Copyright@shravancharitymission
By Kamlesh Tripathi
By Kamlesh Tripathi
LEGACY OF INVENTIONS
What might be good for
you may not be good for your nation, and what might be good for your nation,
may not be good for humanity. What is good today may not be good tomorrow, but
may be good day after, and again a disaster the day day-after.
Thinkers, scientists,
innovators and inventors may create something with a noble intention, but crooked
minds traversing mother earth may hijack it for sinister motives. To come to
think of it inventions leave a legacy behind, where some may turn out to be the
serenades of life, while some a hounding baggage, difficult to carry.
When Sir Alexander
Fleming, Scottish biologist and botanist discovered Penicillin in 1928 he shared
the Nobel Prize for Medicine in the same year. Penicillin later developed into
antibiotics used for killing microorganisms; and since then it has saved many
lives and has reduced the agony of so many sick people. Fleming therefore must
have left the world with pleasant memories about his invention.
Realising what he had
created—Dynamite, a high intensity explosive that could have been a bane for
the society, Alfred Nobel bequeathed his fortune to institute the Nobel Prizes
for noble causes. Perhaps, he could visualise in his lifetime the ominous calamity
that could be struck with dynamite that he had invented, and to offset that he
instituted the Nobel Prize.
While Eadweard Muybridge
commonly referred as the ‘father of the motion picture’ must have exited the
world carrying pleasant memories, the same can’t be said about Lieutenant
General Mikhail Kalashnikov the inventor of AK-47 assault rifle, even when he
invented it for his country. Although, he was born to a peasant woman and was
an Orthodox Christian, he rose to be a Russian General with sterling innovative
attributes, but on hindsight his inventions appear to be for the wrong causes.
Approximately 100
million AK-47 assault rifles have been produced by 2009 and about half of them
are counterfeit, manufactured at a rate of about a million a year. Kalashnikov
maintained in his lifetime that his rifle was a ‘weapon for defence and not a
weapon of offence’ yet countless unwarranted killings must have taken place
through this invention.
Kalashnikov claimed he was always motivated
by service to his nation than money but then what was once good for the nation
could have been used by myriads of terrorists in illegal and dreadful killings.
In the final years of
his life he was saddened and anguished over his awry responsibility for the
millions of deaths that his invention caused, reveals his published letter to
the head of the Russian Church,
In his various public interviews
Kalashiikov who died at the age of 94 insisted that he created the AK-47
assault rifle and dozens of other firearms as a means to protect his country,
and rejected the responsibility for killings perpetrated by militants and
terrorists using his weapons.
“My soul ache is unbearable and has
one irresolvable question: if my rifle took lives, does it mean that I, Mikhail
Kalashnikov, aged 93, a peasant woman’s son, an Orthodox Christian in faith, is
guilty of those people’s deaths, even if they were enemies?” the leaked letter reads. He wrote the
letter sometime before his death.
Kalashnikov, even when he was baptized as a
child, spent most of his life as an atheist living in an officially atheist
country. It was only at the age of 91 that he felt the call of faith and
answered it. And as he was approaching the end of his life some doubts lingered
in his mind, that perhaps, through his invention he gave a chance to millions
of miscreants to massacre innocents.
Surely, inventions do leave a legacy behind,
and some legacies are insurmountable for the soul.
*****
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