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The faraway world Tales of the Future:
Death of a Megapolis, which Jayant Narlikar wrote much before the floods, portrays Mumbai as a melting pot. In this pot, the protagonist is like a frog that readjusts every time the temperature rises, until it becomes too hot to bear and the frog has to either jump out or be fried. Narlikar’s Mumbai ends in a huge fire that sweeps across the packed concrete jungle. For some concerned citizens, the recent floods were a wake-up call. Already, words like rebuild and rebirth are being floated. Prognostication is indicating what is to happen by looking at signs or symptoms. Proteus, an ancient sea god, assumed many shapes to evade having to foretell the future. Narlikar doesn’t play God. The stories represent Narlikar’s unspoken thoughts. His is a comedy of manners, that satirises the faults of society and exposes the criminality of our decisions. He does oversimplify the problems, but then he has the authority. He wrote The Ice Age Cometh, Virus, A Trojan Horse and The Little Green Men much before Hollywood made The Day After Tomorrow, Independence Day, Contact and The Men in Black. His Comet was made into a children’s movie in India and telecast on DD. Narlikar is a funambulist, a tightrope walker, who walks the edge between science and fiction. There are no sudden changes in the course of events he narrates, no twists in the plot, only a moment of recognition of the truth, in which he becomes his magical double and alters the properties of his mind, switching from the logical to the creative. Lack of determinism in quantum theory: it will "spin" your mind and knock your bails over. Perpetual jeopardy, series of tremors that follow the main shock, would make stories more engrossing, but Narlikar’s antagonists pose mostly just one challenge at a time. Constant investigation traces the quake to its epicentre. Every story has an intellectual vertex: a point at which two lines of thought meet to form one angle or point of view. There are also arguments that touch, but not cut each other. Narlikar is like a "white knight", who acts to rescue a company threatened by takeover, in this case by astrologers, Shamans and science’s own. I thought that like all science-fiction writers, he too had been abducted by aliens or lost in space like astronomers, but after Mumbai, I see his reason. The new-age Nostradamus has indeed presented to us ten of his best short stories. It is hard for a books column to condense to collect the components of the mixture, as these boil off at different temperatures. You need a fractionation column for that. True reality lies beyond the observable world. His effort is to explain that it is upon us to preserve this true reality: consciousness, reason and scientific temper. The Return of the Vaman was a striking novel he once wrote. He is also somewhat of a Vaman: little man who grew big because he had an idea of the future. |
As the waters rose in
Mumbai, I held back my review. I lay at periscopic depth, waiting to see
the end of it. As the roads came out of the watery grave, I watched in
horror how close and how quickly the professor’s prediction had come
to life.