In this episode, we’re doing something very different from what we have done on the show before. Instead of the past, we’re going to go into the future. We can do this, because as I just explained – I have complete knowledge over the past, the present and the future. That is to say, I have access to this knowledge. Sometimes if I can’t recall an event, I find it simple enough to travel into the past or the future and see it live. I’m lucky from that perspective. If I want to know who won the 2022 soccer world cup, I just go to Qatar at the right time and see it live there. And if I want to know who ate cookies from my cookie jar, I just go back in time and catch them in the act. From that perspective, you could consider me Doctor Who if you’ve seen that show about the time-traveling time lord. Of course I don’t have a TARDIS, and I don’t have an assortment of companions and most of all I don’t go about saving aliens all over the Universe. We’re going to meet Kalki – Vishnu’s upcoming avatar.
Now I bring up the TARDIS reference, because today our story starts not on Earth but in a spaceship. I’ll just refer to everything in the story as if it happened in the future. Because I went into the future, and for me these things had already happened. Do you see what I mean?
I also have a good reason not to specify the time frame. I don’t want to encourage you to gamble your savings on the stock market based on anything I say here today. I know some of you will still do it, but hey don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Let’s just say the story starts on a spaceship headed for Earth. Not the Earth we know and love, and whose air and seas we take every chance to pollute. The Earth in the story was a rather different Earth, with some positives, and some negatives. On the plus side, there was plenty of new technology to go about including supercomputers running every aspect of your life for you. On the negative side there was plenty of new technology to go about ruining every aspect of your life for you.
On board this ship, which was called the Shambhala by the way, there lived a family of three. Sumati, Vishnuyasha and their son Kalki. Kalki had been born in space, onboard this spaceship. Sumati and Vishnuyasha were old school parents. They did not believe in digital education for their children. They taught Kalki to always be mindful of his surroundings. And to use all his senses. You might say they were imposing their choices on the boy. But that was not really only temporary. Until Kalki had grown up. After that, he could make his own choices.
For that matter, Kalki sometimes already seemed grown up. He was so serious all the time, and wise beyond his years. Yes, he still had his holographic companion follow him around everywhere like most kids his age, but unlike most kids his age, he didn’t use his pet to play silly games. He was always looking to gather more and more information about everything. Right now, for example, he was discussing Earth’s history with his pet who had assumed the shape of a rabbit. He seemed to be very excited about this trip to Earth.
Vishnuyasha on the other hand was a little grumpy about their trip to Earth. “I still don’t see why we had to come all the way here for a tutor,” he complained to Sumati.
“We’ve talked about it dear!” she reminded him. “Kalki needs an education”
“He can get that back home on…..” began Vishnuyasha but Sumati cut him off.
“Sssh. Don’t say it. Narada promised not to give away too many details of the future on the show”
Vishnuyasha threw up his hands in exasperation. “But why Earth? Of all the choices available to him? The best our boy can hope for is to be a Climate Doctor, or Internet Doctor and that takes many many years of practice before he can hope to draw a salary. Back home, he would be a prince!”
Sumati looked her husband squarely in the eye and said “I’m convinced that Kalki is meant for so much more than just being a Doctor. Listen I didn’t tell you this before, but promise me not to laugh” She paused and continued “I had a dream that Kalki is actually an avatar of Vishnu”.
If she thought that statement was going to shock her husband, she couldn’t have been more wrong.
“Who’s Vishnu? Pal of yours?” he asked.
Sumati shook her head in disappointment. But she loved her husband, so she patiently explained to him that Vishnu was the God of preservation of the Universe. And also that Vishnuyasha’s own name paid tribute to Vishnu.
“Huh? Who would have guessed that our names actually meant something? And they are linked to Gods, you say?” asked Vishnuyasha.
Yeah, people are rather out of touch in the future. Things that should be considered history are already thought of as Mythology during the time of you listeners. In the future, there will be very little memory of these. Despite all my efforts.
Sumati continued her explanation even as Kalki and his rabbit pet walked over to join them. “Kalki says he already has found a University”.
