To earth, Yours truly

Dear earth people, 

My name is...well, it cannot be communicated in any of the languages you talk on earth. In our planet we name people based on the body fragrance they carry as new born babies. Just like the fingerprints you have, each one of our babies comes with a unique odour at the time of its birth. And we name a baby based on the way the newborn baby influences our olfactory setup. But, unlike your finger impressions and the palm lines, the body fragrance of our babies remain exactly the same throughout their lives - no matter what. (Even when someone is turning into ash, her body still gives out the same fragrance that she had as a new born, though for one last time.) It means the names we give remain relevant forever. It also means we do not have to bother about remembering anyone's name; we can know the name of a stranger walking down the street by just taking a deep breath in that direction. It is as simple. And if I were to tell you the greatest beauty of our planet, I would vote for the uniqueness in the names we carry. There are no repetitions in our names; the 33 billion of us carry different names. I am sure you will find it hard to grasp that, just like how we found it difficult to understand what was meant by a lie - until, that chap whom you referred by the name PK, kept hitting all of us with that thing called lie.

Things were okay during the initial days of his return to our home, over twenty years back. PK (allow me to use the earth name, please) manned our 17th mission to your planet. Though he was not as smart as the earlier ones we sent, he had an inherent charm that helped him gloss over his certain lack of substance. Yes, we do not talk to each other in our planet, as PK might have told you. But things changed. We had huge expectations from his mission. One of its objectives was to study the life expectancy of the desert animals in various arid zones of the earth. But a rude shock was in store for us. Our efforts to trace anything relating to the mission from the samples PK had brought turned disastrous. There was not a single item that was related to the mission. All that we could find was loads and loads of worn out cassettes; and much worse all the tapes had the very same human's voice. It was just baffling and annoying at the same time. I mean, you spend something around $75 billion and all that you get in return is some strange earth lady's voice? We just could not believe it! PK had taken us for a very long ride. The Body for Inter-galactic Travels and Studies (BITS) immediately blacklisted him from all future missions and slapped a handsome penalty too.

Well, from our earlier mission notes we were aware that something called as love existed in earth and it drove people real crazy. Perhaps, PK was a victim. He was the first recorded case of alien love in our planet. Soon, our fraternity ended up empathising with him. But that is only one side of the story. 

As I said, all this happened before twenty years when PK got back to us. Within a few days of his arrival, we could see there was something strange with his actions, behaviour. But he said "Aall is well". (He actually started talking.) One fine morning he invited all of us to come to his two bedroom house, apparently to have a look at a sample he had collected from the earth. Reluctantly, for the sake of friendship and science, some of us went. It appeared to be something like a brass coin flicked from one of our highly guarded museums. But he said it was a magical talisman that an earth godman blessed him with. He did not stop there. Closing his eyes, he started chanting incoherent and cacophonous couplets, and claimed them to be the namtras taught by the earth god himself. He said the earth god and godmen chose him. He claimed he had acquired supernatural powers. He boasted he did not have the need to go to earth anymore. He announced just by sitting at his home, with eyes closed and the namtras on his lips, he would be able to know what was happening in your lives. He said a lot more. We were all thrilled by his words. The director of our 16th mission, who happens to be me incidentally, was the man who was the most excited one. I wanted to learn every bit of the namtras that PK uttered. He declared he knew the techniques to transfer his super human powers to us. Is there someone whom greed has not touched? Temptation trampled our scientific temper.

Soon there was a beeline in front of PK's house to learn the namtras and acquire the advertised out-of-the-world powers. Everyone wanted to be like that Kryptonian who landed on your planet and who whenever wanting to fly had only to raise his hand towards the sky. Naturally, it was impossible for PK to teach all of us who pestered him, or perhaps he did not want to teach all of us. So he started an education centre with a capacity of one hundred pupils in its first batch. He fancily called it zero2infin2years. The classes were for two hours every day for two years. Good so far. But our jaws dropped when he told us his tuition fees. Normally, we spend about $70,000 for a reputable 2-year MBA course. PK's course was priced at an astronomical figure of $1,50,000! But, though most of us will not be comfortable wearing the briefs over the trousers, who does not long to be a superman? The entire batch got sold out. Most of us took study loans. As planned our classes ran for two hours every day and went on for two years. By then PK had left his job with the laboratory. He acquired two husbands, three wives, and a lot of stones and trees. He just rocketed into the zone of elites in no time. All he did was just sit at his home, make us utter (yes, we too started talking) some gibberish, eat and sleep. 

I was simultaneously pursuing a fellowship program with the linguistics department of the Sentre for Advanced Alien Studies (SAAS). It was the third year of my study on earth languages and it involved analysing about 17,600 fully developed language formats of your planet on a daily basis. And to cut a long story short, gradually, towards the end of the second year of PK's course, I realised four things - that I was poorer by $1.5 lakh, that PK was richer by $15 million, that I was not getting anywhere near the promised infinity, and worst of all, that the blabber of PK did not conform to the syntax of any of the earth languages.

Luckily around the same time I remembered what one of your best detective characters had said "...when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." At last, I realised what he meant by truth. I understood what was a lie. Truth was something like air to us. We were living with it, but we did not know or realise or understand or even define what it was, as it was the default and the only setting we had -  until I realised PK was not speaking the truth; until I realised he had acquired the functionality of telling lies from you, the earth people. 

As you say truth alone triumphs, very soon most of us were aware that there is something called lying. It was an act by which you cover or misrepresent or twist or deform certain events for various reasons like profiteering, wooing others, making fun, seeking attention, so on and so forth. We had the best quality of life among all the planets of the three neighbouring galaxies, including the Milky Way. Perhaps, as I realise now, it was due to the fact that none of us lied; rather we did not know what was meant by lying though we were vaguely aware of such a thing existing in various planets including the earth; we also did not know what was a truth. We just had a mind that was understood by one and all instantaneously, and exactly in the same manner - all without exchanging even a single word. We did not have any hassle ever.

But PK changed everything forever. A lie. Two lies. Many lies. Liars. Good liars. Better liars. Best liars. Super liars. Petty lies. Pranks. Big lies. Betrayals. Crimes. Scams. If you have seen closely in some BBC videos how a zygote multiplies and ultimately becomes a bubbly baby, you can appreciate what I am trying to say. The only difference is that, in our planet a mother lie multiplied uncontrollably unleashing an over-sized, despicable demon. Okay, I think it was more of a cancerous cell than a zygote. 

Today, PK is in total control of our planet. He has assumed the title "The Supreme Lord". No wonder as he is the inventor of lies in our planet. People like me feel earth is a safer place now. I am planning to come there soon.

Yours truly,
.

(PS: By the way, that initial part about the unique fragrance, etc. is not true. Lying is fun.)