Commentary/Varsha Bhosle
True Lies
It's that time of the year again. With not one garba aficionado
amongst us and the loudspeakers of Navratri blaring away happily,
we decided that the best way to drown out the besur din was to
have the video going full tilt. Unfortunately, since the job of
bringing home the tapes was entrusted to a non-SASIALIT type of
male ("As you know, the origin of the phrase 'rosy-fingered dawn'
lies in the Greek of Homer; it was a stock expression in his work,
both the Iliad and the Odyssey..."), all we were stuck with was old
sci-fi heaped upon new kung fu.
Still, it turned out to be a good thing: I realised that the key to deep
insight lies, of course, at the movies. The avalanche of aged Michael
Crichtons steered me to an Adrian-Mole-like mood which my pal, molecular
biologist Sunil Sreedharan, would have
been proud of. To wit: It's not just that truth is stranger than fiction,
but, truth is fiction entered through another gate...
It started with Steven Spielberg's 1993 slam-bang thriller
Jurassic Park, the basis of which is that scientists create real
dinosaurs by cloning dino-genes obtained from the blood found in a
mosquito preserved in an amber fossil. Hugely entertaining, but
the story doesn't bear close scrutiny, I had thought, that first
time around. However, two years later, a team of researchers from
Montana State University actually extracted DNA from the femur of
a 65-million-year-old skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus Rex, "the king
of tyrant lizards" we so loved to hate in the flick.
Apparently, the skeleton was so well-preserved that part of its bone marrow
remained unfossilised, thereby allowing the extraction of collagen -- which
item was able to indicate the levels of bacteria in Dino's dinner. Based on
this discovery, new theories suggested that the T-Rex was not an aggressive
predator at all, but lived off rotting carrion (nor would it have chased
jeeps). Nevertheless, how does it really matter? That creative people could
envision the scenario leading up to dino-cloning, is eloquent testimony to
the imaginative leaps of man. The corollary to which could be, scientists
are imaginative artists first, and lab geeks later. Otherwise, how does one
explain the Internet...?
The only interesting character in Jurassic Park (and, I suspect,
the one with whom the author, physician-turned-
novelist/scriptwriter/director Michael Crichton aka Father of the
Techno Thriller, most identified), was 'Dr Ian Malcolm' as played
by Jeff Goldblum. The actor does a decent turn as the hep, sexy
mathematician expert in the theory of Chaos, which character's
function in the film is to lounge about uttering vague
philosophical imprecations and being the mouthpiece for bioethics.
Chaos describes how small differences in natural systems create
unpredictable results: Midway through the film, Malcolm is
vindicated by the all-female gang of dinosaurs who learn to spawn
without the male species. (Hmmm... I wonder if that's such a
brilliant idea.)
The book combined two of Crichton's pet themes -- arrogance and
greed -- contrasted with the power of nature. Crichton said, "I
think if dinosaurs ever are cloned, it will be done by somebody
for entertainment. And that fit in with another thing that
interested me very much, which is the commercialisation of genetic
engineering -- which is a very serious problem and one that we are
still not facing..." No, Dolly wasn't born, then -- though
conceived, she may have been.
Thus, on the one hand we have the scientific community which
relentlessly, and sometimes irresponsibly, presses on with its
quest for understanding and altering the universe, and the
unfortunate by-products of such progress, like the H-bomb, nerve
gas, LSD et al, become money-spinners for the destructive element
of society. On the other hand are the artists -- those who dwell in
a world of their own making and who occasionally trespass so
prophetically into reality that it's downright eerie. If it's
possible to extract DNA from fossils, it's plausible that
biophysicists may attempt to clone a velociraptor, no? Who's to
say that the novel is just a jeremiad of an outraged idealist?
