From Asoka to Bill Gates

Two thousand years are a small, though well-recorded, fraction of the 15 billion years of Earth's existence. CVG takes a walk through the ages.

JANUARY 1, 2000 A.D. Is it a privilege to be around on this date just because we are stepping into another century - notwithstanding the impatient reminders that the next century arrives only a year later? 2000 A.D. does indeed look very tidy with the three orbs flanking the two of the new year. They could almost make you hear the flapping wings of the Bird of Time. But two thousand years are an infinitesimally small, though a very well-recorded, fraction of the 15 billion years which have fled since Planet Earth was hurled off into space as a piece of debris by the sun. The 2000 years were given their digital identity by the Gregorian calendar,often wrongly spoken of as the "Christian" calendar, and this perpetuated the belief that it began its run from the birth of Jesus Christ.

Jesus was born on December 25, 6 B.C. and it is celebrated as the Christmas day. The Gregorian calendar goes back to not less than six centuries and precedes the Roman Republican calendar introduced by Tarquinius Priscuz, fifth king of Rome (619-579 B.C.). In 1572, Pope Gregory III issued a Papal Bull drawn up by the Jesuit astronomer, Christopher Clavius, who laid down the length of the year at 365 days. The addition of an extra day for the "leap year" was made in 46 B.C. when the Gregorian Calendar was re-established as the Julian Calendar. Jesus died on the Cross in 36 A.D. and Easter Sunday commemorates his resurrection.

The Bird of Time flying in eternity has seen the rise and fall of empires along with the kings and tyrants. It chirped merrily when geniuses and saints came on the scene and suffered the scoundrels who strode on the world stage. The song it has sung for millions of years lays out for me only the inviting moments after the sun's rim has dipped and the stars rush out to huddle together under the shadows of the night and not the misty dawns or the blazing noons of the gone centuries. The battering which the long flight has taken before its touchdown at 2000 A.D. calls for a dropping of the imagery and a parting from the Bird of Time. The restriction of the survey to the 2000 years of the Gregorian Calendar or the "Christian era" could be rebuffed by Time for being so constricted.

When Christ felt sorry for the men who nailed him to the Cross, because they did not know what they were doing, he might have also thought that had he arrived a few centuries earlier - in the much gentler, wiser world and times of Confucius and Lao Tse, the Buddha and Mahavira - history would have been different. Socrates, Plato, Alexander, Chandragupta Maurya and Ashoka basked in bright sunshine while the Romans and the Anglo-Saxons were wallowing in the dark ages. But the whirling wheel of time made it up to Europe and England who win their empires in Asia whichbroke up half a century ago.

The centuries separating President Clinton from Hiawatha (1450 A.D.)in the U.S. belong to the same country, with the blond one in the White House pushed away by five centuries from the legendary chief of the Onondaga tribe of North American Indians blazing in angry red recorded in H.W.Longfellow's long poem. Pocahontas, also an American Indian (1617) who helped maintain peace between the English colonists and native American Indians by befriending the settlers, was also from the same country which threw up three centuries later Marilyn Monroe, another queen from Hollywood. The American Indians have a much longer history dating back to the Maya civilisation (613 B.C.) of Central America and the cruel rule of the Aztecs before it was brought down by the famous Spaniard Cortes in the early 16th Century. When white and red America fought each other, William Frederick Cody (1840- 1917), better known as Buffalo Bill, waged 16 wars and was celebrated for his scalping of Yellow Hair, the American Indian warrior and became the Wild West hero of Hollywood. The encounters of white and red America were a preoccupation for James Fenimore Cooper (1784-1851) in his Leatherstocking tales about the American "frontier" and a lingering image he has left is the smell of the "red meat". The sordid history of slave trade, wholly devoid of heroism, ushered in the black America of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin which still lives in the sorrow and pain left by the assasination of Martin Luther King. The dabbing of the American canvas with the one million Indian immigrants makes the continent on the other shore of the Atlantic a neo-classic - White, Red, Black and Indian American Nights.

Europe of the Middle Ages, also known as the Dark Ages, fits with greater aptness into the twilight slipping into the shades of night where the past is resting. Even if it was bright sunlight, when women condemned as withches in medieaval Europe - including Joan of Arc - were burnt at the stakes, it was a terror of the night of the long knives.

Charlemagne, proclaimed by the Pope as the Holy Roman Emperor around the ninth Century, the Saracens and Turks, who include Emperor Haroun-al-Rashid, made up a constellation which did not exactly bathe Europe or Asia Minor in light and left it in recurring turmoil. Canute of unregenerate England stays in the night of the dim-witted as the king who ordered waves to roll back.

It is going to be a very different millenium and Bill Gates and his ilk have already taken us to another dimension through the Internet . It is not the chilling dreaded new dark age dreamed of by George Orwell in his Nineteen Eighty-Four when he inducted a newspeak like doubleplusungood, duckspeak, unperson with the day itself having to accommodate an extra hour with the clock striking thirteen right at the beginning of the novel. But the millenium has already arrived with its own newspeak of which Y2K abbreviating 2000 A.D. is just a sample of the speech and language at other levels of comprehension. Bits, bytes, and netscape are just a few of the new entries in the ever expanding electronic dictionary. The "navigator" and "explorer" of its "hyper deck mark up language" (hdml) area long way from the edicts of Asoka sculpted in Prakrit script and have taken us to an expanding electronic world. The "surfing" we now do is far removed from waves spliced by alluring Helens in bikinis mounted on racing rafts but on computer terminals mocking at us by denying the "servers" when we mess up.

The world of Bill Gates has its "viruses" and "hackers" and they are on the prowl to break into and wreck computer fortresses. Rarefied electronics compresses days, weeks and months into minutes and hours. It is a time dilation - again of a different kind from what Einstein said would happen if and when we could travel at the speed of light. Whole libraries housed in skyscapers go into computer discs and can be retrieved as and when we need them. If we are clever enough, we could see to it that planet Earth becomes roomier than we could have ever thought of.

If this is the Brave New World that awaits us in the next millenium - not exactly the one Aldous Huxley dreamt of half a century ago - what should we do with such super-electronics with great power? Should it stay only in the drawing rooms of the privileged classes? Should we not press its infinite versatility into the service of the other half sunk in illiteracy and poverty? If the chemistry that has made electronics all powerful and compressed the giant frames of a not very distant past into chips, the test to which the incoming millenium will put it will be the deployment of its bits, bytes and servers to rid the planet Earth of its poverty.

As if anticipating the charge that the happenings in cyberspace could be of interest only to the world's well-to-do, Bill Gates has recently said that he would help the world's poor to join the Internet.

The glittering world of the well-to-do will not stay so very deceptively sanitised and antiseptic if the other half, wallowing in povery and squalor, decides to break out. It will definitely do so when its suppressed fury over the inequities it has suffered ed so long explodes unless the science and technology of Bill Gates acts much faster than he intends to.

He, along with the rest of us, would certainly benefit from a reading of the edicts of Asoka and putting them on the computer screens.

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Section  : Features
Previous : Mapping the millennium: Understanding
           consciousness
Next     : Mapping the millennium: Difficult times for
           individuality