“Yes,” said Kalki. It’s the Parshuram Institute of Higher Learning. I expect to learn how to be a warrior.
“Like Master Shifu or Yoda if you want a pop culture analogy,” his rabbit chimed in.
“I’ve never heard of that University,” Vishnuyasha narrowed his eyes with suspicion. “Have you, rabbit?”
“I have not. But my data banks are only full of Universities that advertise. If I don’t know about it, it probably doesn’t advertise. It does have a website though, so it probably exists”
“And yet, it is older than all the other Universities. Well, maybe not Nalanda and Takshashila.But the rest. My prospective guru, Parshuram’s credentials because he doesn’t just accept any students. He has only trained a few students all his life. But I am confident he will tutor me”
“If it is so exclusive, how will you know you will be accepted? How much is this going to cost me?”
“Not a rupee” chimed in the rabbit. “Parshuram provides 100% scholarship”
“How do you know that? I thought you didn’t know anything about the university” Kalki’s dad asked the rabbit. To which the holographic pet replied “I didn’t. I’m simply reading off of their website”
Vishnuyasha didn’t want to continue this conversation. He resigned to having a quick meeting with this alleged professor and then at least enjoying the rest of the week in a hotel resort. If Earth had any hotel resorts left, that is. But his mind wondered if this tutor’s name also referenced some god or the other? Unusual name he hadn’t heard before – Parshuram.
What he didn’t know was that Parshuram himself was another avatar of Vishnu. Yes this is the very same Parshuram who has trained a few prominent people in the Mahabharata – including Bhishma, Dronacharya and Karna.
The next morning, after a long day of clearing immigration queues, they were finally ready to head for this Parshuram institute of higher learning. But Kalki had another idea. He wanted to go alone. Sumati and Vishnuyasha hesitated but they had no data to back up their apprehension. The boy had never made a poor judgment call in his life. And when he added that he would not be taking his beloved pet with him, his parents realized that their boy was now all grown up. Sumati hugged her boy and shed a few tears, while Vishnuyasha kept assuring her that Kalki would be back in an hour once he found out that the Parshuram Institute for Higher Learning was a fake.
It was a good thing that Kalki went alone. Because the Parshuram Institute of Higher Learning turned out to be a cave. On a mountain. In the middle of nowhere.
Kalki was welcomed in by Parshuram himself. Politely. This was very different from when Parshuram had first met Ram,another avatar of Vishnu. That meeting had almost started with a battle. But we’ve covered that before in Episode 16.
“Why are you here?” asked Parshuram getting straight to the point.
“If you mean why am I here on Earth? That’s easy. I’m here to rid this world of evil”
“I meant here, in my home. Why did you come to me?”
“You can teach me how. As I recall, you did a fair bit of ridding-the-world-of-evil yourself in your time”
“It didn’t do me any good. Everyday feels like I’m back to square one. Besides, I haven’t kept my fighting skills up to date. I’m skilled with the ax, sure, but it wouldn’t stand a chance against the guns and blasters that modern armies have. And look at me, I’m completely out of shape. What can I teach you?”
Before Kalki could reply, Parshuram continued. “Have you thought for a second how pointless your work is? You are supposed to be a warrior waving a sword about and destroying all evil just before a major extinction event like the one that killed the dinosaurs. Why? Why not just let the Pralaya, the extinction event, do all the work? Also we are avatars of Vishnu, the preserver of the Universe, why are we destroying anything? Why not just leave that to Shiva?”
Kalki took a long pause before replying. “First, we are not exactly preservers. We balance things between creation and destruction. Sometimes it is necessary to scale down on creation by destroying some parts.
Second, unlike a Pralaya I’m not ridding the world of people. I’m just ridding the world of evil. There is a big difference there. It’s especially important before the Pralaya to remove evil, sort of like cleaning a home before you move into it.
