes, this would be big thumbs down to the theory that there is life outside the planet. And Americans would again go back to their old popular belief that life exists only on Earth in general and USA in particular.

A human deformed due to enormous forces experienced during time travel
A human deformed partly due to enormous forces and majorly due to nausea experienced during time travel

So, again I get zero marks, this time for marking both the options.

Answer 4 – Yes, I did miss the bus that day. So I had to wait until 11 o’ clock, when an evening shift colleague of mine dropped me home in his car.

1 comment:

Samit said...

Hehe... Nice one, Mathur ! These questions (and loads more of those kinds !) keep hovering in the midst of those brain cells, and remain unanswerable - by myself, and by the entire world around me. I therefore only want to land up in a situation where those questions do not pop up in the first place, and that is when I could say I've been successful in "answering" those :)