17 January 2009


















I'm pretty sure i won't be time-traveling ... atleast in this life of mine ... and i don't even believe that i would be reborn again ... so in essence, i won't be time-traveling. Yet, the science of time travel is so fantastic ... so convincing ... and yet so bewildering ... that it blows you off totally! I was probably introduced to time travel by H G Well's novella 'The Time Machine'. It was one of those times ... i was young (i'm young now too ... only thing was, i was much much younger then) ... i was very impressionable ... and be it the Terminator series, or Back to the Future trilogy ... time travel was what i dwelt on.

My interests moved onto more saner topics like double murder mysteries ... genetic modifications leading to end of the world ... artificial intelligence taking over humans, and so on. Thankfully, or woefully, my cousin brother introduced me to 'Donnie Darko' ... and his journeys across time ... and lo and behold ... i was traveling again!

The argument i continuously have with my friends is something over the existence of fate ... destiny ... or whatever you name it ... i don't think it exists. I base my future on what i do today ... in essence, i control my future by altering the present. But what if you say, i was destined to make whatever choice i made? If i changed my choice, you can still say i was destined to make a change in my choice! Its simply an irrefutable argument. Donnie Darko deals with fate ... its said that every human being follows set patterns ... whatever he does during his existence is according to that pattern ... any changes he makes is still a part of that grand plan. But does it feel good to know that you hardly have any control over your life?

And then there's the paradox of time travel. The endless loop you put yourself in if you attempt to travel in time. If you go back in time and kill your mother before you are conceived, you think you have brought about a change in the pattern. But if you would not be born, you would also not travel back in time, and hence not kill your mother ... which means you will be born and will travel back into the past to kill your mother ... ad infinitum!

Donnie Darko is really a complicated movie ... the little you understand is not by watching the movie but by reading about it. The movie bombed at the box office but the amount of discussions it has given birth to is astounding.

There are many things that can be explained using the time-travel concept. Take, for example, the aspect of rebirths. Rebirths remember their past life ... it is said ... only because they existed in another universe ... a parallel universe if you may call it ... because they somehow managed to travel across the time barrier ... and when the time was reset and they took birth again ... they remembered certain events ... certain events that happened in the parallel universe. Sounds ludicrous? Anything beyond comprehension sounds stupid ... its man's way of seeing it ... that under our limitations ... we define what is Science and what is stupid. Something like believing that the sky should end somewhere ... its very unconvincing that the sky stretches across endlessly above ... there has to be an end somewhere ... that's our limitation ... what if there never was an end? Why do aliens always have to have eyes, limbs and a structure? What if they were just a spreading mass of gas? Why do we think aliens have to exist in the first place ... what if only the earth harbors life? Despite our limitations ... man's imagination stretches beyond infinitely ... that's where time-travel took birth ... !

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