A Tale as Old as Time

Tick tock! It is I, Sir Tickalot, and this is the thrilling tale of my life, complete with my brilliant ideas and daring exploits. So, dear reader, buckle up for an incredible journey through time!

My story began on a frosty December morning in 1991, when I was built by an eccentric old clockmaker in an apartment in Maastricht, Netherlands. It was there I spent the golden days of my childhood, ticking away in joy. Alas, my happiness was short-lived. Soon, the clockmaker hauled me to his shop, a dark, dusty flat right above his living quarters. At first, I was miserable - after all, a beauty like me didn’t belong with the common timepieces in the scrappy store. As time passed, however, the rundown little shop almost became a home to me. I even found companionship in two ornate cedar clocks, Mr and Mrs Brown.

Unfortunately, four years later, my world was upended again. One evening, a middle-aged couple entered the shop in search of a clock for their brand-new house. My comrades and I expected them to pick one of the newer models, but when they caught sight of me, their eyes seemed to widen in glee before they turned to each other, whispering excitedly. Nine minutes later, I was lying in the trunk of their car, being driven to their house in Amsterdam.

While my latest residence looked homely from the outside, I soon learned it wasn’t the safe haven I had hoped for. No, my new owners had three dreadful children, who seemed intent upon causing my early demise. The eldest daughter, Elsa, often tapped callously on my delicate glass visage, traced my intricate engravings with razor-sharp fingernails, and yanked me open to see the bottle-holder behind my door. The five-year-old twins, Dirk and Lara, dashed madly around the house every single day. I lived in constant terror of being knocked over and destroyed.

After a month of this misery, I decided enough was enough. At the stroke of midnight, when the family was nestled snugly in their beds, I climbed out the window, onto the road, and into the warm bakery just next door. I was discovered by the delighted baker, who placed me upon the mantle above the hearth. For a decade after that, I watched over the boulangerie with a flowerpot and candelabra for company.

But in the first week of 2006, disaster struck. The baker passed away, and I, along with his other possessions, was shipped away to his niece, Charlotte. Charlotte took one look at us, sighed heavily, and shut us all up in an attic full of cobwebs. I must admit, being tossed among broken playthings and unusable tools was a severely harsh blow to my ego. The year I spent in that loft was the worst of my existence.

Still, I didn’t lose hope, and a year and three months later, things began to look up for me again. Queen’s Day, or the birthday of the Queen Juliana, was approaching. Every year on April 30th, the people of Netherlands celebrated the deceased queen by dressing in orange, hosting parties, and most importantly, selling everything from decrepit furniture to fashionable outfits on every street in the country.

At the crack of dawn on the 30th, my fellow inmates and I were finally released from our prison and laid out on Kerkstraat, a narrow, cobbled street guarded by towering buildings, with an elegant church at one end. Soon, other stalls were set up around us, and hoards of shoppers arrived to poke and prod at us, deciding which of us was worth their money. I waited with bated breath to be chosen, but hours passed and no one spared me a second glance. I began to despair. What if no one picked me? What if I was tossed back into the attic, all alone this time? What if I spent centuries there, until I wasted away and ceased to exist? Just as I was about to give in to those dark thoughts, I spied a couple walking purposefully towards me. I straightened up with anticipation, praying that they would decide to purchase me. The woman, who seemed to be pregnant, enquired how much I cost. When Charlotte replied that they only had to pay five euros for me, they were ecstatic. They carried me to their canal-house that overlooked not a canal, but a football field. Please don’t ask me to explain why, as it puzzled me, too, for several days.

While I wasn’t trying to fathom what sort of house they lived in exactly, I spent my time observing the house’s occupants. They were lovely people who treated me better than anyone else ever had. They asked me the time, rewound me when I gained minutes (for while ordinary clocks slow down over time, I speed up) and brushed me down when I grew dusty. When they gave birth to a baby, I watched over her. When they moved to India, I moved too, satisfied as long as I was near them. I travelled all over the world with them, in fact, and yet it never frazzled me. For, wherever they took me, one thing stayed the same - I was finally home.

