Friday, September 17, 2010

Etched in Time

A thing of beauty lasts forever. In the last few months, In the last few months I have felt this saying literally come to life.My last few months have been embedded travels to diverse historic places.

A visit to these fascinating places and timeless artefacts brought a strange thought to my mind – We visit these historic artefacts in our contemporart times and marvel  at the ancient society which once thrived n these lands. We wonder what was the dream which  possessed these people so as to produce generation-surpassing monuments.
However we should relaize that at some point in the past  commonplace mortals would have toiled to put in place these immortal monumnets.Little would have a stone carver , toiling under the sun thousands of  years ago chiselling away at the stones in order to earn his/her daily meal ,  imagined that an ordinary worthless stone would, a thousand years from now be an object of wonder and amazement  for the yet to be born generations.

For instance – have a look at the snapshot of the Halebedu Temple walls – a temple constructed around the 12th AD by the Hoysala dynasty. The temple passed to us the architectural acumen of a long past generation. The bodies of the thousands of people who made this temple have long been turned to dust but their efforts have been etched in time forever.Th eof the Hoysala dynasty drew a die but the stone temples stood the test of time,

Till now we have discussed about the past, now let’s look into the future. Imagine about 1000-2000 years from now (assuming the earth and life does not collapse before that ) when our generations would also have become a thing of the past and new generations would discover some of the objects and artefacts of  our times – what would they interpret of us ?

A lot of these interpretations might also depend on what things the future generation find?

Maybe one of our countless sky scraper might survive the test of time and still be erect in the time of the new coing generation.This tall building  might make them awe in delight – “How could the older generation make such tall precise buildings when they did not have the developed quantum tools (soemwhat just as we say now  - How the ancient peopel moved such big stones to make the massive temples without having the developed electric and mechanical tools).

Our countless weapons might make the new generation wonder why we had so many weapons which could destroy the earth multiple times. Was it because we were fighting with other planets?  The new generation would wonder how we managed to interact with extra territorial life with our limited mechanical physics (just like we wonder how did the old cultures already knew the secrets which modern physics is unravelling today)

The new generation might get hold of the facebook wall data of one of us ,see 1400 people in the friends list and imagine that they have found something related to a past  influential king / leader who guided people with his/her words (or rather) scraps of wisdom. The last scrap on these walls  might be analyzed by the new generation as a clue to understand how the old  generation perished.

Only time will tell what the future generations would interpret of us. But we would no longer be there to listen.
Only our artefacts would speak of our times,
Only our artefacts would keep us etched in the coming times,

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