Dinner Party
It was a regular Sunday morning, or probably a regular Sunday evening, or what the hell, may be even an irregular one, Frank had no idea. All he knew was that he was still in his bed and that his head was making periodic attemtps to explode. He had a vague memory of hearing the door bell once when he was still asleep. He had assumed that it was the milkman and then had cursed the landlord for not doing anything about that extremely unpleasant sound the bell used to make. But that was long ago. It felt as if he had slept for ages after that.
He wanted to check the time. He looked around and realized that the only watch in the room was kept on the side table facing the window. This annoyed him. Why the hell should a watch be facing the window? Who was it trying to tell the time to? He thought of turning it around but soon realized that that would require him to lift his hand and lifting his hand was the last thing he wanted to do at that moment. The first thing he wanted to do was to have a cup of coffee. “Tara!” he shouted, gathering up some left over energy from the corners of his body, hoping that in all these ages he had been sleeping, the landlord had somehow appointed a maid called Tara who would be willing to serve him coffee. He was wrong. No one responded. “May be she had left already,” he consoled himself, “why would a maid stay in the house at such a late hour of the day?” This reminded him that he did not know the time yet and he had no idea why he was assuming it was already too late.
He looked at the watch again. It was still facing the window. He stared at it for five minutes, trying to make it turn with his will power. Didn’t work. Damn it. Time, was a piece of information that should have been easily accessible to everyone. He had never before in his life faced such difficulties in finding out what time it was and hence was puzzled that he was not able to do it then. It was not usual. He was probably missing something. May be there was a mirror somewhere in the room that would show him the other face of the watch. No, there was not. May be, the body of the watch itself would turn transparent. It did not. Then finally, as one last desperate attempt, he closed his eyes and concentrated hard hoping to make a telepathic connection with someone who knew the time. This didn’t work either. He got completely vexed and decided that once and for all, he was going to end this idiocy. He had the right to know what time it was and he was going to find it out against all odds. He shook his head, which hurt by the way, and decided that it was somewhere around 4 pm. That’s all. It was a Sunday and it was 4 pm. He took a mental note of it and warned the world to not argue with him about it. Good. A regular Sunday evening, then. Or may be an irregular one.
Through the corner of his eyes, he got a glimpse of the mess near his wardrobe. This made him uneasy. He closed his eyes, because although he was still in his bed, he knew that there were several things around him that he didn’t like. The mess of dirty clothes, empty beer cans and old newspapers was just one of them. He had long struggled with this dilemma and was still not even close to a solution. The dilemma was to choose between the boredom of arranging his room every now and then and the agony of living in a mess. If he chose to do one, the other wouldn’t happen, true. But his problem was, why even choose one? Couldn’t he, in some way, evade both of them? Why, in other words, was it so natural for the things around him to go from bad to worse when left to themselves? Couldn’t they just behave themselves even when he was not looking? He had learnt in high school that it had something to do with the second law of thermodynamics, the one that said that entropy always increased. He had always believed that it was some kind of cosmic error, a bug in the source code of the universe. He wished he had access to the code. He had worked on big software projects before and had the ability to handle thousands of lines of code. He knew he could deal with the universe.
All these thoughts about source code and software projects reminded him of his computer. It was a small, regular laptop with very humble features just sufficient to surf the internet, chat with friends, listen to songs and watch porn. His laptop was perhaps the only exciting thing in the otherwise monotonic and often depressing state of affairs around him. It used to be on and working most of the times running Frank’s favourite instant messenger. He would, every once in a while, take small five minutes breaks and check whether someone had pinged him. Finding a message from someone was always exciting and not finding anything was disappointing. So this was a kind of game he used to keep himself busy with.
He decided that it was time for one of those five minutes breaks now. His laptop was lying very close to him fortunately, so that he did not have to move too many limbs in order to touch the mousepad, which took the laptop out of its sleep mode and showed the extremely cluttered desktop. There were three different messages. He made a quick check if any one of them was from Olivia and then soon remembered that she wasn’t there in his list anymore. He had removed her a few months ago, as soon as she had announced her engagement. He felt bad, not because Olivia was engaged – that was past now – but because he did not have any messages from her. The fact that she was not on his list and could not send him messages in principle did not stop him from feeling bad. He felt bad out of habit, because it had been almost hardwired into him now.
