An ark for the future

Whenever people give advice on writing, be it in books, movies or real life, one thing always said is “write what you know”. One woman according to what I read adhered to it to the extent of making her husband gag, blindfold and tie her up just so she could write about a kidnapped person’s thoughts and experiences more realistically.
Looking at it differently, if everyone just stuck to writing about what they know, boundaries would never be pushed, the science fiction and fantasy genres would lie empty other than the pieces written by magical beings themselves (they exist. DO NOT try to convince me otherwise). Part of what I think a writer’s job is, is to think and imagine the what’s and how’s the rest of us cannot.
Maybe the secret is writer and reader journeying together into realms unknown. Maybe that’s what authors do when they don’t have many actual experiences in that field….the writer learning of and living in the world he has created and reader being patient with his thoughts and believing the writers words. So lets the two of us try that and go on a voyage looking for what might happen if the Noah’s ark situation occurs once again in the future, say in 2012 since so many doomsday theories surround it.
It is October 2012 and due to global warming, the threat of polar icecaps melting is imminent. The world is witnessing fights in every single communication forum-louder and more forceful than ever before among presidents, celebrities, businessmen, neighbors each trying to justify why they need a place on the ark group of spaceships more than the others.
One hears of a fan buying his favorite actor a seat on it (with 5 star luxury available of course!) and being promptly berated by his family for wasting money that could have bought every one of them places at that price. The omnipresent subject of discrimination[racial or otherwise] makes its way into this controversy as well, making way for more people coming onto the ark. There has to be a couple of people not just from every ethnicity, country and religion, but also especially in the case of India someone from every state and caste on it.
The question of taking 2 of every animal species does not rise, what with so many people clamoring to get a seat. Instead genes of every species will be taken along and once optimum living conditions are obtained they’ll all be cloned. This makes the animal activists indignant and they plan to remain behind to share the fate of their fellow earthlings-in the nude.
Come November and most of the small islands are submerged and have completely disappeared. The larger ones like Sri Lanka and Madagascar partially so with their inhabitants fleeing to landlocked countries.
As December 21 approaches….things get more chaotic and the future murkier making it harder for me to predict what happens next. Maybe since it is doomsday and nothing will work according to plan, right after taking off, the spaceships will malfunction and hence all signs of life on earth will disappear. Or maybe…...there will be enough ark spaceships for every one of the 7 billion people on the planet. And even if that does not happen, we’ll start a completely new colony in space like the Jetsons [loved that show!].
Take that world politics! You can’t have wars when you don’t have countries anymore.
But for what really will happen…..we’ll just have to wait and watch won’t we?

By Nirmitee Mehta

{Disclaimer-The writer of this piece has not seen the movie 2012 and does not plan to either. Hence any probable references to the plot of the movie can by accounted for by the simple explanation that the makers had gone into the future and stolen ideas from her brain.}