THE GREAT INVENTORS !

THE GREAT INVENTORS  !!

we are in the habit of taking everything for granted. As darkness descends, as the Sun sets, we just switch on the lights. we turn on the tap when we need water in our houses . we have gas to cook our meals - we do not have to go into the forest to get firewood for kitchen as our ancestors did in the past. We also do not go out  searching of food everyday. Our food is available ,whenever needed - both cooked and uncooked - for a payment.They are so many  comforts in day to day living now. It was not like this always.

Yes ! Many things that we take for granted in our daily life now, were never there until the recent past. Come to think of it, less than two centuries back there was no electricity (fan, electric light, heater,cooler ACs- as you keep reflecting, the list keeps growing longer and longer), no railways, no cars or motorised vehicles, no
telephone,no radio,noT.V. ,no music recordings of any kind, no cinema, no air travel and not even the ubiquitious bicycle!! Most of these things are in general use for less than a hundred years. The internet came just the other day. There was a time when sunset meant darkness -end of major activities. Then dim Oil lamps provided a ghost of a light in the dark streets of big cities. Elsewhere it was total darkness. Homes were dimly lit with flickering candles, lanterns or oil lamps.

Even a person of ordinary means today possesses things a king of the olden days could not have dreamt of ! Emperors would have given away a fortune to get a working television network or a train service or,for that matter, even a tape recorder.

And yet (think of it) we never feel grateful to those very few magnificent men and women who brought about this qualitative change in the human race. They are all but forgotten ! Their birth anniversaries pass unnoticed.

To borrow from Winston Churchill's once famous remarks, said in another context, '' never have
so many (read- 'billions') owed so much to so few". The enormousness of the human civilization's debt to these few inventors becomes apparent when you are reminded that
once upon a time there was no WHEEL !!