Olivia was that girl he had met in his Economics class back in college. She had a round face, that sometimes gave a false impression that she might be plump. She was not plump of course, but was not too thin either – the dimensions that would make one feel that it might be fun to use her as a pillow. She was so soft that a lover trying to plant a passionate kiss on her body would be as pleasantly surprised as a kid who puts a date in his mouth and realizes that it’s seedless. Her hair were dark and short with a few strands hanging out of the otherwise well kept bunch, blocking her left eye on the way and finally tickling the area around her chin. She had a peculiar way of sitting in the class and listening to the lectures. In her right hand, she would have a pen which she would be chewing most of the times and her left hand would be pressed between her two knees in a slightly awkward but cute way. Overall, she was a kind of girl who was attractive without being too beautiful, the kind that Frank liked.
From the day the course started, Frank began doing all kinds of things to impress her. He would buy her gifts without any occasion, do her homeworks for no reason whatsoever, give her a shoulder to cry on whenever she felt bad, fight with people who didn’t like her, write her songs, drop her to the airport and so on. Very soon, she gave him a peck on his cheek and announced that he was her best friend. He was happy. His efforts had finally shown some results. Best friend was like the acme. If you were the best, you couldn’t get any better. So all he had to do now, was to probably propose to her in a nice, romantic restaurant and things would be settled for all. He would marry Olivia and then live happily ever after. He mulled over it a lot and thought about the restaurant he would take her to and the ring he would propose her with and daydreamed about the way he would kiss her at the altar and the place they would go for their honeymoon and so on when finally, two weeks later, she introduced him to her boyfriend. She said this was going on for some two months now and she was sorry that she never mentioned him to Frank but she swore that Frank was the first person to know about him and that no one else had any idea till now. And then she asked Frank if he was free the coming Saturday and whether he would want to join the two for dinner at that same restaurant where Frank had finally decided to propose to her. Frank was in major confusion all this while. This made him pretty much speechless and hence he just kept nodding. Olivia said she found this cute and gave him another peck on his cheek.
This was the beginning of his misery. Two years passed since then and nothing changed, except, for Olivia’s boyfriends. Frank still did her homeworks, he still bought her gifts and he still would be the first one Olivia would introduce her boyfriends to. This killed him. It wasn’t a kind of killing that a murderer would do though, for murderers are supposed to kill. It was rather the kind a confused barber would do – you go and ask him politely for a haircut and he pulls out a gun and kills you instead and then asks you for the fees too, because, may be a shot through your head is what he thinks you asked him for. Hadn’t Frank made it very clear that all he wanted was a regular haircut and not, for example, a shot through his head? Or couldn’t the barber at least give him some time to run or may be just a simple warning before pulling the trigger?
This ended though, or so he thought, when Olivia finally announced her engagement. Of course, Frank was the first one to know about it. He decided that this was the end, that this was the deepest one could possibly fall and that he was finally going to forget her completely. He removed her from his friend list, deleted her number from his phone and had a refreshing bath. He was all set to begin a new life.
This was all past now. He had not talked to Olivia in months and did not want to talk to her in future either. He was living a better life now, at least better than what it was earlier. Right now, all he knew was that it was a Sunday evening, he was still in his bed and there were three messages on his desktop that he had not checked yet. This made him feel a little enthusiastic. He read them one by one. The first one was by Sam. It said, “hey awesome party dude… thanks again… call when you are back in your senses…” This made many things clear, especially the heaviness in his head. He had had a party in his room the previous night and he had been drunk. Others had also gotten drunk. He looked around his room and could identify each person’s mess. There was that stinking crud that came out of Peter’s bowels immediately after his eighth tequilla shot. It had dried up by now and the thought that he had co-existed with it in a small room for several hours now depressed him. Then, there was that pair of socks hanging on the lampshed that had previously been busy warming up Ted’s feet until Ted realized that socks had feelings too and that it was time that he would pay them back for all these years of care and do something to warm them up instead. He realized that there was some left over pizza lying right next to his pillow that he had not noticed yet. This was a lot of mess. He had no idea how he was going to clear it up. He thought he would call up his friends and ask for help.
