They invented the wrong pill in the sixties, and it is only now, four decades later, that we realise this. What mankind is really looking for is the knowledge pill. Here's how it will work: You know nothing about the photo electric effect, let us assume (not that you need to assume too much; after all, how many of us are familiar with the theory which won Albert Einstein the Nobel Prize?).

Troubled by a deep urge (of the sort that sometimes strikes pregnant women, although in their case the urge is usually towards food) to understand the P E effect, you go to your nearest knowledge-pharmacist.

He gives you a pill, to be swallowed within 10 minutes of opening the packet. Hey! Presto! You have ingested everything mankind knows about the P E effect, and now know more about the subject than even Einstein ever did.

Or you want to understand Picasso. Why would he paint women with eyes and nose and mouth and ears all on the same side of the face? Did he have some ugly neighbours?

Again, you walk into your knowledge-pharmacist's shop and look under the shelf! The photo electric effect was easy, you just needed to take one pill. Picasso is a trifle more complicated.

You need to take at least three pills to understand him. You do so, and now you are on par with the best Picasso experts in the world. Knowledge becomes truly democratic, accessible, and just a swallow away.

Thus it is for relativity, the gross national product of Papua New Guinea, the smile on the face of Mona Lisa, the binomial theorem, why, even the more abstruse portions of this column. Ignorance is eliminated in one gulp (or two or three, as the case might be), and man is no longer differentiated from man on the basis of knowledge alone.

Schools and colleges become irrelevant since everything can be bought in bottles and knowledge can be
ingested with a glass of water. The effects (to carry the fantasy further) are permanent. Once you understand the PE effect, you will never forget it, unlike in today's world where you lose touch with what you learnt in school and college once you have graduated from them.

What a wonderful world, did I hear you say? Wait. And you will read (or swallow) the story by a modern Chekov about a man who has everything, all the pills in the world, but no real happiness (despite popping pills from a bottle marked 'happiness'). He has wealth, knowledge, ideas, plans, but spends all his time sitting in the corner of his huge mansion popping pills from various bottles, paying no attention to the world out there.

People will hark back to the good old days when knowledge came through experience and the lived life, not ready-made and out of bottles. They will talk about ignorance as the greatest gift of mankind, and the search for the pill of knowledge rather than the pill itself as being the aim in life.

But is that worth it? All these thoughts are the result of watching the U.S. bombing Afghanistan. Wars make philosophers of us all. And we don't need pills to tell us the truth.