Day 64 - Imagination

James Cameroon's latest movie 'AVATAR' has just released in India. Being a huge sci-fi fan I am excited by the prospect of watching the movie. While the rest of the world is excited about the special effects and the story, my interest lies in a different angle altogether.

I am excited by the imagination that the director and the special effects people have put onto screen for a world that lies only in their minds. I am excited about the new kinds of animals and plants that they have imagined. How will the sunset look like on the planet Pandora? How will the flora and fauna be on a planet that exists only in the minds of the designers and the director. While people will be watching the movie and be excited by the look of the Na'vi, on a second or third run I will probably be watching the background more than the actors and the action.

I have a hobby of reading books. I have to have a book to read at all times. While my interest spans across genres, my fascination is exclusively for science fiction. Arthur C Clarke and Isaac Asimov are writers that I swear by and love to read their books again and again. I realised that one of the reasons I love these books so much is the fact that I have to imagine these worlds as I read them. I have to experience what the writers experienced as they wrote and see these new worlds with their eyes. Asimov's Foundation series took me to new worlds of Trantor and Gaia while Clarke's Odyssey of Rama series really pushed the limits of my imagination. I still love to read the Rama series as I believe that I still haven't been able to imagine the Rama world in its true splendor.

Imagination pushes your creative limits. It makes you wonder and trains your brain to think out of the box. When you need to imagine a new place, a new experience, a new location or a new emotion that you have not experienced before it pushes your brain to exercise itself and bring those places to life. Reading Harry Potter was much more fun than watching it. In fact reading the Amar Chitra Katha books of Ramayana and Mahabharata was much more exciting than watching them on screen. We had to imagine the battle of Kurukshetra without ever seeing one ourselves. We had to imagine Hanuman's flight with the mountain at an age when our brain was pushing its limits. I believe that is what made our generation so much more creative.

I rue the fact that in today's generation the books become movies so much faster that children don't need to imagine these worlds. They just have to wait for some time and the world comes to them. But this is the imagination of someone else - not your own. It deprives the children of creativity, of having to make up this world of Hogwarts or Twilight in their own minds. Its so much fun to read and imagine a person turning into a werewolf and then seeing that transformation on screen as compared to watching someone else interpretation of it and taking that as your own.

This generation's imaginative powers are very limited and this will impact the generation when it grows up. Creative powers will be valued much more and most of the generation will follow the vision of a few people. The generation will accept that someone else's vision is the right one because they have been trained to not think but just experience. I rue that fact.

Teach your children to read. Try and cultivate the reading experience in them. Let them read the books first and then watch the movies. Even for our stories like Mahabharata and Ramayana, let them read these first and then watch the serials. Let their brains imagine and go to place where they have not gone.

Let them give wings to their imagination!