Thirdly, and this has to do with the second point too, I’m not here to learn any physical skills from you. You’re right – you are out of practice. The evil I’m fighting is not physical. It’s digital. If you look through history, the digital world was completely secure for a long time before it got suddenly worse. Of course in the very early days of computing there were some viruses and hackers aplenty, but nowhere near the scale we know about now. Now we have bots that intelligently adapt to the communities they operate in, to maximize disruption. They’ve become experts at poisoning people’s minds. It’s not a far cry to attribute all of the world’s problems to these bots that sow discord”
“You may be right so far, but what you are describing is an abstract problem. How can I or anyone do anything to help?” Parshuram interjected.
“There is something that can be done. Through some….shall we say clever tricks, I managed to trace the route of all those disruptive bots to just one datacenter”
“Just one?! A single point of failure? Who would design such a thing?”
“The Umbrella Q corporation. One is not an unreasonable number. This Oohan datacenter is the only one that has escaped scrutiny. Everytime any cybersecurity officials are about to raid it, some other problem pops up and the raid is forgotten. The government doesn’t act, and people won’t act because no one knows about it”
Parshuram was silent for a long time. “Alright, you’ve convinced me Kalki. Every word you’ve said is correct. I know, because I came to a similar conclusion about the Oohan datacenter and the UmbrellaQ corporation. But I can’t train you. Best I can do is to give you a few things that I have been saving up for you – and then you’ll be on your way.”
He led Kalki into the next room. The first thing he gave Kalki was a parrot.
“What’s up, doc?” asked the Parrot. “You have a cracker for me?”
“Parrot, stay silent for 30 minutes,” Kalki said dismissively.
The parrot didn’t like that. “Watch it buddy. I’m not one of those digital pets. And I was serious about the cracker”
Parshuram sighed and pointed Kalki towards a bagful. Kalki gave the parrot one, and that seemed to alter its mood dramatically. It rested on Kalki’s shoulders and nuzzled his head affectionately.
Next Parshuram showed him a scooter with folding wings. It’s the latest model – the Devdatta 360, affectionately dubbed the flying horse. Great for low altitude flying, and needs recharging only once a year under moderate flying conditions.
“Read instructions carefully before operating” the parrot added helpfully.
“And lastly,” Parshuram said “Here’s your SWORD”
He gave Kalki a small blue square about 3 and a half inches wide.
“Hey it looks like a 3-d printed save icon” chimed in the parrot.
“It’s a floppy disk,” said Kalki. I read about these in the history books.
“Those books are wrong,” the parrot asserted. “It doesn’t look floppy to me. And where’s the disk? This is a square”.
“Look, that’s just how the name evolved from an earlier version of this, okay? What I’d like to know Parshuram is why you called this a SWORD? I was expecting something different. Is it possible you made a mistake?”
“No. This is it, lad. This disk is a SWORD. A Software Write-Once recovery device. S.W.O.R.D.”
“But this looks all dusty and ancient and stuff. Will this even work on the Umbrella Q datacenter? The datacenter probably has hundreds and even thousands of servers. Will I have to insert this into each one?”
Parshuram just smiled. “You’ll have to figure it out yourself, won’t you?”
“I’ve got it!” The parrot exclaimed. “The thing you are calling a floppy disk must be a cracker. A blue cracker meant for me. Oh please let me try to bite it?”
Kalki thanked Parshuram, booted up Devadatta and took off into the sky, with the Parrot trailing behind. Low-altitude flying was fun! If he didn’t have a mission to save the world, Kalki could try to join a Quidditch league back on his spaceship.
The parrot prattled away on the journey, which made it a quick one. Turns out its name was Shuka, and he had been waiting a long time for Kalki. He also had this ability to occasionally glimpse into the future. For example, “I see that we are going to a very cool place now. Both literally cool, and figuratively.”
“Right,” said Kalki, “it’s what I expect the UmbrellaQ datacenter to be like. They need to keep it really really cool, otherwise all those thousands of servers heat up and will melt that place down.”
“Why don’t we just burn it down?” asked Shuka.
