Time 'cooks' all beings

The world’s first atomic explosion in New Mexico was conducted exactly 65 years ago. “On that day (July 16, 1945), we knew that the world would not to be same,” Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Manhattan Project, under which the bomb was built, said in alater interview.

“A few people laughed... A few people cried... Most people were silent, I remembered a line from the Bhagavad Gita: Krishna, the avatar of Vishnu, is trying to convince the Prince Arjuna that he should do his duty, and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds’ .”

Everyone present at the test must have thought of death and destruction in one way or another, Oppenheimer added in the interview. As a mushroom-shaped orange fireball went up on the horizon from the explosion, Oppenheimer claimed to have thought of yet another line from the Bhagavad Gita, “If the radiance of a thousand suns/were to burst into the sky/ that would be like the splendour of the Mighty One...”

(The light from the detonation was indeed so piercingly bright that residents from a faraway community would swear that the Sun came up twice that day. Even more astonishingly, a blind girl ‘saw’ the flash behind her eyelids 120 miles away!)

That has not stopped some sceptics from casting aspersions on Oppenheimer’s literary allusions . They allege that having just said ‘It’s done’ during the blast, the scientist must have added the Sanskrit conceit as a cosmetic afterthought. Nevertheless , his story has become part of the nuclear folklore.

In retrospect, Oppenheimer’s evocation of ‘God as Death’ seems entirely appropriate while witnessing the deadly radioactive cloud. But did he make a mistake in his translation ? For, Krishna says, “Kalo-asmi lokakshya-krita-pravruddho ( Time am I, born to decimate people).”

Is it Kala as Time, or as Death? It’s true that the two terms are often used interchangeably, yet some scholars say when Kala is seen as Time, the meaning changes radically: it turns into a memento mori or ‘a reminder of our mortality and finite lifetimes’ , writes M V Ramana in Bomb of the Blue God. “It then becomes more akin to western notions of the ‘slow March of Time’ and thus having little to do with the immense destruction caused by a nuclear explosion.”

Slow or fast, Time is still a killer, which ‘cooks’ all beings, the Mahabharata cautions.