Recently, I read William Dalrymple’s Age of Kali, and one particular section caught my attention.

The railways are now so much part of the everyday life of the subcontinent that it is difficult today to take in the revolution they brought about, or the degree to which they both created and destroyed the India of the Raj. Before the arrival of the railways in 1850, travel in India meant months of struggle over primitive dirt roads. Just fifty years later, tracks had been laid from the beaches south of Madras to the Afghan border, more than twenty-three thousand miles of railway in all. It was the biggest, and most costly, construction project undertaken by any colonial power in any colony anywhere in the world. It was also the largest single investment of British capital in the whole of the nineteenth century.

This was a fascinating read.

The book is a series of short essays in which Dalrymple shares his experience as he travels across India as a journalist. Sort of like a Behind-The-Scenes of journalism. The underlying theme of all the essays points towards society’s decadence.

Having been a child of the ’90s and reading this book in 2020 was like looking at a snapshot of life back then and allowing me cognizance of the language and symbols referenced in the book. Furthermore, taking the book as a reference and looking at the present, one can undoubtedly see “the age of Kali” all around us.

The Last Mughal by William Dalrymple, an excellent piece of research into the time that, in many ways gave birth to the nationalist movement in India. The book recreates the one of the largest mutinies of the modern word, the 1857 uprising. Starting from the events that led to the uprising, the book covers in detail, both sides of the story. Using both European as well as Indian sources, translating the mutiny papers for almost the first time.

Nineteen eighty-four by George Orwell, written in 1949, must be one of those books that come closest to prophecy. Asimov’s stories are very subtle in connection with present day events though as mentioned earlier, they do have a question we must ask ourselves while looking at the progress of science and technology. This on the other hand was more direct.

The book talks of a world where every aspect of human life is under supervision and is controlled in the direction the government( referred to as the party) wants it to be. The book gives detail working of how the party operates so as to achieve its motives.

Boston dynamics has become quite famous after the recent take over by the internet giant Google. The work done at Boston dynamics in my opinion, is ground breaking and far ahead in technology than any other country or firm has ventured into. The complex control algorithms mimicking that of real world animals to a high accuracy.

The recent acquisitions of Google spur up an all new thought process. Google acquired a total of 8 companies for their robotics division. If we look at the details of all these companies we get a fairly clear picture of what google is aiming for - building robots that look, act and work just like humans. The only difference, these new robots never get tired providing high efficiency.