“No! There are innocent people who work there. I’m not going to hurt them even if they work for an evil corporation. I’m going for something very subtle. I’ll drop down from the skylight and access those systems and take my chances”
“But if there are really thousands of servers, how will you use the floppy disk?”
But Kalki had no answer to this. Yet. And when he did get there and did exactly what he had described – he left Devadatta in hover mode next to the skylight, and simply hopped in. No one had stopped him. None of the defensive systems were expecting a physical intrusion. So even though his presence was discovered by the UmbrellaQ corp, there was nothing physical done about it. The UmbrellaQ bots were desperately stirring up debate on all kinds of topics on every public forum, but Kalki strolled along the aisles unchallenged.
Still Kalki knew a security guard would come by to do rounds. So he had to hurry.
“Shuka, help me scan these computers quickly. Look for a slot where we can insert this disk. And hurry. I think we have 5 minutes tops”.
But despite searching several aisles, there was not a single slot in sight.
“What about this one? This looks like a larger computer than all of the rest” Shuka suggested.
“No, silly parrot. That’s not a computer. That’s an air conditioner.” Kalki said. And stopped. Kalki stared at the parrot. The parrot stared back.
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking, Shuka?”
“Yes! That is, if you’re thinking about grabbing lunch at the cracker barrel on the way home.”
Kalki laughed. “If this works, I’ll get you a barrel full of crackers!”
He quickly looked over the Air Conditioning system and found it. Single point of failure indeed. In the system of complicated tubing, Kalki found the place that he was looking for. It was a little gap that would render the Air Conditioning master system inoperative. The color of the system perfectly matched that of the floppy disk. Once the disk was inserted, no one could tell it was even there. They wouldn’t find it, and it wouldn’t trigger alarms. The servers would continue operating without automatic shutdown. And that meant they would melt down.
“So that’s it then?” asked Shuka once they had gotten out of the datacenter. “The end of evil?”
“Maybe,” said Kalki. “I sure hope so. I thought this would be it. But I can’t help feeling that it was just the first step. Removing all those evil bots helps immensely, but I think we have a lot more to do. And despite what Parshuram says, there might be physical dangers too. What happened to Kali? The demon and personification of the Kali Yuga? He was in Episode 120, why didn’t he stop us today at the datacenter? Today’s mission went smoothly, it sounds a little too good to be true”
“Well, you better hurry,” Shuka said as his eyes slowly unfocused from seeing another vision. “Because the Pralaya is coming. And it is coming very soon.”
That’s all for now
Some notes on the show
All the facts known to people in 2022 are more or less accurate. His parents were indeed Sumati and Vishnuyasha. He was indeed trained by Parshuram. If you can call it training. And he had a parrot sidekick.
There are subtle differences – he was born in the Spaceship Shambhala and not in the town of Shambhala. And the winged horse was actually the Devadatta 360 flying scooter. Now I know that
The boundary between these Yugas is usually a Pralaya or Dissolution. These yugas are cyclical, there’s the Satya Yuga, the Treta Yuga, the Dwapar Yuga and finally the Kali Yuga. Each of these eras has a different length than the other.
We have seen the concept of Pralaya before, as early as Episode 1 – Unicorn Fish.
There is the concept of a deity yet to arrive in a number of cultures around the world. There is the prophesied return of Jesus Christ, of Maitreya in Buddhism
Shambhala is considered to be the inspiration for the mythical Shangrila in the Kunlun mountains in modern-day Tibet. If you’ve watched the Doctor Strange movie, there’s a reference to Shambhalla in it. Bit of an easter egg really.
We have previously met Kali, the personification of the Kali yug when he caused many of the events in the Nala and Damayanti story in Episode 120.
With this we have covered all of Vishnu’s avatars. Check the links to those earlier episodes in the show notes on the website sfipodcast.com.
That’s all for now.
Next Time
In the next episode, we’ll go back to the Ramayana where Hanuman will continue to explore the island of Lanka. Not as a tourist but on a mission to find and rescue Sita!
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A big thank you to each of you for your continued support and your feedback.
Thanks for listening and I’ll see you next time!