Monday, May 15, 2017

Fiction and Non- Fiction - Musings on Mother's day!


My son and I were watching Phineas and Ferb (a cartoon on Netflix where two genius kids do highly improbable and complicated things ) together.Suddenly he looked at me and said, "You know none of this can be real , right Amma?".

They had been learning fiction and non -fiction in school and I tried to bring in those concepts as I replied. "Of course this is fiction, it is an imaginary story. I'm sure kids like them would not be able to build such complicated things so easily. So is the other TV show with bionic humans",  referring to a sci-fi comedy that we all watched called Lab Rats which had  three bionic children as its main protagonists. To which he indignantly replied , "Bionic humans are not fiction, I'm quite sure science is very close to humans having bionic chips and implants, may be they have already done it somewhere."  Before I could get another word in, he got back to the topic

"I mean , I can totally get that they are super smart and able to create roller coasters , what I can't understand is , how would they ever get the money to build those things", he mused. Personally I had not thought of that as an impediment and to foster debate , suggested that may be Phineas and Ferb's parents were very rich and they gave them a lot of pocket money. At this he started laughing loudly and said "Amma,you don't get it , no parents would give kids so much pocket money. It has to be fiction."

I chuckled to myself.We live in an age where super smart children and bionic super humans are close to reality. But thankfully parents are still parents and children receiving huge amounts in pocket money is still fiction.

Many times , we tend to forget that our children live in a world far more advanced than we can comprehend and seeing it through their curious eyes is a gift to cherish.

HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY!

P.S : It does look like bionic humans are coming for real.
http://www.cnbc.com/2017/02/13/elon-musk-humans-merge-machines-cyborg-artificial-intelligence-robots.html

2 comments:

  1. i was reading this op-ed piece on NYT by Thomas Friedman 3 days back https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/10/opinion/owning-your-own-future.html?_r=0 and was thinking the same thing. it has a wonderful line where it says "Stop asking a young person WHAT you want to be when you grow up. It freezes their identity into a job that may not be there". loved your post Sunu xoxo

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  2. Very interesting article. Was saving to reply to your post after reading the article. So true what you said. Manu and I were just talking the other day about self driving cars and how we could possibly rent a self driving car while travelling anywhere in the world and just tell it where to go.

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