courtesy: http://timesofindia.com/
Samit BasuMillennia ago, a Vedic spaceship took off from India and colonized another planet. The Indians in it were perfectly happy: in order to minimize internal differences and language superiority squabbles and avoid the End of Days (the invention of Facebook), they'd abandoned language altogether, and used their highly advanced plastic surgery skills to give themselves perfectly sculpted bodies, which it made no sense to cover with clothes. Like all NRIs, they liked to come back to the homeland occasionally to see how poor conditions were and feel smug about their choices. The result of all this? PK is totally true, people.
Bad science? Yes. Bad science fiction? Definitely. I'm hoping to deliver the keynote address at the Indian Science Congress next year. We live in an era where even presumably well-educated adults have problems telling fact and fiction apart. That certainly explains the events at the recently concluded Indian Science Congress, which demonstrated that apart from inventing everything in the world thousands of years ago and then presumably losing these marvels while planet-hopping, undergoing elephant-head plastic surgery or tweeting in Sanskrit, Indians also lead the world in the production of bad science fiction authors.
Having been a bad science fiction author writing about vamans, rakshasas, vanars, vimanas and nuclear-powered bows for over a decade now, I have just realized my big mistake. I never thought the events in the books I wrote were true, which would have been the key to untold wealth, a ministerial berth, probably, and a permanent seat on the speaking roster of the Indian Science Congress — even in times when India's actually doing well in non-mythic science, with Mangalyaan and recent Nobel Prizes and whatever else. Science fiction, like most of literature, mythology, science, history and selfies, is essentially an attempt to use specific tools to find answers about big questions about the human condition: Who are we? Why are here? How do things work? But the goals of all of these fields are different, as are the tools they use. Sci-fi/fantasy, like mythology, folklore and fable, uses fantastic, larger-than-life devices, characters and objects, imaginary-scientific or magical, to inspire, understand and investigate humanity. Good science fiction and fantasy create alternate, whatif universes, create contexts and explanations for ways the worlds in them differ from ours, and use the resultant mixture to tell stories that, like all good stories, help readers understand who they are. But they're clear about one thing — the worlds they create are mirror universes, not this one.
Science friction