(As already said, I have much time on my hands now-a-days so I will continue with my earlier posts. As before please go thru the earlier posts in this series to get the context and glossary)
After Niharika went to “office”, I started feeling lonely and anxious to know more about the world now. I searched for a magazine or newspaper but darn everything was on the network. Later I learnt they have stopped publishing not only newspapers but everything. Why? Because it became illegal to cut a tree (law decree of 2067) and without trees there won’t be any paper. “Good for the environment”, I thought, “But damn them for not publishing anything for a blast from the past like me.”
All the libraries are virtual and are maintained by Google wherein you can read books which are all digitised and well catalogued. Just pay a small fee annually and you can read any book. Cool, right? But not for me, I don’t have the ID remmember.
So, I went to the museum (because it was the only place you didn’t have to have ur ID or money to go, it was free!!) to read some ancient books. Books are only available at museums and not at libraries. Talk about advance of civilisation, huh. Anyways i got a history book titled “Modern History of Man, Vth edition”. It was very old, being published last in 2066, in fact being one of the last books to be published.
What I read was not about wars and annihilation of the world prophesised by the 2008 gossip columnists (after 2008 there were a total of 52 wars fought, most of them in the African and Middle East asian countries to contain the ruthless rebel forces) but about development, tremendous development. The time between 2015 and 2064 was an era of constant inventions and innovations wherein man grew from just being a social animal to an advanced being which understood his balance with nature.
On the economic front there was a great upheavel in 2055, when all the major corporations restructured or merged to keep up with the times. The major winners were the network providers who now amongst themselves almost monopolise the way humans interact with each other and information is shared. All type of commerce is on the network. You need something, you just have to think about it and have necessary points (the currency of the day) in ur virtual bank account. Wow!!
People have also maintained a balance with nature and their evolution. They consiously try to restrain themselves from the misuse the resources(may be because they have no other choice and are paying for the misadventures of their forefathers). I was impressed by our children.
I took almost four hours to read the whole book. Bless me, it was not that thick for a history book. Maybe they finally understood that its not in the volume of the book but the amount of data it contains that help the child to grow. I was very happy till the time I learnt that it was a book for the class V students. Damn NCERT!!
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