Maturity comes with age. A mature mind is one which has seen the vicissitudes of life, felt the miseries of the aged and cried with the thundershowers. Man is but a wanton fly tom nature’s wrath, to borrow an allusion from Shakespeare’s play King Lear. The blind Gloucester tells a mad king, “As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.” But believe it or not, science has an explanation for anything and almost everything under the sun. Otherwise, man would have failed. In this perpetual struggle for survival and supremacy between nature and man, there is – and can be - no place for the fragile hearted. Survival of the fittest is a scientific law. But it is also a moral ignominy.

But can science explain man’s imaginative powers? The Beatles leader, John Lennon, had sung his song Imagine, with a mission in mind. He had dreamt about the future, about the human progeny and what they ought to do.

“Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us, only sky

Imagine all the people
Livin’ for today
Ah

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too
Imagine all the people
Livin’ life in peace
You

You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope, someday you’ll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man

Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world
You

You may I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one”

But we all are grown-ups. With time and its passage, come certain constructs that put fetters on the human imagination. In an age when ChatGPT will rule over our consciousness, I think the time has arrived to change our lifestyles accordingly. But can the words of a literary work, created after years of thought and painstaking research, be changed by the future generations of men? Just think over this… If Shakespeare’s lines in his plays are to be tampered with now, won’t the ghost of the playwright himself come to haunt us? Just like Hamlet’s father in his play Hamlet?

Even if the scare of the haunt doesn’t, well, scare us, do we have the right to run our own penmanship over the Folio texts? Are we acting out roles in a Theatre of the Absurd? And the improbable?

The Grand Dame of crime fiction, Agatha Christie, would have turned a hundred and thirty three years today. Granted, that no person, till recorded time, has lived this long. But even if the mortal body perishes, the immortality of her works ism secured for posterity. According to UNESCO’s Index Translationum, Christie remains the most and widely translated individual author of all time. People of all ages, of all nationalities, and of all ethnicities love and enjoy an Agatha Christie novel.

The same readers were peeved when media reported that some of the books by Christie, along with those by Ian Fleming and Roald Dahl, are coming out in an abridged format in the newer editions of these timeless classics. This is supposedly being done to suit modern sensibilities. I agree with the double-Oscar winning American actor, Tom Hanks, when he said that he will ‘boycott’ such abridged editions. The actor, in an interview to the BBC, said, “I’m of the opinion that we’re all grown ups here. And we understand the time and the place and when these things were written …. Let’s have faith in our sensibilities here, instead of having somebody decide what we may or may not be offended by … I would be against reading any book from any era that says ‘abridged due to modern sensitivities’.”

The actor whom starred in Hollywood films like Forrest Gump, is, himself, working on a novel. Salman Rushdie, in the same context, said that publishers should allow books “to come to us from their time and be of their time… And if that’s difficult to take, don’t read it.”

Following the reports of censorship – impending – of classic works of fiction such as Matilda and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Puffin Books UK, the publishers of Roald Dahl’s works, had to announce that they are likely to go ahead with publishing uncensored versions of his classics.

Agatha Christie’s novels like Death On The Nile, may undergo the axe. But I take this opportunity to question readers: Will it not be a fallacy, if not illegitimate? To show our penmanship – albeit a mutilation – over immortal literary works, is gross erroneous. Whom are the publishers catering to? Readers who read Agatha Christie or Roald Dahl or for that matter any of the all-time greats in literature, are always – repeat, always – open minded. They possess an inclusive, rather than exclusive, minds. All these works must be read, and I agree with Tom Hanks and Salman Rushdie here, with the context in which they were written, kept well in mind.

But axes arrive in the publishing world at different junctures. Closer home, in our very own land, the theories of Sir Charles Darwin, prominent figure of the nineteenth century, are being axed from NCERT text books in schools. Darwin’s On The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection was published in 1859 when he was just fifty years old. According to a scholar, “This was as important a publication in the entire history of science as Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687).” When Darwin had published his book, he was well and fully aware that he was inviting the ire of the Church. But he laid the foundation stone for modern scientific thought. The very idea that school children will be barred from Darwinism, sounds preposterous, unscientific and totally dictatorial.

To lead lives in and with censorship, is the bane (or boon, whichever way you may look at it) of modern living. That is the sad (or certain state-wise) story of, our lives.

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