Disclaimer: This piece of writing was originally published by Timbuktoo Young Authors Publishing in its anthology, Precious, in 2021.

Dreams, Screams, and Other Terrifying Themes

I hurtle through the woods, wind billowing through my fur and twigs snapping beneath my paws. I have less than a minute to catch the squirrel. If I’m even a second too slow... well, it’s best not to consider that possibility. Horror spikes through my chest as I feel my body begin to transform. It’s now or never. Bending my knees and tensing my stomach, I pounce.

And then I wake up.

**************************************************************************

“Looks like someone got up on the wrong side of the bed,” my brother sneers as I sleepily shove a spoonful of cereal into my mouth. I ignore him, too exhausted to come up with a sufficiently scathing response.

I had another of those nightmares last night, the ones that leave me drained, both physically and mentally. While I can only recall vague flashes of this one - an owl’s hoot, a strange, metallic taste, and a feeling of utter desperation - I feel as though I’ve dreamt it before, and more than once. Is that even possible? To have the exact same dream repeatedly? But I’m too drowsy to ponder it further, so I wolf down my breakfast and pad up the staircase to my bedroom. Ten minutes later, I’m sleeping like a log.

**************************************************************************

“Nila!” Mum calls from the drawing room. “Come here!”

I trudge downstairs, irritated. “What is it now?”

“Where’ve you been all day?”

“Sleeping.”

She raises an eyebrow.

“I was exhausted,” I explain defensively. “Now may I leave?”

“No, you may not. Mr. Aditya claims to have spotted a wild animal in our half of the woods last night. He’s probably just paranoid, but it’s best we’re on our guard anyway. So stay away from the forest during the day, and don’t go outdoors at all in the night. Oh, and make sure to lock and bolt the front door every evening. Is that understood?”

“Yes. Now may I leave?”

Mum merely sighs in response.

**************************************************************************

It’s been two weeks since my last nightmare, but I don’t think they’re really gone yet. I don’t remember when I had the first one, but I do know that it was here, at our farmhouse. Perhaps I’ll have to leave before I’m entirely free of them.

My mother’s shout of “Nila! Have you bolted the door?” startles me out of my reverie. There’s no point in wasting the day worrying about the night, I suppose, so I suppress my terrifying theories and do what she asks. Then I head upstairs and settle in for what I hope will be a peaceful night’s sleep.

**************************************************************************

I’m trapped. I’m surrounded by walls on all four sides, and there’s no way out. If I can’t somehow make my own way soon, I’m doomed. I have to taste blood by the break of dawn, or I’ll lose my life. I pace back and forth, claw at the ground, and growl in frustration.

I’ll do whatever it takes to survive, I decide. Whatever it takes.

**************************************************************************

I wake to the sound of a scream.

Rolling out of bed, I scramble down the stairs towards the source of the noise. I’m still half-asleep - my nightmares returned last night, leaving me more fatigued than ever.

The sight that greets me when I enter the drawing room certainly wakes me up. Mum is standing, motionless, in the centre of the chamber. She is fear personified, with her skin as pale as the fading moon, her eyes as wide as oceans, her mouth open on a terror-filled shriek. I stop short when I catch sight of the wreck around her. Our once-luxurious velvet carpet has been ripped to shreds, the floorboards beneath it cracked beyond repair. There are claw marks on every inch of the walls and door, the curtains torn to the ground. And in the midst of it all is my brother - bruised, bloodied, and unequivocally dead.

And then Dad is dashing past me, trying to comfort his wife while he is in shock himself. And Mum is wailing, shrieking, howling with grief. And the labourers are knocking on the door, trying to find out what’s happened. And everyone is rushing, rushing, rushing, but I stay rooted to the spot, staring at my brother’s mangled corpse.