The other two messages were from random people from work. He never bothered to reply to them.
He felt it was a good idea now to check who all were online, may be Olivia was and may be he could ping her and have a small chat with her. Then he felt annoyed for thinking along these lines and reminded himself that he had forgotten Olivia completely and that there was no chance that he was going to find her online. This didn’t stop him from scrolling through his friend list once. He even furtively sneaked a glance at that spot between Oliver and Peter, the spot that used to be his favourite till a few months ago. Olivia, of course, was not online. He felt bad.
He thought he would go and call up Sam now because he was pretty much back in his senses and he also needed some help to clear up the mess in his room. But then, he had now scrolled down his friend list completely and this was not the normal position for a friend list to be in. So he thought he would do it some favour by scrolling up and leaving it there. Of course, he planned to sneak another glance at that spot.
The spot was not empty any more. Olivia was online. His heart skipped a few beats.
He kept staring at the name for the next few minutes trying to answer three completely different kinds of questions, the first one being, “How the hell did this happen?” the second being, “What the hell was he going to do now?” and the third, “What the hell?” He first tried to handle the third one. He shook his head as hard as he could just to make sure that alcohol was not the reason for all this. It hurt. He checked the name again. It was Olivia, and not something that just looked like Olivia. He wrote her name on a separate piece of paper and matched each letter backwards. It matched. He scrolled up and down again. The name was still there. He scrolled up, remained there for some time and then scrolled down quickly. The spot was still occupied. It was time to deal with the first question now. He had absolutely no idea what had just happened. May be he did something stupid when he was drunk. Now when he thought of it, he did get a vague feeling that Olivia had come up in the discussions the previous night. He thought he should check his chat history and the numbers dialed on his phone. But then, he was running out of time too. Olivia was on his list after several months now. He didn’t want to miss the opportunity to say hello. What if she went offline and never came back? He didn’t want that to happen. This brought him to the second question. He thought he should ping her and ask what she was upto. He did.
She did not reply. He waited for two minutes. No response. This was definitely a bad idea. She was probably busy fornicating, or may be, getting cosy with her fiance on a sofa. He shouldn’t have pinged her in the first place. But now he had done that already and she had all the right to not reply and make him feel miserable. In fact, he was pretty sure that that’s what she was doing. She was not going to reply. He didn’t want to feel miserable. He wanted a solution and the only one he could come up with was that he should call her up and clarify that it was very confusing that she was on his list because he had removed her a long time ago and the only reason he had pinged her was to ask her how this had happened. He did remember her phone number, so the fact that it was not there in his phone’s memory wasn’t a problem. But calling her up could equally turn into a bad idea. What if she did not pick up? He would feel even more miserable.
He called her. She did not pick up.
He felt annoyed. He wanted to throw something at the wall. He chose the left over pizza. He picked his phone again to see if he had made any calls to Olivia the previous night. He was interrupted by the door bell. He wasn’t expecting anyone. May be, it was Ted. May be, he wanted his socks back. Or may be… no come on, it couldn’t be Olivia. He dismissed this line of thought as soon as it came. However, it did make him pace up a little. He reached the door and looked through the peep hole. It was Olivia.
Vacuum, as it turns out, is more mysterious than one would think it is. You say you take everything out of a given volume and what you have in the end is vacuum. But you see, there’s a problem here. ‘Everything’ does not just contain matter that can be sucked out using an ultra powerful vacuum cleaner. ‘Everything’ contains energy as well, especially because of that famous equation formulated by Einstein that says matter and energy are interconvertible. Now when you suck out energy, using may be some sort of equivalent of an ultra powerful vacuum cleaner that can suck energy as well, you might end up in a state from where you are not able to suck out any more energy and yet, it is not the state with the lowest energy possible. In fact, to reduce the energy even further, you may have to give it some energy first. Such a state gives a false impression of being a vacuum even though it still has a lot of stuff in it. This is exactly like being in a valley, which even though looks like the lowest point in your vicinity, is not the lowest point in the world. Given a strong enough push up the hill, you may roll down into some other valley that is even deeper.
