While cycling today saw an old man, overweight and slow crossing the road. He was blissfully unaware about the cars speeding towards him or the frantic gesticulations by the drivers inside the cars asking him to hurry.
Countless times, I have heard family and friends saying “Sau Saal Jiyega”(You will live a hundred years). "We were just thinking about you."
Sitting back, putting together these two disconnected events got me wondering about old age and the concept of time. It fried my mind for minutes. I had never thought of life so far ahead… But what IF?????
Imagine – Being a 120 year old, so old that all those older than you and your peers and many of the next generation would have been gone. One would be stuck with very old children (maybe) and more than middle aged grandchildren who would probably have…. Their grandchildren!!!!
Some great movies – ‘The Man from Earth’ and ‘Logan’ and ‘Hancock’ hit me on the face and forced me to think of immortality – living 500, 1000…10000 years.
What would one talk or ramble about (if one still could. I am imagining an ultra-healthy 120 year old)? What all changes would one see? How would this super old human being relate to others? How would one explain a bullock cart in an age of driverless flying cars? Explaining a ‘Trunk Call’ to one’s own children – the wait, the location of the phone booth in today’s seamlessly connected world itself seems to be so difficult.
Going back – What would be one’s conversation about one’s life? Would it be as boring as history books are to us? Would one feel guilty of living so long when all other near & dear ones are no more? Would one remember them at all? I can’t seem to remember what I ate last Tuesday for breakfast!!! If insects, whose life spans are equivalent to few human days, were to communicate to each other about the existing human life, how would they explain? They would hardly see a change in the humans they see every day before their life ends. Would they be thinking that humans are immortal.
The only common thing in all this is – TIME. We humans, with our intelligence, think Time is our creation. Probably, Yes. But this same concept seems to disappear in the realms of space.
My thoughts of Life and Time swings from the idea of a space travel to a star a Billion Light Years away to how old I would need to be to land on that star!!! Both unimaginable.
Keep wondering!!!
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