TIME TRAVEL

KIRAN’S KONTRARIAN KORNER

- Kiran Karnik

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.

A BIG MARKET FOR THE PAST

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.