47-4,p44

Cosmic Juggling

BY RAM PRASAD

He enjoyed watching His children attempt juggling. In over 4,000 years, they had

moved from one object to over ten. It wasn't bad really, but He had hoped for a much greater progress rate. He knew He had blessed them with more thinking power than they knew, but they didn't seem to be applying it. Certainly not to juggling.

He was beginning to get slightly irritated. What were they trying to achieve? He often wondered. A dozen objects? A dozen in each hand? The children didn't pause to think beyond using their inept hands. Maybe He shouldn't have made juggling three objects so easy using Hands. That was when they had stopped using their minds and started believing that it was all to do with the hands.

It was going to be a while before they even started dreaming about big numbers. Really big numbers. The children imposed so many limitations on themselves. It amused Him sometimes. They blindly accepted anything they perceived as constraints. Especially gravity.

It was with a mixture of fun and frustration that He watched a child who He thought showed promise, attempt juggling. The child would spend hours and hours to improve the tiniest bit, trying hard to squeeze a little extra out of the physical limbs He had given it. The children spent hundreds of hours trying the toughest of ways. He compared this to a fly trying to go through a glass pane, while a door was open right beside it. And all along, the mind lay idle.

He watched the jubilation at the clumsy flashing and qualifying. And without pausing to think, the child would run to show off to others. The mind remained idle.

Years ago, He had prided Himself on having so subtly hidden the big clues. Now, He sometimes wondered if maybe He had done his job too well. The children repeatedly tried to brute force their way through the walls, ignoring all the doorways that were waiting to be discovered. How could they be completely blind to the obvious? A terrible thing to waste.

He got excited on those rare occasions that He found some child thinking. Dreaming of really big numbers and autojuggling and masslessness. But the child invariably disappointed Him by reverting back to old habits and succumbing to gravity with flailing arms.

The beauty of it was that He had placed the clues all around them. The children had found most of the clues eons ago. They grasped the concept of infinity centuries ago and He had thought it was all over. But they didn't realize at all that it applied to juggling. They couldn't think beyond really small numbers.

When they invented their flying machines, He thought they had conquered gravity forever. But they didn't remember their lessons. The juggling bunch humbly accepted gravity as a given. The biggest constraint and they did nothing whatsoever to try to eliminate or circumvent it. They were fighting it instead of going with it. That was when He had been really disappointed.

He sometimes liked to compare their juggling efforts with their transportation efforts. They were yet to use friction-free levitation or to discover astral mobiles. But in their juggling endeavors they were still in kindergarten. They were flooring the gas pedal while still in first gear. Did they think that this would take them anywhere faster? They had to first find the higher gears, then drop the concept altogether and move to gravityless autojuggle.

He thought back to when He was learning. It seemed so simple now but it had been quite a journey back then. If even one child would leave arms and props alone and think laterally for a couple of hours...

He let out one of His very infrequent sighs. It might take another thousand years. Or it might happen tomorrow.

He could very well be a She. They are beyond Genders now.