Spinning the Web

Imagination is the fuel of a creative mind. Creativity in turn is subjective to each person, but nonetheless present in all. So why not tip the scale further and imagine something as bizarre as what I have imagined about the topic in hand:-

Rewind to The Great Library of Alexandria, a reservoir of the most valuable books and scrolls till today and an enigma of the ancient world. The imposing facade beckons the top scholars, researchers, scientists, and bibliophiles of the day. Slow footsteps enter the premises of the largest library in the ancient world. Just then a man swathed in pure white cloth walks up to you and asks if your blackberry is catching the wireless network.

You shrug him off as a man well, ahead of his times and he walks off clacking his sandals against the floor. However, you quickly realize that everything inside the library is different than it is supposed to be. You spot Archimedes (made immortal by the phrase “Eureka”) looking absorbedly into the flat screen monitor in front of him. You take a closer look and see that he’s reading one of Shakespeare’s literary masterpieces.

It is then you realize that the internet has spun its web even here. The Great Library stood in 3 Century B.C. with no traces of a world connected by the internet. Nonetheless information about it can be accessed even today through the Internet.

In a life which is ever more complex, the ‘Net’ as we affably call it guarantees easy solutions. Nothing has remained the same as it was two decades earlier. Today, the net has taken over the role which was once the prerogative of books i.e. imparting knowledge, and a sense of fulfillment.

It is a revolution of sorts that the building blocks of each and every civilization of the world i.e. books like the Vedas for example, would be lost in the virtual realm of the Internet. What started as a modest attempt to etch history on clay tablets and tree barks has culminated into an invisible tangle of different eras, transcending both space and time. The phenomena of IP addresses, URL’s, and websites have taken the world by storm.

Perhaps the internet is a giant leap of mankind. It is an evolutionary phase for books. For me the Internet and books live in a symbiotic relationship, quarreling with each other sometime and caring each other at other.