“Any sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from magic” – Arthur C. Clarke
The scream pierced the Trivandrum night. He was holding this chest and screaming. His grandfather, a medicine man, had
bequeathed him that ancient chest. The chest was called “Chest Z,” because right
from ancient times people in Travancore were using English alphabets to denote variables and
unknown parameters. Nobody knew what was inside the chest and the old man never
gave a hint. He was in the attic holding Chest Z within seconds of his grandpa croaking,
trying hard to open it. Nothing worked. He was going crazy screaming, when suddenly,
another old man, probably a relative he didn’t know existed, appeared near him
and told him the secret behind the chest.
The chest is locked with a magic hymn – a hymn
that is made up of seven farts of a dodo bird in varying frequencies. Not only
that, there is a secret sound in between, which certain trusted sources have
said, is the wet fart of a gastric brooding frog.
“What the #$%&?! Where do I get these
creatures and their farts? Who told you this?” he began panicking. The old man
smiled and said, “There are books by NASA which cover this in detail, but they
have kept it a secret. They stole from us, y’know. You have heard of Alibaba and
the open sesame cave thingy, right?”
He nods.
“Same technology. Where do you think they
got that from? Us!! Where do you think they got the knowledge to develop this voice recognition
software and all?”
“That’s all OK, but where can I find this
dodo and the brooding frog,” he wondered, but the old man had disappeared.
He had an idea. He flipped out his
smartphone, which works like magic. You open up this thing called Google and
type in “dodo bird” and you get all the information you need on dodo. How does
it work? It’s f$%&ing magic. You can even say “brooding frog” and this nice-sounding
lady will tell you everything about the frog in English.
And the information was shocking. Both the
dodo bird and the stupid frog are extinct.
The old man mysteriously appeared again and
told him, “Don’t open the chest. It will destroy everything here” and
disappeared.
Possible, he thought, the f#$%ing thing is
filled with farts. Must be toxic by now. Scream....
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Are we in frikkin 21st century
or what?
I sometimes sit and brood and some people think
that I’m thinking deep philosophical thoughts. They’re right. I have questions
all the time. “Do frogs fart?” was one such thought. Luckily for me, Google God
gives me all the answers I ever need. It is magic.
Apart from the Google God, I have a thing
for gods who protect their own asses. You see it quite often in the aftermath
of a natural disaster. A god figurine that was left untouched by an earthquake,
or a place of worship that survived a tsunami when all the blooming worshippers
living around it were washed away, or a tsunami that bypassed the god and destroyed
everything a few kilometres away. These are the gods I love. Parochial, territorial and
selfish. Just like us.
Anyway, get ready to be destroyed, because
the Supreme Court wants Chest Z…no Vault B of the Padmanabha Swamy temple opened.
The court probably thinks it is a bar in a city, for which it gave permission to open.
The question I asked in this post on Devaprasnam from 2011 still stands.
Is the lord going to destroy Trivandrum? Or, could it be the area under the erstwhile Travancore kingdom (parts of which the lord anyway ignored when the
tsunami came) or is it going to be Akhand Faarath that is going to be destroyed
if the Supreme Court order is carried out? Scary!
