Looking for my Parallel Universe!

The Quantum Theory is something that technical, scientific and any-big-term-phobic ‘me’ would generally stay miles away from. Heck, I don’t even know if it is more concerned with science or technology or both. But I’ll tell you what my modest ‘big-on-advice-n-little-on-information’ brain has understood of it through a lesson I teach in Class 11^th, through the mind-blastingly awesome flick ‘Source Code’ and through my discussions about it with a dear friend.

It is an amazing theory that implies parallel universes could exist simultaneously along with our own, having their own history, events and often a completely poles apart turn of reality as compared to the one that has materialised in the otherwise normal world, as we know it. The ever eternal debate between reality and what we deem as real!

What is reality? Something that we are experiencing as of now or is this, the big, fat dream that would burst someday like a bubble and we would wake up to a different scenario?

I’ll first share with you the gist of this chapter I teach to Class 11^th students and that evokes the maximum number of yawns and protests from most of the slackers. So if you yawn in between don’t you dare open your mouth for anything besides a mesmerized gape, we’ll know where you stand!

It is the story of a History professor/writer/lecturer who one day wakes up to find himself in a train that is heading from Pune to Bombay. There are some Anglo-Indians on board and the train bears the symbol of the East India Company. Flabbergasted, he first presupposes that he has somehow travelled back in time, but it is not so. He is in the same time zone and era but in a world that is unfamiliar to him. Upon a little investigative stunt, he finds out that this is a different India, in contrast to the one as we know. Here we have not been ruled by the Britishers for a hundred years and are instead self reliant and extremely progressive. Whatever pocketful of English influence is there on the Bombay soil, it is in way of trading and entrepreneurship.

He goes to the central library to search for the turning point of the events and from where had history become different in this world to our own. Upon digging his self written history books, he finally converges it all to The Battle of Plassey where Vishwas Rao, the Maratha ruler missed the English bullet by a fraction of a hair, leading to the subsequent morale boost of his army and victory against the English in the 1800’s. The British influence thereafter was reduced and Indian Marathas ruled the nation for half a century before it became democratic.

While OUR History reveals that Vishwas Rao was killed by the British army that eventually led to an irreversible expansion of the English empire, whereby they ruled us for the next century! The professor absent-mindedly keeps the note of the information in his pocket, moves out and gets embroiled in an argument with an angry crowd, beaten up to the point of becoming subconscious and wakes up again to find himself on his bed in the world that he calls his own.

He is then explained to that since the last two days he was in coma, after a collision with a truck and the near death experience-which he realizes may have somehow made it possible for him to make that transition. However, the professor has evidence of that note in his pocket to prove to the detractors that they are wrong and what he was relating was not his insane imagination or wishful thinking.

 

The movie ‘Source Code’ also revolves around a similar web whereby one person travels through time and space to find himself in a body unknown to him, to save the world from a potential bomb threat and thereby able to create different realities by going back and forth in time for eight minutes on each round. Sounds complicated? Read the story here.

                         

Is that not an amazing leeway?

The assumption that varied realities exist in the universe where different histories I never thought I could use this term in plurals are being made based on a turn of events or diverse decisions that might have been taken. If I put my own life at this parameter it makes me dizzy to just imagine the possibilities.

Forgetting the global potential, it makes me wonder if there is another world, where I may be living a different life based on some road less travelled that I decided to sojourn on. There could be a world where I may not be married but running my own media channel, as was craved by me some fifteen years ago when I stepped out of the threshold of school. Selfish na, you think....But that was the first crossroad that I had stood on, debating and churning within till I finally gave in to family pressures. And many a times I am confounded by the 'what if?' that could have transpired there.

 

How amazing if we could peer into these different worlds as though into crystal balls and then pick and choose which alternative best suits our disposition and perhaps live there happily ever after. It is even more awesome than the supposition of visiting our future through some time machine because that cannot be altered while here we get options. And I have yet to find a human being who dislikes the idea of options for anything and everything!

“There is no one reality. Each of us lives in a separate universe. That's not speaking metaphorically. This is the hypothesis of the stark nature of reality suggested by recent developments in quantum physics. Reality in a dynamic universe is non-objective. Consciousness is the only reality.”-says M.R. Frank, from the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada.

