Raghu still remembered watching the shining gigantic metallic bird landing down with the symbol of proletariat revolution shining in mighty red. So they could very well go inside and watch the planes land and take off. Those were days of less threats and lesser security. He had made his pilgrimage to USSR at a very young age for a chess tournament. He was a member of the party, a senior member, and a secretary of PPASMP. Basu was a student of ecology at the Pondicherry Environmental Studies Institute. ‘Get up …you lazy comrade… Revolution has arrived’ Raghu woke up to see that they had arrived at the airport. Now Sergi himself would come and deliver a lecture in Pondicherry and he would be accompanying him. The chapter explained that this phenomenon, unique to USSR, removed the dichotomy one finds in the US – the inevitable divide between bourgeois idealist philosophy and progress of physical sciences that existed in capitalist societies like US. Then there was a separate chapter on how in USSR, dialectical materialism had been an abiding guiding light for not only every physical science but also new synthetic disciplines like cybernetics. Every chapter in the beginning had an opt quotation from either ‘Dialectics of Nature’ of Friedrich Engels or Lenin’s ‘Materialism and Empirio-Criticism’. Raghu had savoured the book thoroughly, every page of it - not just for the lucid explanation of the subject matter. His book ‘Soviet Cybernetics’ published by, the Mir publishers Moscow, was one of the few books on cybernetics then available in India. He was the cyberneticist from Soviet Union. Sergi Leonski the cyberneticist from Soviet Union was coming to give a lecture. A seminar on the scientific progress achieved by Soviet Union had been planned. PPASMP was celebrating the 70th anniversary of the Great October Revolution. They were both members of PPASMP (Pondicherry People’s Art and Science Movement for Social Progress). Raghu was with his close friend comrade Niranjan Basu. The ambassador car was speeding along the road from Pondicherry to Madras.
Now I am working in Bulgarian Bionics Institute where I am in charge of Prosthetics division dealing with digital neural architecture of artificial limbs…. Decades after, in fact more than a quarter century after, a message from an old friend or was it a mere acquaintance? With a smile he clicked opened the mail.
Sergi Leonski! Ah… now that name rang a bell. Most probably, a phishing scam or a spam mail that escaped the filter of his mail box? With the lines in his forehead getting more pronounced he looked at the sender’s name. After the regular mails, there was something new - a mail from Bulgaria. Today all that remained of those days was the photo now digitized and made into a desktop wallpaper. Good old days of Komsomal and Soviet Union. And there a younger Raghu, well… actually Comrade Raghu was standing with red flowers in his hands in front of the eternal red fire. A swift feeling of pain that coursed through his spine reminded him that he had crossed half a century. Raghunanthan switched on his desktop and slowly reclined on the chair.
0 kommentar(er)
