Looking up an old diary

It seems just the other day that I was holidaying in the Kumaon hills with my daughter – December 2017, actually – and already seven months of the new year are gone. Time doesn’t fly, it zooms!

Which is why one day in my late twenties I decided to begin a diary to write down, year-wise, all the things worth remembering, good and bad, happy and sad, that have happened to me. I started with 1969, the year I first went to school, and got a lot of stuff down immediately, because my memory was still sharp and clear then. Thank God I did, because now, glancing through that diary a quarter century later, I realize I probably wouldn’t have been able to recall all those events in correct chronological order today even if I could remember them at all, and I would have been poorer for it. I have annually updated that diary without fail ever since, right down to end-2017, and while it has become a pretty long list, I also wonder that I didn’t care to jot down so many things which apparently seemed very important when they happened, and I was right, they weren’t really important after all, not in retrospect. Life is like that. Someone who has been big and important, the way society understands those words, realizes in the dusk of his life that he hasn’t done much after all, while history says that some son of a carpenter who preached a better kind of life to a bunch of illiterate poor shepherds changed the world forever. Meanwhile a great scientist said towards the end of his life that if he had a chance to live it all over again he would have collected more butterflies… why does wisdom come to us too late for us to use it?

As one looks backwards, so does one feel a strange curiosity to look ahead. How different is the world going to be by the time I am a really old man – say twenty five years from now? A world torn apart by war and pestilence and famine again, and ruled in patches by tyrants? A universal basic income in place everywhere, and robot servants in every house, and only computer-driven cars allowed on the roads, and agriculture and fossil fuels slowly becoming obsolete, cleaning up the air and greening the land and freeing up hundreds of millions of acres for human habitation and wildlife? Marriages of the traditional type becoming history too?  Education increasingly happening at home via the internet, conducted only by those who really can and want to, as it used to be in the distant past? Colonies sprouting on the moon and Mars? Will it be nearly unrecognisable from today’s vantage point, or will it be plus ça change, plus ç’est la même chose? Those interested in how I have been wondering about this sort of thing for ages can look up my old post titled How my world has changed. Been some time since I wrote that, too!