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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