Remember the perennial favourite "Que Sera Sera" sung by Doris Day in Alfred Hitchcock's classic movie "The Man Who Knew Too Much"? She sings it to her little boy as a lullaby coaxing him not to worry about the future because "Whatever will be, will be."
Human beings, however, are madly curious to know their future. Witness the daily, weekly, monthly and annual columns like "What the Stars Foretell" that are published in most newspapers. Readers avidly read them without pausing to think how the forecast could apply to billions of people in different parts of the world just because they share a Zodiac sign! Prophets and seers appear daily on TV broadcasting their predictions very knowingly and condescendingly. To learn about their future in exclusive detail, people flock to astrologers, palmists, tarot readers and numerologists. The latter even suggest 'havans', 'pujas' and rituals to change the future from bad and undesired to good and wanted, never mind 'the moving finger having writ and moved on'! The craving as Omar Khayyam said is,
"Ah love! could thou and I with Fate conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire
Would not we shatter it to bits - and then
Re-mould it nearer to the Heart's Desire!"
On the global scene, perhaps the biggest future predictor has been the French seer, Michel de Nostredame, widely known as Nostradamus. His famous book,"Les Propheties", was published in 1555 and contains 942 quatrains which are supposed to predict future events the world over. To his supporters, his predictions are accurate. To his detractors, the predictions are vague, dateless, misinterpreted and moulded to fit events after they have occurred.
If we believe his supporters, Nostradamus predicted the Great Fire of London in 1666, the French Revolution 1789-1799, the rise of Napoleon and Hitler, the two World Wars, the atom bomb attacks on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the assassination of President Kennedy, and the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Centre in New York City. Coming to present times, an interpretation is that 2026 will be a turbulent year marked by a seven-month war, death of a great man and a naval conflict of seven ships. Believe it or not!
On a smaller scale but more accurate and technologically correct are the predictions made many years before their occurrence by writer Jules Verne in his science fiction novels. In "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" (1870), he wrote about an advanced electric-powered submarine, Nautilus. "From the Earth to the Moon"(1865) is about a moon landing, splashdown capsules in the Pacific and launch sites in Florida. "Paris in the Twentieth Century" (1863) describes gas-powered cars, skyscrapers, elevators, an automated transit network and electric streetlights. Verne also wrote about "picture-telegraphs" (fax machines), a network similar to the internet, green energy and solar sails. Made in the Nineteenth Century, the predictions all came true in the Twentieth and are still being improved upon in the Twenty-First Century.
Among thousands of predictions, the one that is the mother of all comes from the origin of the word '"trumpery". The first known use of this word was in the 15th Century and the word was derived from the French 'tromper' meaning 'to deceive'. The English word means 'something showy but worthless', 'trashy', 'paltry'. Synonyms of 'trumpery' include 'nonsense', garbage', 'nuts', 'blah', 'stupidity' and 'rubbish'. Samuel Johnson writing in "A Dictionary of the English Language" defined the word as "something fallaciously splendid; something of less value than it seems."
Was Samuel Johnson extraordinarily prescient more than 500 years ago or are we just fitting things in a mould already cast?
Giving him the benefit of the doubt, the Nobel Prize for the most outstanding prediction of all time goes to Samuel Johnson posthumously.
