I really don’t know why I got interested in this subject all of a sudden. I have indeed been a fan of the Back to the Future movies ever since I saw them, but I have seen them so many years ago, and haven’t had the opportunity to get the pleasure of re-watching them (Or re-reading H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine or Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) in recent memory. It could be that I kinda got thinking after seeing the surrealistically beautiful (and yet) clichéd teaser trailer of Love Story 2050, when I had been to the theatres to see ‘Race’. The teaser was well-made, thanks to the high-profile fight sequences and panoramically digitalized city of Mumbai, but it reminded me most terribly of movies like The Star Wars saga and the strange capsule-like cars from ‘The Fifth Element’. And then again, the sight of a scientist (albeit, looking like a mad one, with haywire hair and manner of talking and blah blah blah) boasting about his one-of-a-kind creation… it’s too clichéd for anyone, thanks to the abundance of Hollywood movies in the offering. But I’m not about to talk about any movie here… I got hooked on to the real subject: Time-Travel.
Yeah, I was struck by that age-old question that has baffled even the likes of the baffled-haired Albert Einstein. Is time-travel really possible? Is it really something more than a mere myth, creation of some looney’s brain, maybe? It does seem like so, because if a ‘time-machine’ is really invented someday (someday!), which can take people through to the past and future, wouldn’t someone had seen a time-traveler (from the future) by now? I mean, when someone claims that aliens exist, that claim is backed by stuff like flying saucer pictures or giddy details of alien abduction and stuff like that. But who on earth has claimed to see a time-traveler? I would love to meet someone someday!
And if time-travel would indeed have been true, wouldn’t someone have erased (prevented) things like 9/11 (by maybe informing the airport authorities before the departure of those fateful flights)… and wouldn’t some Samaritan Terminator have gotten rid of Adolf Hitler even before he rose to power, before he became the Fuhrer?
But then, as we delve deeply into it, things aren’t actually that easy. Suppose, let’s take the example of a hypothetical victim of 9/11 tragedy, Mr. Samuel. After Mr. Samuel passed away, his loving wife grieved for months on end, demanding justice which remained the hardest thing to come by. And then, she moved on (if that was possible at all) and fell in love with, and married Samuel’s best friend Richard, who had been beside her during the traumatic post-9/11 days. Now, five years after the marriage, they have a son, Harry… and Harry grows up, becomes a 25-year-old man, is a software engineer by profession, and one day, he hears about this amazing proposition of the government which has developed a time-machine: some people are about to travel to 2001 and reverse the 9/11 tragedy, thus threatening the very existence of Harry… since Mr. Samuel won’t die, Richard would fall for somebody else and marry her… everyone lives happily ever after, everyone except Harry, who doesn’t exist!
Is that even possible??? If time-travel is, so is this! And then, of course everyone realizes that and blah blah blah, and so the time-travelers, travel (in the past, too, maybe… maybe a couple of them are lurking in some street of Kolkata, dressed like 2008-ers, right now as I write) in disguise, in total quiet, not changing anything, not letting us know that they come and go like we visit shopping malls or movie theatres, bunking precious classes in our college. But then, wouldn’t some different-thinking, rebel time-traveler decide to bunk the trend and reveal him/herself to us, mortals of the past, by now? I can see Star Ananda and CNN alike feeding us that for ten years’ worth of breaking news! Dunno, it somehow doesn’t seem like a long shot.
Good to think, fodder for thought during a nice, irritatingly long queue for paying the electricity bills, maybe… on a serious note… I’d really like to see a time-traveler, too!
Signing Off,
See ya in da Futureeeeee…..
-Jagannath (Jesse)
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