Let’s talk abracadabra, let’s hallucinate,” I teased Subroto Bagchi, mastermind behind MindTree Consulting, India’s new kid on the knowledge block, workplace to some of the country’s best known IT talent. That was almost a month ago when Subroto came calling to Delhi. Bangalore had always fascinated me from the distance because I could never understand what those brilliant IIT types did out there, sitting in front of monitors, stretching themselves for hours, encrypting miles-long codes that would make the world open its Windows to, hey…a better tomorrow.
“Welcome to the trenches,” Subroto said before leaving for home. “Welcome to our world.” And finally, I was off to Bangalore last week in a one-of-its-kind experiment to, what else, but hallucinate on the creation of the universe. and figure out how far the Bangalore nerds could stretch their imagination. True to his word, Subroto had gathered around me half-a-dozen of his best minds, among them a metallurgist, an architect, an electrical engineer, a mechanical engineer and a computer scientist by training, to race their minds. Back to the Bible, I said. To Genesis 1.1: On Day 1 God created the Sun and the Moon and the stars. Now, let’s reboot. On Day 1 God created the computer chip instead. What happened since then?
“I’d rather imagine God created the human being first so that he could tell the computer what to do,” said one. “Wrong,” argued another, “one could always argue that God did create the computer chip to control the events, so that He would not end up controlling everything Himself.” “All that’s bullshit, God would have rather created the human being first, because the human body is a far more complex piece of machinery than the computer,” said the third. The fourth one came up with something novel: If you go deeper and deeper, it’s always the same pattern. If God created the computer, then the computer created man. And man being what he is, created another God.
Ha, ha, ha! So much for hallucination. We were getting nowhere. Until, of course, well into an hour of going round and round that a bright spark flew across the table. Yes, God created the computer chip, and everything fell in place. It was the Sun and the Moon and the stars. Then Earth. And life went on as usual following the natural laws of evolution. And then came man. One too many. Their minds inter-connected! Connected minds? So, your thoughts became your language. Man ceased to speak in multiple tongues. There was no limit to thinking. Just think of it, billions of years ago, the computer chip created connected minds where everybody hooked up to one another at the flash of a thought. So did man need to talk, did he need to read, to write? Did he need to love, to hate? Did he need to be happy, to be sad? Did he need to make war, make peace? Did he need the telephone, the computer, the internet, the satellite, the spaceship? Did man need to explore?
We were two hours into our brain game, and still going round in circles. At every thought of change, came several reasons why the more things changed, the more they remained the same. At the end we failed to travel beyond the reach of our common perceived knowledge. Because rationalisation crept in with every thought. Yes, man still needed to talk, to read, to write, to love, to hate, to be happy, to be sad, to make peace, to make war. Yes, he did need the computer and the satellite and the spaceship, though he could have done without the telephone or the Net. And yes, man still needed to explore. These nerds of the Bangalore variety are so stereotypical in their approach. They just can’t let their imaginations get past the accepted. I guess it’s the result of linear thinking. You are given a task and you complete it to the best of your knowledge, not to the best of where your imagination can make you fly. That’s reason, perhaps, you never heard of a Bangalore techie creating something as simple, yet pleasurable, as the emoticon.
On my flight back to Delhi, I reflected on the Bangalore experiment. What if I had asked a poet to hallucinate? Would he have imagined something different? I had to turn to Tagore for an answer: Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high/Where knowledge is free/Where the world has not broken up into fragments/By narrow domestic walls/Where words come out from the depth of truth/ Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection/Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way/Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit/Where the mind is led forward by thee/Into ever-widening thought and action/Into that heaven of freedom. My Father, let my country awake. I bet you’ll never have the Bangalore techie dream up the ultimate creation. Not until he becomes a poet, an artist, a maverick first. Blessed be the poet among us. Blessed be the soul that dreamt up the Bible. Amen!
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