Mahatma Gandhi shared his decision, to call off the Non-Cooperation Movement, with my hundred years old teenage son, after the Chaura Chauri incident in 1922. King John of England had consulted me before sealing the Magna Carta, about eight hundred years back. My father was witness to the rise and fall of the Mauryan Empire, around 4th century A.D. And my grandfather was witness to King Porus’s telling Alexander the Great, “Treat me as a vanquished king is treated!”

Confused? Then believe in what researcher Valter Longo has to say. Future human could expect to live for, hold your breath, eight-hundred years! News has reached us confirming that, “Scientists have now created a genetically engineered organism that lives 10 times longer than normal. It is the greatest extension of longevity yet achieved by researchers investigating the scientific nature of ageing and is directly relevant to human ageing and longevity.”

If Valter Longo were born five-thousand years ago then the claims in History, made in respect of my son, me, my father and my grandfather would not have been sneered at. But then the news item itself suggests against ‘shrugging it off as an unrealistic possibility.” So put on your thinking caps and come with me on a flight of imagination.

With life expectancy of eight-hundred years, you would never afford to wish anybody to live, for ‘only a hundred’ odd years. You would have lived through the Modern, Medieval and Ancient times. Renaissance and Reformations would be quite in your reach. You wouldn’t be dogged by what could be Elizabethan and what Victorian. More over a living member of Lord Rama could have confirmed his place of birth and the evidence of Ram Setu.

All your court cases should have been (hopefully) decided in your life span only. A General would be able to launch ‘a hundred years war’. Married couples would atleast celebrate four centuries of staying in matrimony (ooofff)! Your fifty-years old toddler (I don’t know if the sizes will also grow proportionately with the age) would sit in your lap.

You would never be intimidated by your physician since you would ‘live’ with your diseases, with time and age being on your side. Also, any small fry would be able to jeer at Baba Ram Dev’s prescriptions and advise him to retire to Himalayas for improving his Yoga skills and rekindle hopes in human beings to be able to live for a thousand years. Economists would have non-plan expenditure schedules covering millennia. Ekta Kapoor will weave plots for serials running for centuries.

In their condolence to those whose life would be cut short, people will exclaim, “He died young at the unripe age of 447 years.” The dead letter office in Amritsar will deliver letters to the addressees written to them centuries back. Government officials will retire at the age of 620 years.

I am not sure what Valter Longo and his research associates are doing for ensuring the longevity of the life of other creatures around although he has announced that longevity mechanism could be applied to ‘every living organism’. With a lust to live, I don’t think the humans will allow research to be made applicable to anything else. So, your pets will live with you for a very ‘short’ period. It is high time Madam Maneka Gandhi had put her foot down to have a similar package for the sub-humans as well.

All I can wish for the time being is ‘long live Longo!’ And beseech you, all Ladies and Gentlemen, to believe him since his intent is heartening. See you soon at the turn of the century!