Have you ever woken up in the morning, brushed your teeth, made yourself a cup of coffee only to realize that there’s a humongous bulldozer sitting in front of your window ready to demolish your house to make way for a bypass? The authorities claim that they had sent a notice to you and you yell back at them saying that you didn’t receive it. And then after a few minutes of yelling and laying in the mud, in front of the bulldozer, your very good friend for six years comes up to you and says that he needed to tell you something important and that you should go to the village bar with him.

Oh… and that “something important” is actually two somethings – the best friend for six years is actually an alien species from the planet Betelgeuse and that the earth is about to be demolished in approximately 12 minutes. “How?” and “Why?” are the first things that would enter your mind.

And the answer is a painfully cruel irony – to make way for an intergalactic bypass.

At this point, I must mention the name of the heroes of this story – Arthur Dent, the helpless human and Ford Prefect, the alien from Betelgeuse. Since we are dealing with aliens and “primitive apes” (we, dumbos) alike, it can get really messy if we are not on a name basis now.

The entire story revolved around these two central characters along with two others – Trillian, another Earthling who had escaped Earth and President Beeblebrox, the notoriously mischievous President of the Galaxy. But I’m not gonna be talking about the whole story because I’m not here to give a summary – I’m gonna be talking about the most iconic and the absolutely hilarious parts of the story that made it an iconic masterpiece.

One of the main reasons I loved this book so much is because Douglas Adams didn’t write this story as an Earthling; he wrote it as an insignificant person in the space which made the story much more convincing (if the concept of the Earth being demolished wasn’t convincing enough :D) and far more hilarious than it would have ever been. He looked at the customs of the Earth as if it were an alien and primitive, while the rest of the universe, which is mind-bogglingly big and full of weird alien species, seemed to be… normal.

Orbiting [the star, Sol] at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea. Narrator, The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy

Douglas Adams

Really gives us something to think about, doesn’t it?

Another one of my famous quotes from the book is this one by Ford Prefect. It was in reply to a question asked by Arthur who was very concerned about filling himself up with 3 pints of beer just before lunchtime.

Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so. Ford Prefect, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Douglas Adams

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a classic blend of humour encased in a nutshell of sanguine universal concepts. The thing that stands apart in this book is that everything is treated as a relative piece of information – everything is a small cog in the bigger picture (and the bigger picture is a small cog in a yet bigger picture and so on). To a code geek, this statement has godly status.

If one wants to understand what the universe looks and behaves like, with a lot of comedy along the way (if you have seen the Big Bang Theory, you will find resemblances), this book is definetely for you. And those of you who are not sure, why not give it a try? This is a book all can enjoy and learn with – humans and aliens alike.

Which one are you?