I find myself wondering at the concept of multiple realities. How do parallel universes connect? What are the exact processes by which mind interacts with matter at the quantum level? Would we ever be able to travel through time, space and realities like this? And would a technically-duh me ever be able to comprehend fully, leave alone use this scientific break-through, if ever achieved in our history? The universe that we live in has such a fascinating nature and there is after all something more complex than the brain...or is it really the brain’s complexity again, after all?

My Understanding of Women and Men!

•    A woman will not expect a man to impress her, but she expects him to try.

•  Women fantasize more than men.

• A woman does not relate to why his palm sized techy gadget should cost a world but expects him to understand that one single pea sized diamond is worth it.

•  A woman wants you to tell the truth whenever she says, “Tell me honestly” and later wishes she had not asked you in the first place.

• She may spend her better years professing how she wants X-Y-Z qualities in her man and also proudly declare in the same breath how she always falls for the opposite.

• She knows there is no ‘happily ever after’ but she pines forever for the Prince Charming to come along.

• A woman expects a man to share all his work tensions with her but does not expect him to expect her to remember about it when questioned later.

•  Most women are more in love with the idea of being in love than a person.

• A woman may speak for hours and then end by saying, “I somehow find it difficult to express what I really feel.”

• You would hear this more often coming from a woman’s mouth than a man’s, “Something is missing in my life/I don’t feel good inside today but don’t ask me why” when she would bloody well know what and why.

•  Women would like you to open doors of restaurants for her and pull the chair before they rest their cute butts on it; but they may throw a tantrum of equality and accusations of biases when you say, “It is not a woman’s job.”

• When they say “I am in a bad mood and want to be left alone”, they actually want your company the most.

• Most women can handle alcohol, men and women better than most men.

• A woman knows that her man may not have the best of voices but she loves to have him use it to sing for her.

• The speed with which a woman says "Nothing" when asked "What's wrong?" is inversely proportional to the shitstorm that's coming. 

• She dresses less for herself and more for others.

• Women use their smiles to get away with ANYthing.

• When she is in her teens the older men are always more appealing and when she is not, the youngsters are suddenly so bloody hot.

• Women are of three kinds: high maintenance, low maintenance and those who think they are low maintenance but are actually high maintenance*thank you Billy Crytsal for this superbly quotable quote*

• Women may age in their bodies but never in their minds.

Now the man’s point of view:

• A man knows his wife would never agree to a threesome; but he believes that miracles do happen.

• He would expect the woman to understand if he had a fling; but he wants her to understand not to expect the same from him.

• Men always like options.

• Men have better traffic sense but poorer sixth sense.

•  A man may want to bed a woman but not wed her and the one he weds is not always the one he beds.

• Watching television is the greatest stress buster and porn is god's gift to mankind.

• A man may crib about all those woman’s magazines that crowd the washroom space; but in his private enthroning on the pot, these become his philosophers, friends and guides .

•   Men are better flirts than women.

• A man may grin big time when he elucidates about his skills in bed to his guy friends; but he would frown big time about his woman doing the same to her guy friends.

• A man would not mind ogling at other women but gets all ‘saala, kutta-kamina’ when someone eyes his.

• He would mock at gatherings about how women love to gossip; but after the party, he would corner his woman like in an interrogation about who rules the gossip-vines and how.

• A man would not really talk to his woman on the phone while in the work space; but when she stops calling on him there, he would wonder what is wrong.  

•  For a man, some sex is good, more is better and too much is just about right.

• A man would crave for a woman till she is a chase and when she ceases to be one, he goes in a haze. Hard to get are always harder to forget.

• Men get better with age*don't ask me in what*.

• A man loves compliments just as much as a woman does, if not more.

• For a man, the relationship is on the rocks only when the sex decreases.

• Most men actually talk more than women, contrary to the popular myth and listen lesser, as is an established age-old fact.

• Men use alcohol as a reason and justification for making passes. They always test the waters before wadding in.

That’s about it from three decades of dealing with both the sexes, in different measures of course! Happy Gender Dealing!:-)