Authors are often the first to publicly raise the alarm on
scientific excesses: The sci-fi novel of H G Wells, The War Of The
Worlds (1898), combines political satire with warnings about the
dangers of scientific advancement, prophetic depictions of the
triumphs of technology, as well as the horrors of 20th century
warfare. Its 'Dr Clayton' surmises that the invading Martians have
no immunity to Earth's bacteria, which is what kills them in the
end, or, as its film adaptation relates, "it is the littlest
things that God in his wisdom had put upon the Earth that save
mankind." As for Wells's The Time Machine (1895), I've no doubt
that aproned gnomes are busily at work in some secret lab in the
US. (Yes, I fervently believe in the divine David Duchovny and The
X Files, too.)
The public at large can never be privy to the impetus which can
give birth to the true lies of writers: An innocuous item in a
science journal? An overheard snatch of conversation? The between-
the-lines at a press conference? It could be just about anything.
Like, I'm forever stumped by Robin Cook and his novel Coma, the
film based on which -- with scenes of such chill, spectral beauty --
is directed by our old friend Crichton. Did Cook cook up the story
from hearsay, or was his plot of vegetablised patients and organ-
snatching later emulated in Third World countries?
Oh yes, Life can imitate Art: Leonardo da Vinci, Renaissance
painter, sculptor, inventor and genius, drew up plans for a
submarine and for an aircraft which used the same principle of
flight as the helicopter. He anticipated many of the methods and
machinery of modern engineering -- and all this in the 15th century
when even the bicycle and Dilip Dear's pet object, the flush-
cistern, were nonexistent. Similarly, although Sherlock Holmes was
partly based on an eminent Edinburgh surgeon, Dr Joseph Bell, Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle's ingenious methods of deductive reasoning and
his emphasis on maintaining data on crime and toxins enriched
investigative techniques of the 19th century.
In the world of politics, George Orwell's condemnation of a
totalitarian society is expressed in his scathing satire on
Communism, Animal Farm (1945), wherein the domineering fraternity
of pigs is "more equal than the others." The brilliantly witty
allegorical fable is periodically brought to life in the land of
his birth... Yes, Jyoti Basu's West Bengal. On the other hand,
Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four (1949), which presents a terrifying
picture of life under the constant surveillance of "Big Brother",
is also being rejuvenated in the claustrophobically PC climate of
no-smoke/no-drink/no-pot/no-excess California....
Then, there's that buzz about American best-selling authors
exploited by the CIA and Pentagon: Sometimes, they are used to
whip up public opinion against a nation or group -- as in Crichton's
Rising Sun (1992), which is a frankly racist attack
on Japanese business practices in the US that drew storms of
criticism when published. At other times, novelists can be the
means to propagandise even the necessity for the stockpiling of
strategic weapons (Tom Clancy and his opus). Levered into creating
bogey-men of our political nightmares, Art is manipulated by
Life.
Moonraker or not? Sadly, it all ended when the
Berlin wall came tumbling down. Gorbachev has no inkling of the
mischief done to millions of readers. For, blatant Islamic
terrorism can never replace the subtle thrill of the Cold War:
Art is even cheated by Life.
The fantastic flights of writers are no different from the
hypotheses of theoretical physicists who use the esoteric quantum
mechanics as their springboard for spatial free-wheeling. Stephen
Hawking (suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), while
trapped in a chair, on Earth, and in Earth-time, propounds on the
Big Bang, which, according to cosmological theory, marks the origin
of the universe. He monographs on the collapsar, a 'black hole'
region in outer space with a gravitational field so intense that
no matter, not even light, can escape from it. First comes the
flight of fancy, only then can it be propped up by inscrutable
algebraic equations...
Why, then, is the imaginativeness of novelists and poets held in
less esteem? Their premises may not be quantumly divisible, but
they do have a more reliable and tangible source of psychological
profiles and case histories -- humankind. Just within the space of
50 years, the Big Bang has come to a whimper: Astronomers now
believe that the rate of expansion of the universe belies the
theory. However, even after the weary tread of centuries, the
words of William Shakespeare still ring just as true:
The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Or, as Dr Malcolm could well say after the catastrophe in Jurassic
Park:
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Then are dreamt of in your philosophy.
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