‘AM’ not in my senses!

All of us sometimes feel like Arthur Dent felt on the day Earth was destroyed by the Vogons to make way for a space highway through the Galaxy, in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. A few days ago it was my turn to feel so, albeit for a very short time, thankfully. I happened to read that a patient plunged in coma from several days had sprung out of it when he smelt his favorite food! I had pooh-poohed it then, but I was about to experience something quite close!

One fine day, uh oh… I mean one not so fine a day, I woke up with a weird feeling. I can’t describe the feeling in words, except by giving a simile. It was exactly the feeling you’d experience if you slept in your house and woke up in the forest. Like you stepped into the elevator of your office, waited till it climbed up to your floor, and suddenly the door opened onto a deserted beach. Ok… not so dramatic, but almost :)

It was a strange morning, and I knew it the moment my sleep broke. It was (supposed to be) a cold December day, but unlike every other day, there was no cold mist, no feeling of freshness that accompanies you once you chase away the sleep hangover. And it just didn’t feel right. While I still lay on the bed, I noticed momentarily that it was all too quiet, and the very next moment I realized I was noticing the absence of the chirping of early morning birds, and the predictable drone of school vans. What was wrong with the environment?

Don’t worry I’m not going to end this article by saying my mom shook me up and I realized I had been dreaming. Nope, this was for real. Very real. I looked at the clock on the table beside my bed. It showed 11.30. I realized with a lazy groan that it had run out of battery a week ago. So what was the damned time? And what was wrong with the Earth?

I intensely felt I had overslept a great deal. But why? The previous day hadn’t been all that exhausting. Expecting it to be quite late in the morning, I got up from my bed, walked over to the window and glanced across the road, half expecting small green men with onion eyes to be walking around. But no, it wasn’t unrealistically unreal. It was just… realistically unreal! I mean, where were the schoolchildren? Where were the joggers? Where were the elderly thieves that stole flowers from our garden every morning on the pretext of performing Pooja? What was wrong with the society?

And what was the matter with the lawn? What? No newspaper? Was the previous day a public holiday? How would I get through the day without a newspaper? Hmmm… and why hadn’t I heard the milkman’s call? That was loud enough to wake the dead. What was wrong with… with everything?

Hmmm, the time should be about 8 or 9, I reckoned. As I walked on towards the sitting room wondering why my mouth felt like some angel had brushed my teeth while I was asleep, the clock in the sitting room suddenly struck 5. Eh? I looked at it with disbelief. Now what was wrong with space and time itself?

I earnestly tried to fit the pieces of the puzzle. Just then I smelt coffee, and my emotions went something like: Coffee. Coffee? Coffee! Of course, coffee!

In a moment, my nose had told me everything that all my other senses could not! Mom never made coffee in the mornings. Coffee was conventionally an evening drink at my place. Like a person who hit upon the ultimate truth of life when struck by a streak of lightning, I suddenly realized why the morning felt weird; because it wasn’t morning at all! I had just woken up from an afternoon nap. I smiled, and stepped into the kitchen for the coffee. Come on, what was wrong with me?! The Universe was alright!

Then on, my respect for the olfactory powers has greatly risen! Nowadays I opine that coffee vending machines should be an integral part of the ICU ward of every hospital.

It's a Pity!

Like I might've said before, I've been a sticky Isaac Asimov bookworm. Most of his sci-fi stories are set into the distant future (as expected, of course). Through his stories, he tries to warn us that technological advancement is moving humanity away from nature. Many of his stories depict the future earth as a place that’s technologically impressive, with fully mechanized comforts, but devoid of natural beauty, with an atmosphere polluted beyond repair, with a teeming test-tube born population living entirely under artificial environs and eating cultured, biologically engineered food. Scary. Improbable. Or so I thought.



A few weeks ago, my niece and nephew from Mumbai came visiting us. They are a bubbly pair of school kids who have spent all their lives behind the closed doors of an apartment in Mumbai. This was the first time they ever came down to our house in Vidyaranyapura, Bangalore. They enjoyed their stay in and out, and they just didn’t want to go back. And for good reason. But throughout their stay, they reminded me of Asimov, and his stories of the fallouts of mindless urbanization.

Their joy burst forth the moment they saw my house. They had expected me to live in an apartment just like the herd of people does in Mumbai. Fortunately Bangalore isn’t so ‘apartmentalized’ yet, although that statement is fast becoming obsolete. Anyway, they just didn’t tire of running in and out of our small bungalow on the outskirts of Bangalore.

Ok, Vidyaranyapura was like paradise for them. They never thought one could grow vegetables in his own house. They just assumed everyone on earth bought vegetables from a shop! They never thought the chirping of birds and cooing of cuckoos could actually wake you up from sleep in the morning. They never thought that a jasmine creeper or a champaka tree could be more fragrant than their perfume-bottle counterparts. They never saw the shine of dew drops on the tips of the tiny velvet fur coat of rose leaves. They never thought the early morning fog could come down so low and thick that you could not see the other side of the road.

It all started one morning when my nephew woke me up, all excited saying, “Kaka, come quick, there is a cuckoo in the garden.” I was overawed that they had distanced themselves from nature so much that hearing a cuckoo was so exciting to them. The same evening there was a slight drizzle, and a beautiful rainbow sprang up on the horizon opposite to the setting sun. The moment my niece noticed it, she and her sibling scampered onto the terrace and gazed at it with mystified eyes. It was so awesome for them to actually witness an event about which they had just read in their text books. It’s not that rainbows don’t happen in Mumbai, but I suspect most people just can’t see them with all those tall buildings around.

The night was even better. In Mumbai, they never got to see the night sky except from the beach, and even then hardly any stars were visible, thanks to all the light pollution. The stars twinkling like pearls on a jet black canvas was a real treat for them. They spent hours on the terrace, feasting their eyes through the binoculars.

This set me thinking. I was overwhelmed with a feeling that Asimov’s prophecies are really coming true. That reminds me of another incident that my friend told me about, a few days ago. He had just returned from New York. While he was enamored by the grandeur of the mega city, he was stumped at the fact that you just cannot get around the city without a car. You need a car to commute from anywhere to anywhere even if the two anywheres were within walking distance. People can’t walk. Instead, they buy treadmills and burn their calories and time in such a silly manner. What the?

Also, while he was there, he had once been to an amusement park, where a typical model village had been recreated. He couldn’t believe that people were actually paying money to see what the rural landscape looked like! It sounds absurd, at least to us Indians! What’s more, even when inside, people were not watching it directly, but through the camcorder’s display screen. He was appalled that people there are quagmired in so many levels of artificiality. They actually pay money to enter an artificial village, spend all their time walking around looking at electro-mechanical animals through a tiny camcorder viewer, then go home and replay it on their television screens and feel happy that they experienced something beyond city life. Aaargghh! Asimov, thou art the God!