When Frank was looking through the peep hole, he was not aware of the fact that the universe he was living in was being fooled by one such energy valley, that the vacuum in which all the celestial bodies of his universe were floating around was not the actual vacuum but just a fake one with energy much above what could in principle be achieved. His universe had been in that state for some billions of years now and not many people were aware of this confusion of a cosmological scale.
The other thing Frank was not aware of was that about twenty minutes ago, something had happened at a distance of about two billion miles from his room that had never happened before in the history of the universe. A fairly catastrophic cosmic ray collision had occured that had released a phenomenal amount of energy into the universe. The energy released was so massive that it had stirred up the vacuum and had caused it to finally climb up the energy hill surrounding it and roll down into a valley that was much deeper than the one it was previously occupying. Since the vacuum is what decides the fundamental nature of things in the universe, this had caused a major change at the collision spot. It had created a bubble that contained inside it a universe that was totally different from what one had ever seen before. The laws of nature were different. The fundamental constants that had been so loyal to their names for ages now were different. The whole fabric of the universe, its very nature, the way it behaved was different. Forces did not follow the inverse square law any more. Fundamental particles did not exist. And then, the bubble had expanded, reaching areas that were far away from the spot where the collision had occured, changing the very fundamental nature of things into something very bizarre and unimaginable wherever it went and by the time Frank was about to open the door, it hit his building.
Frank, was no longer Frank. Olivia, was no longer Olivia. And the Sunday evening, perhaps the most irregular one in past, present and future, was no longer a Sunday evening. No one was left to even express surprise at the extremely unusual turn of events.
On test reports and their interpretations
Suppose you take a test and pass it along with nine other people. Initially you are only told that you have passed and hence you are all too happy about it. But later, you discover this webpage where a list of passed candidates is given. The list is numbered and your name is mentioned at the first place. However, nowhere is it mentioned that the list is sorted according to the scores obtained in the test. So may be, it is just arranged in the order in which the papers were checked. Or may be, the order is just random. The question is, should this new information make you happier than before?
Suppose you had never seen this list and were just told that you had passed. In that case, it would only be fair to assign equal probabilities to you being at any of the positions from one to ten. Your expected position, therefore, would be 
You should be happier than before if the new information raises your expected position to something above 
Now let’s say, that a friend of yours comes and tells you that the list is either sorted in the increasing order of scores obtained in the test or in the decreasing order and he seems quite confident about it, should you be happier than before now? The answer, once again, is ‘no’. This is because your expected position is still 
I find this analysis interesting because the above situation occurs quite often and in most cases, one feels tempted to draw conclusions about his actual position in the test from the position in the list provided. Also, increasing order of merit and decreasing order of merit are two most likely orders that come to mind.
About food
Although human beings have very skillfully avoided getting extinct in all these ages, I don’t think human genes are very happy about the way things have turned out. At least, if I were them, I would be damn pissed about a lot of things. Protection, of course, is one of them. I mean, it would be really annoying to keep having my hopes of getting replicated crushed on a regular basis by a piece of rubber that was shaped like a dick. I would probably mutate myself and invent a new extra-lethal kind of cancer that would torture these humans to a very horrifying death. If I were to die anyway, I would prefer dying in style.
It’s not just protection however, that I think is in the list of things that can potentially annoy our genes. It is this general tendency that humans have built over a period of time to not give a damn to what their genes have programmed them to do, that is, to help in their replication, and instead waste a lot of their resources on such extremely futile pursuits as, to name just one of them, sports. That it leads to some momentary rush of adrenaline and gives us something to talk about is none of our genes’ business.
Along similar lines, or perhaps I should say, of a similar taste, is the very large amount of time and resources we collectively spend on satisfying the needs of our taste buds. Consider cheese, for example. I agree that it is one of the most astoundingly delicious things ever invented by mankind, and that having a spoonful of cheese melt inside your mouth and slip all around your tongue is an experience of such immense pleasure that it does lead one to ponder that may be having cheese is what leads to procreation instead of the more accepted act of copulating with another human being. However, look at the method used in producing it. First of all, you pull on an animal’s breasts and store the white coloured liquid that comes out of it. In the background, you grow this plant called Hordeum Vulgare and once it is grown to its full size, take out its seeds and throw the rest of it. You do lots of weird things with the seeds and finally obtain a sour liquid out of them, also known as vinegar. Next, you put some of this liquid into the white coloured liquid you had obtained earlier and then once again do lots of totally weird things with what you obtain. This gives you cheese.