And then a realisation hits me, knocking the wind out of my lungs and my feet from beneath my body. Those nightmares... weren’t just nightmares after all. I transformed last night, and a fortnight before that, and a fortnight before that, into a vicious, bloodthirsty beast. And on each of those moonlit nights, I took another life to secure my own. The first time, it was a rabbit’s. Two weeks ago, it was a squirrel’s. And last night, when I was trapped in my family’s home? It was my brother’s.

Next full moon, I decide, I will not drink a drop of blood. I’ll ride the night out, and by dawn, I’ll be as dead as the brother I have murdered. Maybe then, I will finally find peace.

The Politics Behind Political Correctness

Political correctness. It’s a term we hear everywhere around us – on social media sites, in political speeches and debates, and even during everyday conversation. It’s also a term that divides our society into two categories - those who abide by it, and those who scoff at it.

But before you write something off as being “too PC”, ask yourself the following questions: What exactly do I mean when I use the words “political correctness”? Does my understanding of the expression match its actual meaning? What is it about the expression that invites so much contention? And finally, is it important for me, as an individual, to be politically correct today?

First, let’s learn what the term political correctness means, and when and why it came about. According to Britannica, the term first appeared in “Marxist-Leninist vocabulary following the Russian Revolution of 1917”. Back then, it was used to describe “adherence to the policies and principles of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union”. The phrase was linked to traditionalism, conformity and right-wing ideology.

This continued into the 1960s, when the term was applied by leftists in the USA to mock the right’s extreme orthodoxy. It was not only used to criticise the conservatives, however - the Left also used the term to call out rigidity within their own party. According to Ruth Perry, a professor of literature at Massachusetts Institute of Technology who participated in several feminist and civil rights movements, the expression “was always used as a joke”, when “calling attention to possible dogmatism” within leftist groups.

Until the late 1980s, this expression was used exclusively by the Left. But around 1990, the term was adopted and altered by the Right. Conservatives began to claim that political correctness was the Left’s device to promote their curriculum and teaching methods on university and college campuses through “liberal fascism”. For example, during a 1991 commencement speech at the University of Michigan, Republican (right wing) president George H.W. Bush said the following:

"The notion of political correctness has ignited controversy across the land. And although the movement arises from the laudable desire to sweep away the debris of racism and sexism and hatred, it replaces old prejudice with new ones."

Thus, “political correctness”, which came to mean speech that caused the least amount of offence, particularly when speaking of groups who are socially disadvantaged or discriminated against, was portrayed in an extremely negative light. Right propaganda stated that political correctness was censorship, and a restriction on freedom of speech. Meanwhile, leftists believed that the Right had villainized the idea of “political correctness”, to get away with hate speech and other similar discrimination.

Recently, movements like MeToo and Black Lives Matter have prompted more anti-political-correctness sentiments, mainly from the people these movements are calling out. Anti-PC crusaders use their philosophy to account for hateful words against marginalised communities. I think this is the essence of why an anti-PC stand is problematic. You can use it to justify any number of statements, and subsequently actions, against victimised groups. I believe that the moment you state that you “don’t believe in political correctness”, you also state that you don’t believe in treating people of persecuted races, religions, classes, genders, and sexual orientations with respect. You state that you are a narrow-minded human being.

This translates into our everyday lives, too! For example, every time you use the pronoun “he” instead of “they”, you are erasing people of more than fifty different gender groups. You are indirectly saying that the people who fall into these categories matter less than males. You are becoming another droplet in the bottomless well of misogyny.

One common complaint about political correctness is that it has been taken to an extreme, with “the PC police” correcting you ever time you use a term they deem incorrect. While I agree that we have taken political correctness to an extreme, I also think these extreme measures are necessary. Picture a pendulum that has swung all the way to one end. Before it can return to its equilibrium, it must reach its maximum height on the opposite end. Similarly, women, people of colour, and those in the LGBTQ community have been oppressed for so long that to reach a state of total equality, we must start by taking drastic levels of affirmative action. If at first we make an effort to be overly politically correct in everything we say or do, this common decency will someday become the norm.

