Close Encounters with Isaac Asimov

I was introduced to Isaac Asimov on the footpath of the Daryagunj Sunday Book Market. This was a regular hunting ground for books with my friends during my college days at Delhi University in 1999 or so.

Our purpose of the visit used to be to munch on a few mouth-watering old Delhi street food, buy some dirt cheap books and then watch a movie at Golcha or Delite cinema halls.

It was not the time of multiplexes (though the first PVR multiplex cinema came in 1997 at Saket, Delhi), smartphones; dumb phones were for the rich. We had a good time, as we were in real time and our love of books added to this exploration.

The Foundation Trilogy was the first Isaac Asimov book series that I read. I purchased it at the Daryagunj Sunday Book Market. The same series about which Elon Musk had quite popularly stated that the Foundation series had inspired him to start SpaceX. Then I had no idea what SpaceX was.

The Foundation Trilogy is comprised of Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation, published in the 1950s. Pursuing my grads in English Literature from DU, Asimov was a pleasant detour with future-ready fast forward ‘entertaining space opera’ away from the dark novels of Emily Bronte or family dramas of Jane Austen or tragedies of Thomas Hardy and not to forget the bard, Orwell, Becket, et al.

On his 103rd birth anniversary, Isaac Asimov, the American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University stands tall among all futuristic writers.

During his lifetime, Asimov was considered one of the "Big Three" science fiction writers, along with Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke.

What would be more fulfilling to a person who achieved what he aspired for, as Asimov told the world in 1990, about two years before his demise on 6 April 1992 – “I have had a good life and I have accomplished all I wanted to, and more than I had a right to expect I would.”