Headlines

Memory tag: The wedding of William and Kate, the beatification of Pope John Paul and the death of Osama Bin Laaden, breaking news in quick succession in 2011.

Lines on palms or foreheads are thought to be leads to our future, the biometric version of destiny’s writ. Does it have any connection with the breaking news that makes headlines in the print and electronic media? The end of April-beginning of May, saw three huge stories break in quick succession. The wedding of Prince William and Kate, the beatification of Pope John Paul and the death of Osama Bin Laaden. Three events completely disconnected except perhaps for their media worthiness and their proximity in time. Yet their appeal probably lay in the fact that each touched the very human cords of love, faith and retribution. Or should we dismiss them in the words of the Japanese poet Matsuo Basho

“Samurai talk-
tang
of horse radish.”

It would be unfair to dismiss them so easily. Each in its own sphere had a significance beyond its day of occurrence. For each event was either part of an idea or gave rise to an idea that did not die when the sun went down on that day. Then do ideas generate lines of destiny , unique, individual , marked by the stamp of the creator ? Once an idea is broadcast, it marks the individuals that subscribe to it. No one can ever estimate the actual number of subscribers to an idea or of its subsequent metamorphosis. And therefore any creator is as effective as its creation and this makes the difference between superficial and deep lines, some call destiny, that some believe are preordained down the ages.

Any moment in time has its strange bedfellows and this is especially true of adversity. During the second World War, the year 1945 marked the award of the Nobel prize for Penicillin and the dropping of the atom bomb on Nagasaki and Hiroshima among other events. Posters would hail penicillin as the saviour that actually saved 45,000 lives in the aftermath of the Second World War. Contrast that with the atom bomb, which Oppenheimer apparently greeted with words from the Gita ‘I am the death…destroyer of worlds'...was he being prophetic about its overkill? Well, in its first outing it killed 1, 50, 000 to 2, 50, 000 in Japan. 66 years later, the fear of nuclear energy lives again in Fukushima, once again in Japan.

Headlines can be misleading too. Lamarck, the biologist is synonymous with the not so convincing example of evolution of short necked giraffes sticking their necks out till they became the long necked variety of today. The fact he started the then non-existent branch of Zoology called Invertebrates, rearranged parts of Linnaeus’s classification and had the guts to propose evolution in unequivocal terms is never given the same space. While his body lay mouldering in an umarked grave, his ideas went marching almost verbatim into modern textbooks of taxonomy and Zoology and are even gaining recognition in 21st century genetics.

The real headlines are therefore, the ability to create ideas. They mark the true destiny of the human race. For without this cascade of ideas, the 2% difference in the human vs. chimpanzee genome would never have made headlines (pun intended).

To quote from Basho again,
“Do not forget the plum
blooming
in the thicket.”