Of Scheming Siblings, Wrathful Wishes, and Catastrophic Consequences

The flames flickered, the wax dripped, and the icing melted on my birthday cupcake as I sat all alone in a rundown cafe, scoffing bitterly as I wished myself a wonderful year ahead.

My parents, for what seemed like the thousandth time now, had proven their preference for my simpering suck-up of a sister yet again. Ever since my mother had given birth to the little devil, she and my father had shoved me aside like an outgrown, unwanted piece of clothing. While they bought my baby sister Emma brand-new rompers and frocks, I was forced into second-hand garments. While they drove Emma to preschool every morning, I travelled the five kilometres to school on a rickety old cycle. While Emma was showered with attention and affection, I was ignored, dismissed, told that I was “far too old to expect constant entertainment”. For five years now, I’d watched, helpless, as the scheming shrew usurped my position in my family.

But today, I decided, it had gone too far. It was my fifteenth birthday, and my parents had taken my sister out to a Build-A-Bear workshop, forgetting to wish me a good morning, let alone a joyful birthday. The situation would be ridiculous if it weren’t so devastating.

I checked my watch - it was eleven o’clock, the exact time I had come into existence fifteen years ago. Then, I blew out the candles on the sugary confection in front of me, and wished with all my might for Emma to disappear - to go somewhere far, far away and never come back.

After hours of silently stewing in my misery, I paid my bill, left the restaurant, and strolled down the street towards my neighbourhood. My parents were probably back home by now, taking an endless stream of photographs of “the lovely little darling” as she messed around with another new toy. I wondered if they would even notice my return.

When I entered the house, however, it was empty. Perplexed, I called out for my parents, but received no response. Whatever could be keeping them out so long? It had been more than three hours since they’d left, and they still weren’t back. I phoned both of them, but to no avail. Eventually, I flopped down onto a sofa beside the window and peered out every few minutes, hoping to catch sight of their car pulling into the driveway. Then, suddenly, I heard the sound of an automobile driving down the narrow street leading up to our gate. I bolted outside, desperate to see my family. But to my shock and horror, the vehicle reversing into our drive was not my mother’s cherry red mustang. It was a police car.

A willowy woman in a cop’s uniform approached me warily. “Are you Mr. Gardner?” She enquired. I nodded, too nervous to form words. “Well then,” she responded, “I’m going to need you to come with me.” I followed her into the police car, terrified. “What’s going on?” I asked, as soon as I had found my voice again. “I think it’s best you hear it from your parents, dear,” the woman replied sympathetically. But why was she sympathetic? Was there something for her to be sympathetic about? What could have happened that called for her sympathy?

The drive to the police station seemed to last years, although realistically, I knew it was an hour at most. I chewed on my nails, tugged at my hair and fidgeted in my seat all the way. When we finally reached the precinct, I darted out of the car, not bothering to wait for the policewoman to follow me. I had to know what had ensued, right away.

The receptionist, taking in my frenzied appearance, wordlessly showed me into a lounge decked with colourful curtains and flamboyant cushions. In direct contrast with the general cheeriness of the atmosphere were my parents, huddled together on a couch as if they’d seen a ghost. “Mum!” I exclaimed, feeling relief, then confusion, and finally even more worry wash over me. “Dad!”

My dad glanced up at me with haunted, unseeing eyes, but my mother continued to stare at the ground as if frozen in time. Dread began to seep through my skin, squeezing the air out of my lungs and trickling steadily down my spine. Something was terribly wrong.

“Dad, what’s happened?” I asked, panicking. When he didn’t reply, I turned to the secretary who had led me to them. “Please tell me what’s happened!”

“Mr. Gardner,” the lady began cautiously, “I’m so very sorry, but your sister... well, your sister’s dead.”

I stared at her disbelievingly, incapable of comprehending her words. Emma wasn’t dead. She couldn’t be. She was alive, and she’d come waddling through the doors any second now, whining that she was hungry. This lady was barmy if she thought Emma was really gone.

“Your parents were searching for decorations for your birthday party later this evening,” She continued. “It was a surprise, apparently, organised by little Emma.”

