To a man who once helped me imagine. Michael Crichton (1942-2008)

On your planet you have an animal called a bear. It is a large animal, sometimes larger than you, and it is clever and has ingenuity, and it has a brain as large as yours. But the bear differs from you in one important way. It cannot perform the activity you call imagining. It cannot make mental images of how reality might be. It cannot envision what you call the past and what you call the future. This special ability of imagination is what has made your species as great as it is. Nothing else. It is not your ape nature, not your tool-using nature, not language or your violence or your caring for young or your social groupings. It is none of these things, which are all found in other animals. Your greatness lies in imagination. The ability to imagine is the largest part of what you call intelligence. You think the ability to imagine is merely a useful step on the way to solving a problem or making something happen. But imagining it is what makes it happen. This is the gift of your species and this is the danger, because you do not choose to control your imaginings. You imagine wonderful things and you imagine terrible things, and you take no responsibility for the choice. You say you have inside you both the power of good and the power of evil, the angel and the devil, but in truth you have just one thing inside you—the ability to imagine.

From 'The Sphere'

I should have read that a hundred times. Thought whether it is true, whether it is false, what it means, what it implies. Yes, I was a kid then and for the teenager me, Michael Crichton was nothing less than a hero. I read, nah, devoured all his books. Even into my early twenties I would be first in line from my lending library to get hold of a new release from him.

He was someone who could transport you along with an Arab and the first Vikings that he meets on their battles with the last Neanderthals which existed on earth. He could make you passionate about something like the Chaos theory and some giant lizards. He could make you start to look at Africa and your ape cousins with new eyes. I can still quote that beginning sentence in Congo.

Only prejudice, and a trick of the Mercator projection, prevents us from recognizing the enormity of the African continent. Covering nearly twelve million square miles, Africa is almost as large as North America and Europe combined. It is nearly twice the size of South America. As we mistake its dimensions, we also mistake its essential nature: the Dark Continent is mostly hot desert and open grassy plains.

Hell, he even wrote a book which hare brains in both hollywood and bollywood could use to make another one of their grotesque movies. While his book had made you think about the technology industry, its manufacturing processes, the politics of sex and indeed of 'sexual harassment', after the movies you thought - yeah Priyanka Chopra is even hotter in a swimsuit and yeah Michael Douglas is even uglier with longer hair.

Of course, Crichton was no George Orwell or Umberto Eco. He was a populist and unapologetically so. But he could make you interested. And that is indeed the first step. It is said that he would start the research on his book with an empty file and by the time that he was done with his book, it would have grown to an unmanageable bundle of scraps, book pieces, articles etc. His books sometimes did reflect that amateurism and sometimes you were left with the feeling that he did not go as deep as he should have, but then you realize, he is doing what he wants to do, and what he is great at. Now YOU go deep.

Slowly, I had come to think that I had outgrown him. And frankly, his later works were far from his best. The global warming piece was more of how much he hated lawyers. Even the biotechnology novel was below par. And then I came across his internet presence. It was my fault that I had come across it only recently. I had never put in his name to a search engine and of course, he never frequented the mass media which he thought were bad and also dead. It is sorta choking when you find that the ideas you know that you vaguely think have been expressed much more deeply and lucidly by one of your favorites - whether it is his piece on the death of mass media , the one on men's feelings or on how to fight with your woman intelligently, he was like Virender Sehwag was on Jason Krejza yesterday - audacious, unafraid and yeah, sometimes wrong.


To Michael Crichton.
In case both of us were wrong and now you are in 'heaven' and you are reading -

Thanks for your work sir. Highly appreciated.

My suggested Chricton reads to any of you who haven't. In order - Sphere, Congo,
Eaters of the Dead, Jurassic Park,
Disclosure, Rising Sun.

Essays -
How to fight (with your other half) ,
Men's hearts
Mediasaurus