Remember, Remember

This week began with a strange 25-hour day, one of those quirky habits of civilisation to adjust where they sit on the scale of time in order to have the Sun shining by the time they get up. On Nov 3rd, when the clocks struck 3:00 a.m. in this country, time was kidnapped, put into a bag, rolled back an hour and then released. So we lived that hour twice.

Romantics and lofty-eyed philosophers would observe this strange phenomenon through various ways. We all got to sleep an hour longer that night. It did not feel strange on Monday to get up to go to work while the sky was still dark. That bewitching hour must have provided the perfect alibi to sharp criminals for committing the perfect crime. Try proving a crime committed at 2:45 a.m. when the accused was actually sleeping at home at 2:45 a.m. One got even more distant from the eastern hemisphere without having to lift a foot. Through that simple act of turning the clocks back once a year, the grey cells up here have to be realigned like grumpy school-goers on a winter morning.

But the promise of the week was not in that mystical hour, but in the hour that came three days later at the stroke of midnight this morning when Mr. Barack Obama took centre-stage at Grant Park in Chicago and breathed in the colossal collective sigh of relief and ecstasy that millions of people around him and elsewhere in the world were having. That moment marks a point of inflexion in the historical graph of the world order, because from now on the flaky, doubtful trigger of cynicism known as ‘ambition without inhibition’ regains its place amongst the collective psyche of both the developed and the developing worlds that co-exist. Whether Mr. Obama turns out to be the beacon that he promises to be will be something that this novel experiment will unfold over the next four years. But this has given a rudder to the American people, and by association, the majority of the world population, to look up and not down.

This momentous event has sadly eclipsed the grave news of the death of one of science fiction's most foresighted and useful pioneer - Mr. Michael Crichton. He died yesterday at the age of 66 after having waged a valiant battle against cancer which he hid from the public eye. The man who authored Jurassic Park, The Lost World, The Andromeda Strain, Timeline, Sphere, Disclosure, The Great Train Robbery and many other fascinating books that marked my bookshelf over the years, is now no more. It's an irrecoverable loss for the literary world, Hollywood and fiction aficionados like me and many of my friends.

With the arrival of a new world leader and the departure of an icon of imagination, is it strange or a sheer coincidence, that today – Nov 5th – is Guy Fawkes Day - the Day of Treason?

But I cannot resist the tickling temptation to salute both by twisting the timeless rhyme of Guy Fawkes Day to suit the day:

Remember, remember
The Fifth of November
When hope wiped your foggy lenses
And a vision shattered all the fences
The world clapped with whelmed senses
And Change ruled all the tenses

Remember, remember
The Fourth of November
A seer of fantasy heaved his last
Preying on Time with a Jurassic past
On the seas of wonder he raised his mast
Tomorrow being his favourite cast

So Remember, remember
This week of November
The Gunpowder of Reason in History’s Plot
I can think of no reason
Why The Gunpowder of Reason
Should ever be forgot

And yes – now I know why I had an extra blissful hour of sleep on 3rd Nov when the clocks changed. The din of the cheering masses through Manhattan all through the night of 5th Nov made up for it.