Question

It Happened Tomorrow (ed.) Bal Phondke

Answer 1

It Happened Tomorrow, edited by Bal Phondke, is an anthology rather than a single narrative, but one of its most compelling and frequently read stories is ‘The Ice Age Cometh’ by the renowned scientist and writer Jayant Narlikar.

The story begins with a climate emergency of terrifying proportions. Mumbai, a city known for its tropical humidity and bustling heat, suddenly experiences an unprecedented, plummeting drop in temperature. Within days, the city is buried under massive snowdrifts, and the familiar sights of the coast are replaced by a frozen, white wasteland. The sudden onset of this artificial ice age brings society to a standstill, causing panic, infrastructure failure, and the very real threat of human extinction.

As the world scrambles to understand if this is a natural cycle or something more sinister, a group of scientists discovers that the phenomenon is linked to a massive, unstable atmospheric experiment that has gone wrong. They realise that the Earth’s climate balance has been violently tipped, and the ice is spreading at an unstoppable rate. The protagonist, a dedicated scientist, realises that the only way to reverse the damage is to launch a daring, high-risk mission to intercept the atmospheric disturbance before the planet becomes permanently frozen.

The narrative follows the scientific team as they race against time, working in freezing conditions with limited resources to execute a project they call the ‘Invasion of Indra.’ It is a tense, high-stakes battle in which the laws of meteorology and physics are their only weapons. They must overcome immense scepticism from government officials who are paralysed by fear and bureaucracy, choosing instead to trust their calculations and the hope that they can save the environment they have lived in their entire lives.

In a dramatic climax, the team launches their intervention into the upper atmosphere. The tension is palpable as they wait to see if their theory will hold or if the experiment will fail, leaving the world to freeze. The story concludes with the success of their mission as the unnatural cold recedes, allowing the sun’s warmth to return to Mumbai. It is a powerful narrative that highlights both the incredible capability of human science to solve catastrophes and the terrifying ease with which we can disrupt the delicate balance of the natural world.