Monday, December 12, 2011

Man's Greatest Invention


Twitter is one of the greatest inventions ever made by man. Anything and everything in just 140 characters. As simple as that. Apparently, when people have less space to express, they tend to be intelligent with their words. Restoring the previous session in my Firefox brought me to my Twitter homepage and a twitter trend made sure I didn’t switch the tab. It was #greatestinvention which had got my thoughts racing. What could be the greatest invention made by human?

Is it the wheel? It changed the entire life of human beings. It gave the actual meaning to movement and has made the world smaller and smaller. Or is it the printing press? It was one of the first media of communication. It changed the ways how information was collected, stored, retrieved and distributed. Could it be the telephone? The idea of talking to a person sitting thousands of miles away from you was incredible. While the wheel made travelling possible, it reduced the necessity to travel. Okay, if not wheel, then what about automobile. Invented after a long time of the invention of wheel, it improved transportation and made movement swift and hassle-free. Television also stands a strong chance. It improved upon the radio and allowed better ways of transmission of news and other important media. It also became an excellent source of entertainment. Then I wondered about Computers. Since its invention in 1837 by Charles Babbage, the computer has changed billions of life. It changed the way we work. From a collection of vacuum tubes covering two rooms to a device which fits in your pocket, the computers have evolved exponentially. And the invention of Internet has only added to the value of computers. Internet was one of the revolutions which converted the globe into a village by fostering the share of information.

The list goes on and on. Steam engine, airplane, LASER, DNA, several vaccines etc. etc. A quick search on Google with the keywords “the greatest invention ever is *” returns thousands of results ranging from sex to space travel. Some consider the remote control the greatest whereas some think the same for seedless watermelon. 



Suddenly something struck me. The greatest invention ever made by man has to be… GOD!! Yes, God. None of the above mentioned inventions could control the minds of millions and millions of people making them conform to one ideal. None of them. There are and have been thousands of Gods. The Hindus alone worship 36 crores of them. A word defined by the brilliant minds of a few humans in the ancient times, God has touched the life of everyone on this planet Earth in one way or the other. Along with God, came Religion, the byproduct of God. It is the best tool to control a mass of people. It has enabled a bunch of people to control the entire human race by injecting fear and religious madness in their minds. It is the only thing which can make people wonder not only about their present, but also their previous and future births. What other invention can make people fight among themselves or even give up their own life? What else other than God can make people accept everything wrong that happened to them?

Inventions were made and forgotten, but God is immortal, the greatest of them all. How can any invention ever stand up to God?