So they had remembered my birthday. It seemed a silly thing to fixate on, but it was the only thing my shellshocked mind could grasp at the moment. My parents were planning a party for me. Emma was planning a party for me. Realising that the woman was still speaking, I shifted my focus back to her.

“The girl spotted some fancy streamers in a shop window, and the next thing your parents knew, she was halfway across the street, right in the path of an SUV.”

“They tried to rescue her,” she continued. “She was rushed to the hospital, and for a while it seemed like she had a chance of survival. The doctors truly believed she was steady, but at eleven o’clock, her heart unexpectedly gave out.”

“It’s ironic,” Mum finally spoke, her voice scratchy and hoarse. “She died at the very same moment you were born fifteen years ago.”

I didn’t reply, too occupied with making sense of the whirlpool of thoughts and emotions flooding my brain. Emma had died. She had disappeared. She was gone forever, never to return. I had wished for that, hadn’t I? I had wished for her demise at the exact timing of my birth, and my wish had come true. So why wasn’t I whooping in joy? Why did I feel instead like the weight of the Earth had been cast upon my shoulders? And why did I want, more than anything, to hurt myself just as much as I’d hurt my innocent little sister? I had no answers.

The situation would be ridiculous if it weren’t so devastating.

Amal Shafiq and the Cat Burglar

It was eleven o’clock in the night and the village of Alfriston was as silent as a graveyard. In the upstairs bedroom of a rundown little cottage lay Amal Shafiq, a girl of twelve with far too much imagination and far too little sense.

Amal had been tossing and turning in bed for hours, terrified at the thought that she was all alone at home. Her family had relocated to this part of East Sussex a mere month ago, and she had already heard stories of the skilled cat burglars who frequented the area. She had brushed them off as tall tales then, but now that she was all by herself in her spooky new house, they seemed a lot less likely to be fabricated.

Just as she was finally on the verge of sleep, Amal heard a loud, crashing noise from the driveway. She shot up immediately, scrambled out of bed, and stumbled down the creaking staircase. Someone was outside the front door! The scared twelve-year-old peeked out of the window, trying to catch a glimpse of the intruder. Unfortunately, the foggy air outdoors made it impossible to catch sight of anything other than vague silhouettes.

Amal collapsed on a sofa, overwhelmed with terror. She was home alone in the middle of the night, with a robber outside who could break in at any moment. She had no way of contacting her parents, as the ancient telephone still hadn’t been repaired. Amal racked her brains, trying to come up with a plan. She decided to be brave, and live up to the example set by Jo March and her other role models. So she crept into the kitchen and grabbed the deadliest-looking knife she could find. She would sneak out through the back door and attack the looter from behind. Hopefully, the element of surprise would be enough to defeat them. If it wasn’t... well, at least she’d go down in history as a true heroine. With her family’s social standing, she may even be featured in the Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls series.

Silencing her daydreams before they could carry her away, Amal turned the knob of the back door and slipped into the narrow lawn outside. She slunk around to the front, ready to pounce as soon as she saw the invader. She took one step further, expecting to finally encounter them, only to see the tail of a cat disappear around the corner, leaving behind the debris of a plant pot it had destroyed minutes ago.

The Future of Transportation: Boring?

Did you know that depending on where you live, you could spend upto 243 hours in traffic every year? Yes, it’s true! This means that you may have wasted upto 10 days a year stuck in a vehicle. This may seem inevitable, but what if I told you that there could be a solution to the problem of soul-destroying traffic?

Elon Musk, best-known as the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, believes that the answer lies in underground transport. Since 2016, The Boring Company started by the American multi-millionaire, has been designing and constructing “safe, fast-to-dig, and low-cost” tunnels for transportation. Along with this, Musk has come up with an effective means of movement through these tunnels - a speedy yet safe system he calls Loop. If The Boring Company succeeds, the issue of traffic will be resolved for good. But is this success possible? It’s time to find out.

