Kedar's Log, Stardate 2009

Last night I had my first deer accident at 9pm. Was returning back from my midterm, driving through Herndon in my Jeep going through a particularly dark spot where they have woods on both sides and there it was, a large deer leaping right in front of my windshield out of nowhere. I think the car hit its leg midair and it kinda still managed to continue its leap into the woods. Not sure what happened to it.

As for me, I stopped right there.. next to the median. Calling my insurance, waiting for the tow truck, letting my wife know that I will be late. A cop stopped by, just to check if everything was okay.. I was there for about 2.5 hrs.. all by myself, thinking – about what I could’ve done to avoid it or why this timing matched for me and the deer – down to the last millisecond… my car leaked some fluids from the radiator.. and then the tow truck came and took us home.

The tow truck driver was pretty boastful about his own deer incidents.. and I guess he was in a different league on that than me. Here I was, totally upset with the whole thing, and there he was, telling me how he killed a deer after he hit it and saw it was still alive and standing, and then he killed it since it had damaged his car already! In another incident, he and his hunter friends ate the one he hit that night.

To tell the truth, I have sometimes secretly wished I was a bit like that – although not exactly like that – rather than being so faint at heart. I think it just makes it easy to deal with some of the harsh realities of life. But I think it is what a person is born with.. I have tried to fight it over the years, but wasn’t successful. But then thinking about that further, I kill animals everyday.. when I eat chicken or fish or a hot dog.. It just doesn’t happen in front of my eyes.. How is it any different from this? Sometimes, we are cool with horrible things happening in this world as long as they are not happening in front of our eyes.

I just keep thinking about the deer and how it is not so important that everyone now talks about the car and how I had a bad night.. To me, we both were going home and one reached home safely, the other didn’t..

Somewhere someone’s vision today, is waiting to turn into reality of tomorrow..

I was reading 100 years of flight history somewhere and Wright brothers story. Then I went to the website for the company that has been working on flying cars since the 1980s – I think it was http://www.moller.com. When I read about the future of space tourism, I wonder if 100 years from now, someone will read this history with the same amusement like we read about the beginning of the 20th century. Wonder if our 8 Megapixel digital images of today will look just as coarse and old to the eyes of 22nd century folks accustomed to the new technology then?

They will probably laugh at the things people are crazy about today – the iPhones, the Wii’s the PS3s..Technology is always cutting edge wherever the blade of time is carving out the present, and the future probably always laughs at the way things were being done in the past.

I believe, by popularizing the word Relativity, Einstein effectively said that every Genius is a relative Genius in his own time, the past and some time in the future. I see that most concepts, theories, ideas, equations fall apart with time; very few don’t and some just become irrelevant.

I think a genius is someone who creates something that works in that time and which has enough capability in it to give rise to something new.. much like God – who creates a living being who can then be instrumental in building a brand new one, possibly someone who adapts better to the new times.