Story so far: After the competition is over, Prahasta takes the princes to the palace to look at their performance charts.
Akshayakumara: I have a question for you about the vimana. Whenever I ask father about it, he becomes sad. Even Meghnath doesn’t tell us anything.
Prahasta gestures to him to be quiet and looks around to see if anyone has heard.
Prahasta: This is something very personal to Ravana. All right, I will tell you all about it but not here.
Prahasta boards the vimana with the six boys and switches on stealth mode. He pilots the craft to the dense forests of Nikumbala and enters a grove of banyan trees with an ancient shrine inside it.
Prahasta: Now, the story of how we got the vimana is one of a broken relationship between two cousins: your father and Kubera. You know that Ravana focuses on winning wars and being technically advanced, rather than worry about the associated good and bad deeds.
Atikaya: What’s wrong with that? As a king, he has to be strong and expand the kingdom.
Prahasta: Yes, but Kubera is more concerned about being good and working towards peace.
Akshayakumara: Well, both seem to be logical.
Prahasta: When Brahma gifted the flying chariot, designed by Vishwakarma, to Kubera, Ravana was very excited and would borrow it to fly around the world and gather technical information from every field. He brought this knowledge to Lanka and the country flourished.
Meghnath: We became technically advanced in every aspect. The army was equipped with high-precision weapons to could target distant places. This led to more wars, more deaths and more suffering during the process of expanding the kingdom. This was against Uncle Kubera’s ethics. So, he stopped lending the Pushpaka Vimana to father.
Prahasta: One day, when the two met, Ravana asked Kubera for a favour.
Ravana: All right, don’t lend me the vimana but allow my father-in-law Mayasura, who is as great an architect as Vishwakarma, to study the Pushpaka Vimana for reverse engineering.
Akshayakumara: That’s a great idea.
Prahasta: But his intentions were not in keeping with Kubera’s ethics.
Kubera: I will allow you to replicate the technology if you promise not to use it for warfare.
Ravana: That doesn’t make sense. If I stop being a warrior, our enemies will engulf us. Also, I would love to learn the science behind the Pushpaka Vimana: of controlling devices through electromagnetic waves from the brain.
Kubera: Learning new things is good. But technology has to be in the hands of the right people.
Ravana (angrily): What makes you think I am not the right person?
Kubera: You cause suffering to neighbouring kingdoms.
Ravana: You are also from a family of warriors. It is natural to wage wars to expand the kingdom. It’s the survival of the fittest.
Kubera: No Ravana. It is worse than that.
Ravana: What? I am a strict king, the protector of my family and people. I don’t want to see my people suffer. Ask the people of Lanka how much they love me. What is your problem in my being strong?
Kubera: I can’t argue with or explain things to those who don’t understand.
Ravana: You are my elder brother. I would not take this from anyone else.
Kubera understands that he has spoken too harshly and tries to apologise.
Ravana: It’s not my brother talking. It’s the devas’ well wisher and friend. I asked you politely but you did not respect that. Now get ready to face the consequences.
Ravana storms out of Kubera’s palace.
Atikaya: Both sides are right. What happened next?
Meghnath: Grandfather, I have heard this story before. But, today, you have introduced something new. What is this science behind controlling through electromagnetic waves from the brain?
Prahasta: Vishwakarma was always in search of new technologies and Brahma helped by making him time travel. When Vishwakarma wanted to build a machine that would move just by thinking about it, Brahma sent him to the 21st century to learn from Neuralink.
Meghnath: What is Neuralink?
Prahasta: A company that will be founded by Elon Musk and seven others (Max Hodak, Benjamin Rapoport, Dongjin Seo, Paul Merolla, Philip Sabes, Tim Gardner, Tim Hanson, and Vanessa Tolosa). It will build “microchips” that can be implanted into the human brain to allow it communicate with electronic devices.
Akshayakumara: Can you give us more details?
Prahasta: On March 20, 2024, Noland Arbaugh, a 29-year-old quadriplegic patient will become the first human recipient of a Neuralink implant that will allow him to control a computer cursor with his thoughts to play video games. The next day, Musk will announce that they were testing a product called Blind Sight (to help visually challenged people see) on monkeys.
Trishira: How does that work?
Prahasta: Through the Brain Machine Interface (BMI), which helps the brain communicate with a machine. First, an electronic chip is implanted in the brain with a robotic electrode injector. The electrodes and sensors collect signals from the brain, classify them and send them to the interface that communicates with machines.
Atikaya: It sounds crazy but I can sort of visualise how it works. But how did Vishwakarma decode it and make it work in our time?
Prahasta: Patience. I will explain.
The author is the founder and CEO of Vaayusastra Aerospace, an IIT-Madras IC graduated ed-tech company and a Ph.D. research scholar in Education at NITTTR.
Now that you have read the story, try your hand at this activity. This is a Wordoku. It’s just like Sudoku but, instead of numbers, you have the letters BRAINS. Fit these letters in the grid so that each letter appears only once in each row, column and 2*3 grid.