Now remembering that cheese was just an example and that most of the things we eat these days go through similar stages of processing before we get to eat them, I think, this demands an explanation. Hitting upon such a queer and convoluted scheme for producing a food item clearly shows the presence of a very large amount of motivation in human beings for producing such food items. However, allowing the human body to have such strong urges for sensory pleasures that do not in any way lead to more gene-replication definitely sounds like a design flaw from the point of view of the genes.
Another interesting thing is that unlike humans, no animals (that I know of) are found to take such enormous amounts of pain just to ensure that the things they eat taste good. The reason they eat is to fill their stomach. Of course, we would not expect an animal of the intelligence level of, let’s say, a dog to invent an equally elaborate method for making delicious dog food. But we could, at least, find one of these animals doing some elementary things, like, may be, mixing two things together so that the taste is enhanced. Why doesn’t this happen? Is it because they are not intelligent enough to invent ways of making things taste better or is it because they don’t really have any taste buds? If it’s the latter, then may be these animals are better designed than us in this respect for survival. If it’s the former, then may be this is just a side effect, a compromise that the genes have to make in order to provide us with one of the most unusual and powerful evolutionary tools – intelligence.
The most comfortable bed ever
When I sleep on my bed, I first try to find a comfortable position to sleep in. Of all the things I am forced to do on a regular basis, this is one of the toughest. There always remains one little glitch somewhere. I am always forced to make a compromise, a feeling that says “if only I had another pillow to keep between my knees” or “if only this pillow under my head was a little thicker” and so on. The compromise is absolutely inevitable. I have never in my life slept with a feeling that this was the best position possible and that it could not have been improved by the presence of a more comfortable bed or a larger number of pillows. However, I have learnt to live with it.
One way to live with the compromise is to dream of hypothetical situations in which all this discomfort, all this not sleeping in the most comfortable position is no longer there. So what would that situation look like?
We can get rid of the discomfort by having an extremely customizable bed. If you want a thicker pillow under your head, you will just have to change the settings of the bed and it will bulge at the area below your head. If you want a support for your right arm, you will just need to fiddle with its settings, may be just press a few buttons and the bed will modify its shape accordingly. But then the controls will have to be intuitive and easy to manipulate. For example, if making the bed bulge under your head requires an amount of effort equivalent to calling up the pillow store and ordering one new pillow, then it’s useless. In fact, the effort required should be much much less than that. Even pressing buttons is too much of effort if you are planning to sleep. It should be pretty close to the effort required in just thinking about it.
So essentially, the most comfrotable situation to sleep in will be where you can just fold your body into any shape and no force (other than the internal forces in your body itself) tries to disturb it. For example, if you lift up your head to gain some amount of comfort, nothing tries to pull it down unnecessarily. This will happen if you go far far away from these extremely bulky blobs of mass like the earth. So may be, zero gravity is the most comfortable situation to sleep in.
But is it?
If you have ever fallen towards the earth for an extended duration of time (for example, in a roller coaster ride) at an acceleration comparable to g, you will know that it’s not a pleasant experience. It makes you feel weird in your stomach and very often makes you want to puke. Zero gravity, I guess will not be different from this. If for some reason, it doesn’t make you want to puke, it will definitely not be the most comfortable position to sleep in.
So you will have to create something on earth itself, and that’s where the following extremely revolutionary idea comes in. The most comfortable bed ever, unlike all the conventional beds, will not be a surface, but it will instead be a medium. You will not sleep on it, you will sleep in it. It will be made of a material that will allow you to move through it when you want to and will get stiff on a single command. So now, if you want to keep your arms at a level above the rest of your body, you will just have to move your arms to that level and then order the medium to get stiff. This, I think will be the most comfortable bed that can possibly exist. Ofcourse, you will have to manage air circulation and temperature control, but those are just details.
