All of earth’s life forms owe their beginning to the Big Bang that occurred some 13 billion years ago. What exactly happened after the event that marked the birth of the universe? Nothing, actually.
According to Ganapati Ramakrishnan, author of Dheivam Neeyendrunar (Vikatan Prasuram), after the Big Bang, there existed an emptiness in which there were no particles such as protons, electrons or neutrons. A few billion years later, “Nature, by some magic, tried to create a single electron through the Higgs boson, playfully named God Particle,” says Ganapati.
It’s in the DNA
Imagine, “it took several million years for all the elements on the periodic table to be formed”. It further took a million years for DNA, the “building block of life” to be born. Then, the amoeba, a “wonder of physical reality” was formed. Some 50,000 years later began the story of mankind. Ganapati’s book starts off with these events. “In the chapter ‘Uyir’, I have dealt with how life came out of non-life chemicals,” he explains. He traces the evolution of mankind through chapters ‘Neeye Dheivam’, ‘Mudhan Mudhalil’, ‘Uyir’, ‘Manam’, ‘Varalaru’ and ‘Dheivam’.
Written over a year after extensive research, Dheivam Neeyendrunar is Ganapati’s fourth work in Tamil. “It took two years for me to arrive at the concept for the book and the sequence of events described in it,” he says. He has written seven books in English so far, including one on economics and management. The 62-year-old was a scientist with the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre.
The book time-travels, taking the reader some 1,500 years back, when settled agriculture and agricultural implements came into existence. Ganapati also speaks of the Industrial Revolution where machines changed the way the world functioned. The author touches upon important events in history, including World Wars I and II, the Cold War, wars fought between small countries, and terrorism of the present times, all of which, he says, were the result of the “play of the mind”.
Destroying resources
Man is exploiting natural resources. Our forests are being destroyed; our water bodies are being polluted. The air we breathe is not what it used to be 20 years ago. So, is mankind moving towards its end? “No,” says Ganapati. He feels we have made tremendous progress when compared to our past.
If evolution continues at the same pace, “violence, war and hunger will disappear some 100 years later. Man will become an embodiment of reason and justice; he will become equal to divinity”. It is on this note that the book concludes. Ganapati has borrowed the title from Bharathiar’s Puthiya Aathichudi .
