I have always been fascinated by ancient history and civilizations and learning about the Indus Valley civilization in school and reading more about it afterwards always made me question historians as to why such a sophisticated and advance civilization wasn’t given as much exposure as ancient Egypt or ancient Greece to name a few.
Can you imagine, when the people in the west were living in caves, the Indus Valley dwellers had flushing toilets, in house bathrooms, international trade, public baths and regularly used weights and measures. These are some of the few things that are attributed to them and are still used in today’s modern world. A special mention should be given to their methods of weaving of cotton and silk. The dyeing methods were at that time long lasting, the colours remaining vibrant despite multiple washings. One can still find authentic artisans in this day and age who block print beautiful shawls and sheets in vivid maroon and indigo colours using the ancient methods. These fabrics when finished are traditionally called ajraks.
It is unfortunate that the history books in school just skim over dry facts of Mohenjo Daro and Harappa because the deeper one looks the more fascinating information is uncovered. Did you know that at the time when the Indus Valley had thriving cities the world had never heard of the domestic chicken? These fowl evolved when the black and red jungle fowl came together. The chickens were then domesticated and cultivated in poultry farms that were nearly the same as some of those still thriving in the subcontinent. Since cities like Kukkuṭārma (the city of chickens, the original name of Mohenjo Daro) traded with Greek, Egyptian, Sumerian and Persian traders to name a few, the chicken became a common household pet and source of protein as their popularity spread around the world. I didn’t read that in my textbooks!
Sounds fascinating doesn’t it. It made me think how wonderful it would be if we had a time machine that took us back to experience the evolution of such civilizations…to study the impact they had on the world and the future. This comes to a speculative question… Is time travel possible?
I like to think so because in my books, Maya’s Quest and the sequel Aarti’s Dilemma are intertwined with time travel, history and mythology. Although it isn’t as easy as my protagonists in the book to hop into a time machine and go back in time, we do know that clocks on airplanes and satellites have been known to travel at a different speed than those on Earth. If you come to think about it, we all travel in time! We travel one year in time between birthdays, for example. And we are all traveling in time at approximately the same speed: 1 second per second. We typically experience time at one second per second. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
But when we think of “time travel,” we are definitely thinking of traveling faster than 1 second per second. That would be in our opinion like something one would see in films or science fiction books. Could it be real? Maybe… or maybe not. And yet science says yes! It is possible.
A famous German born scientist named Albert Einstein came up with an idea 100 years ago about how time works. He called it his theory of relativity. In this theory he explains that time and space are linked together. He was also the one who calculated that our universe has a speed limit: nothing can travel faster than the speed of light (186,000 miles per second or 299,792,458 meters per second). Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Yes, time travel is indeed a real thing. But it’s not quite what you’ve probably seen in films and under definite conditions, it might be possible to experience time passing at a different rate than 1 second per second. Well… although in theory it might be possible, I don’t think one should buy tickets to ride a Tracy just yet. There are still a lot of glitches to work out before one can seriously think of visiting grandma when she was a young girl.