Nothing much, just going abroad
Most countries are extremely careful about the people entering their land from outside. For example, if you want to go there, they will want to know whether “in periods of either peace or war, you have ever been involved in the commission of a war crime against humanity, such as: willful killing, torture, attacks upon, enslavement, starvation or other inhumane acts committed against civilians or prisoners of war; or deportation of civilians”. The means they generally adopt for finding this out is to just ask, in your visa application form. I wonder what the reason might be for this extraordinary optimism. May be, they are asking this under the Right To Information Act or something. May be, this is how court cases are handled at those places – they make a queue of all the suspects and then ask each one of them, “Did you murder Mr Haggard?”, of course, under the Right To Information Act.
Murdering Mr Haggard is, however, a fairly simple crime to commit, in the sense that if you have done that you will know for sure that you have. The crime they are interested in is not that straightforward though. In fact, I am not sure whether it’s even grammatically correct. For example, concentrate on the portion of the sentence that says ‘willful killing, torture, attacks upon, enslavement, starvation’. Now, ‘attacks upon’ is a completely different form than ‘willful killing’, or ‘torture’, or ‘enslavement’ or ’starvation’. ‘Willful killing of’ would be in the same form as ‘attacks upon’, for example, but ‘willful killing’ is different. It lacks one whole preposition. If you ever see such a portion of a sentence where lots of things are written separated by commas and one of those things sounds very different from the others, you should know that something’s wrong. A slightly more obvious example is this – whales, dolphins, porpoises, I like lemons, walruses, sea lions.
And what the hell is that thing added after the semicolon, by the way? What part of speech is it anyway?
I imagine a typical court hearing in their country. The prosecutor and the defendant are facing each other. The prosecutor has a note in his hand.
Prosecutor (reading out from the note) : Answer in ‘yes’ or ‘no’. In periods of either peace or war, have you ever been involved in the commission of a war crime against humanity, such as: willful killing, torture, attacks upon, enslavement, starvation or other inhumane acts committed against civilians or prisoners of war; or deportation of civilians?
Defendant : Yes… No… No wait… Umm… What?
Prosecutor : In periods of either peace or war, have you… ah crap… read it out yourself.
Once having ensured that you have not, in any way whatsoever, killed or harmed a person or a thing, the government proceeds to find more interesting things about you. These include a complete medical profile. Of course, some things are important to find out before a person enters the country. For example, it would suck if an HIV positive Genghis Khan migrated there. It would completely destroy the country. But I am not sure whether it would really matter if he did not have a 6/6 vision or if he was overweight.
In any case, getting a medical profile prepared is not at all simple. You will have to go to a hospital and do things you had never before done in your life. For example, peeing in a box, or, letting a lady poke a full needle into your body and take blood out of it. And then there is a lot of standing in queues involved too.
Letting someone take blood out of your body is scary. You have to spend at least 30 seconds with your arm stretched out and a needle stuck up your vein. If you ever plan to pray to God to not cause an earthquake, those 30 seconds would be the best time to do that. If you are dying in an earthquake, you should die because of something cool, like the roof coming down on your head or something. It would be really silly to find people having the following conversation at your funeral -
First Guy : How did he die, by the way?
Second Guy : He burst his vein.
First Guy: Oh, really? How?
Second Guy : Well, there was an earthquake at a wrong time.
The body does not show adequate response to the situation, however. Human body is supposed to have an efficient alarm system in the form of pain. Pain is how it sends the following kinds of messages to the brain – “Something’s happening around the neck area. Check it out.” The presence of a needle in the body should push it into some sort of a high alert mode. But that does not happen. In fact, I think one can easily manage to stealthily sneak into my room while I am asleep and steal as much of blood from my body as he wants and I wouldn’t even notice. This sort of thing is disturbing.
The problem with going to a hospital for all this is that unlike you, most people around you are actual patients with actual diseases. For example, lung cancer. Imagine a person interviewing everyone in the queue and asking “Why are you here?” It will probably sound like this -
First person : Chronic indigestion.
Second person : Typhoid.
You : Nothing much, just going abroad.
Also, peeing in a box is just too funny.