First, let’s understand what sets The Boring Company apart from other tunnelling corporations. The Boring Company, unlike most other companies in the burrowing business, is constantly modifying its methods to reach maximum efficiency. So far, it has iterated three generations of Tunnel Boring Machines - Godot, Godot+ and Prufrock. According to Elon Musk, each of these machines was “developed to further increase tunneling speed and reduce tunneling cost”. Most tunnelling companies spend between $100 million to $1 billion per mile. The Boring Company, however, has brought tunnelling prices down to 10 million dollars per mile, which is far cheaper than they have ever been.

The Boring Company dreams of not only improving the efficiency of tunnelling, but also revolutionising transportation today. Thus, its tunnels will be built to accommodate Elon Musk’s new transportation apparatus, Loop. Which brings us to our next question - what exactly is Loop and how does it work?

According to The Boring Company’s website, Loop is “an all-electric, zero-emissions, high-speed underground public transportation system,” that uses Autonomous Electric Vehicles (AEV), Tesla creations that can travel up to 150 miles per hour. These vehicles will “operate autonomously within the Loop system”. Every vehicle will carry a limited number of passengers, who can enter and exit the machine at surface stations, subsurface stations, and subsurface open-air stations. Each station will be approximately the size of two parking spaces, as it only needs to hold one AEV at a time. This is an advantage, as it means a station can be built anywhere from outside a school to inside a parking garage. Now, how is Loop different from a subway or metro?

Source: https://www.boringcompany.com/loop

In the words of Elon Musk, “Loop resembles an underground highway more than a subway system.” While in a subway, a train stops at multiple stations before reaching a final destination, Loop consists of smaller, car-like vehicles that, carrying upto 16 passengers per ride, travel directly to their terminus without stopping at each station on the way. For example, I imagine that if there were three groups of 16 people in a station, each group would be assigned to one AEV. The group travelling to the furthest location would set off first, followed by those headed for a midpoint, and finally the group going to the closest stop.

 Thus, using Loop is far more convenient than riding a subway train, for an equal or lower price.

 The Boring Company’s triumph would mean the eradication of traffic, which in turn would significantly lessen pollution, wastage of time, and road accidents.

The last question we must ask ourselves is, is “The Boring Company” a suitable name for this institution? My answer to that is yes, definitely. My mind almost turned to sludge while researching it. I have taken a major risk for your entertainment, and all I ask in return is that you share your feedback on this blog.

The innovations we need to avoid a climate disaster: A TED Talk by Bill Gates

Ever since the mid-twentieth century, humans have been at risk of a major climate disaster caused by global warming. Several philanthropists, including Jeff Bezos and Jeremy Grantham, have donated millions of dollars to the prevention of this calamity. One such benefactor is Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, who has not only funded the fight against climate change, but has also written the book “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster”. In this 47 minute podcast, Bill Gates explains the actions we must take to preempt a climatic catastrophe.

Gates, who has invested two billion dollars in combating climate change so far and plans to continue funding it, speaks about the “green premium”. This term refers to the additional cost of choosing a product with no emissions of greenhouse gases, such as an electric car, over a product that is not environmentally friendly, like a car powered by fuel. As the green premium drops, it becomes easier for ordinary people like us to switch to green products. Thus, Gates suggests that our goal should be to bring the green premium down to zero. To accomplish this, we need:

• people designing eco-friendly technology - Innovation
• investors funding these designs - Supply
• and customers choosing to buy these items - Demand 

Some of Bill Gates’ other priorities when stopping climate change are a) creating green hydrogen (a form of hydrogen that comes from renewable resources and can provide clean power for manufacturing, transportation and more), b) practising direct carbon capture (filtering the air, removing carbon dioxide, and sequestering it into a pressurised form for millions of years) and c) developing nuclear energy. He believes that he is doing his part to avoid a climate disaster by taking the above measures.

Gates tells us that we must begin fighting global warming now, as there is so much to work on, and so little time, before a climate disaster occurs. If we manage to prevent such a disaster, it will be one of humankind’s greatest accomplishments - far greater than even the prevention of World Wars.