Kiran’s Kontrarian Korner: Time Travel
Time travel has long been dreamt about, with many a sci-fi novel and countless movies having this as their core theme. Most people are more curious about the future than the times already gone by. One reason may be that, unlike the future, the recent past – depending on how far back one wants to go ‒ is better known, at least in part. This knowledge comes through anecdote, history books, oral accounts travelling through generations, and old artefacts like monuments or carvings.
Of course, there are distortions or misinterpretation; there is also bias, with history inevitably being written by the victor. As a result, history – long considered a given – is no longer so. The past, once thought immutable, is a topic of controversy and contestation. Some want to make history by beating records; others want to “make” history, re-writing and shaping it to their preferences.
Futuristic fiction continues to thrive, but there is a big market for the past. One indicator is the spate of best-sellers based on millennia-old mythology or on fictionalised history. Many recent box-office hits too are anchored in times past. Though few drivers in India keep an eye on the rear-view mirror (or anywhere else on the road, for that matter), there is clearly a resurgence of interest in looking back in time. This rear view, though, is limited in space and time: while the “wrongs” of a certain past period are seen, we did not seem to notice that those behind us were accelerating and set to overtake us – for example, Korea and China in the 1960s and 1970s, and Bangladesh in the 2020s. Our time travel seems limited to a given era and its restrictive social, dress and moral codes, including patriarchy and caste. A more panoramic view would show that in times past, we were an open, very liberal and harmonious society, where diversity flourished, and led to artistic creativity and scientific breakthroughs.
Sadly, interest in the past does not translate to a respect for artefacts. It is common to see recent graffiti (“AK + DP” within a heart), seeking to immortalise a contemporary infatuation, scrawled on ancient carvings and monuments. Historical monuments are vandalised, demolished and desecrated without a care. Some sites are now protected and a few restored, with spruced-up surroundings. Yet, one rarely sees the same painstaking care, promotion and popular pride in such cases as one sees in countries with more recent civilisations. Interest in history seems limited to disputing, re-interpreting, re-witing, and reclaiming it.
What if one had a time-machine (a concept popularised by H.G. Wells eponymous novella of 1895) to go back to the past, see things for oneself and determine the truth? Travelling back in time is assumed to be a matter of creative imagination, of fiction. Yet today we have something that does just that. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) helps look back, not just centuries or millennia, but billions of light years! Launched by the United States’ NASA in December 2021, JWST – with its massive, gold-plated telescope mirror of 6.5 metres diameter – is a sci-tech marvel. It collects infra-red light that enables us to look back some 13 billion years. Even if only vicariously, we are time-travelling and viewing the early days, practically at the birth of the universe!
Seeing for oneself by returning to the past may seem one way of ascertaining a truth. Yet, as wise philosophers have told us, truth is contextual and dependent on one’s perspective. A two-dimensional view may convince you that an object is round, whereas someone with a 3D view will insist it is cylindrical. If you add a time dimension, a person going back further will insist it is various mineral ores and not a shaped object. The JWST shows us formed stars and galaxies. As it looks further back in time, we see them being formed, and even further back may show only gases. Beyond that, we can only speculate!
Truth is, onion-like, multi-layered and each peeling may reveal a differing truth. As you keep peeling, as a seeker of a deeper truth, you may end up with the ultimate one: nothingness. As we peel back history and argue about what monument was built over a previous one, which group oppressed whom, this may be a philosophical perspective to keep in mind.
The focus on looking back could be a yearning for a real or imagined glorious past, or a desire for catharsis from past injustice and oppression. The past does beckon us; yet, the future interests us even more. There is deep concern about the times to come: what will they hold for me and my loved ones, we worry. Little wonder that astrologers, palmists, fortune-tellers and their ilk have long been around, and leaders are expected to be “visionaries”.
Stories around a predicted future are at the core of sci-fi. Many foretell a fraught time for humankind: alien invasions, destructive mutations, mega-disasters abound, though there is a happy ending in most cases. A few – like George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (a social-sci-fi novel, published in 1949), which drew from the then-prevalent reality ‒ warn us against a possible dystopian future (unfortunately, already a reality in some parts of the world). Stories of the coming times can serve as a beacon to a desirable future, or warn us of forthcoming dangers which we should guard against. Both serve an important purpose. There are also predictions based on scientific studies and on data or evidence-driven models, which urge us to act. Climate change is one example.
Many would wish we could travel back and forth in time. What if JWST were a “reversible” device: looking to the past from one end, and the future from the other? But ponder over whether you really want to know the future. More important, do we want to know and cope with the future, or to shape it?
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* Kiran Karnik loves to think in tongue-in-cheek ways, with no maliciousness or offence intended. At other times, he is a public policy analyst and author. His latest book is Decisive Decade: India 2030 Gazelle or Hippo (Rupa, 2021).