Stony Brook Graduate Causes Havoc in the City
The guy who was being spotted in and around New York city jerking off at random and bizarre locations has been recently identified as Shishir Dash, a 2007 passout from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, currently a graduate student at Stony Brook. This, however, is completely in line with his philosophy of life, which can be summarised by the following excerpt from a recent chat with him -
Dash: load mat leindians ka ek hi role hai in the grnd scheme of thingspadhai karo.. maa baap ka naam roshan karo aur fir hilate hilate mar jaobasDash: load mat le
indians ka ek hi role hai in the grand scheme of things
padhai karo.. maa baap ka naam roshan karo aur fir hilate hilate mar jao
bas
Shishir Dash, also known as Demented Ch***ya Insaan among close friends has created quite a havoc in the city because of his extremely unpredictable and often inappropriate choice of location for carrying out the indecent act. Hundreds of people have died out of embarrasment and several kids have been left scarred for the rest of their lives.
As Kyle, an 11 year old resident of the city recounts – “It was horrifying. I saw Satan right in my bedroom. He was playing with his wee-wee, I didn’t even know Satan did such things. Worst of all, he had the remote in his other hand and he wouldn’t let go of it! I wanted to watch Bob the Builder, but he was busy watching Crocodile Hunter. I think he really likes crocodiles. He was trying to touch them every now and then, not always with his hands though.”
Kyle’s 42 year old mom Tara explains in a voice filled with fear, “We are all afraid of him. I, myself, must have spotted him more than five times in the last few weeks. Last week, when I was at the airport, he materialized out of thin air, snatched my purse and started using my very expensive lipstick as an anal plug.”
The Police department has been trying hard to catch this guy but without much luck. Most of the times they are unable to catch him, but on occasions when they do, they end up catching him at the wrong end. Shishir Dash, with his extraordinary athleticism, always manages to keep things in his own hands and occasionally, in someone else’s. “The latter is more enjoying though”, he says with a wink.
His extremely unconventional and often satanic sexual fetishes have been already exposed (in the most literal sense ever) to the public. As some of his friends point out, he has been well known for being openly vocal about his own interests in handcuffs, latex and such stuff. More recent interactions with him have revealed that even mattresses arouse him sexually. Consider this excerpt from a recent chat, for example -
Dash: correct
to aaja US
yahaan hilane ke bahut saadhan hai
me: “saadhan”
?
Dash: haan
mattresses are very comfortable here
This is probably the first time that the world is seeing something so bizarre and so inexplicable. While the police is frustrated with their hard luck, Shishir Dash is more than happy with so much of hardness. He is, in fact, busy growing his interest into more obscure areas, for example, areas that are found only in the bodies of household furniture.
Saying Good Bye
Suppose you are in the middle of a conversation with someone. How do you decide when to say good bye?
I think this sort of lesson is taught at the same time as ‘how to tie your shoe-laces’ and ‘how to brush your teeth’. But probably when my parents were giving me these lessons, somewhere in the middle, I just randomly chose to doze off. I am now 22 and I still get extremely confused about it. I should have been less sleepy when I was a kid.
One situation in which it’s easy is when you have a prior appointment with someone at some fixed time. You can then keep chatting comfortably and when it’s time, look at your watch, stand up in a way that shows you know what you are doing and announce, “Oh, it’s 7, I have an appointment with the dentist.”
It’s also easy when the other person has a prior appointment at some fixed time. In most cases, he will tell you that he has to leave in an hour or so and then you can throw all the responsibility to his side of the court, as in, “Sure, just tell me whenever you want to leave.” And then you can sit back and enjoy the conversation.
The situation gets tricky when none of you have an appointment and saying good bye is decided on the basis of extremely ambiguous factors such as running out of topics, or getting bored with each other. The problem with this situation is that the information about the other person is not available with you. Is he bored yet? Is he already too sleepy? Social ethics require that you do not tell someone directly that you are bored with him. You are only allowed to show this with the help of subtle gestures with your eyebrows and such things. These, of course, are not precise.
Being on a lookout for those subtle hints is challenging. You might end up saying good bye when the other person has things to talk about. This might annoy him. Or, you might miss out on all those hints and end up making the person feel like his brain is in a washing machine with a bunch of used baby nappies and he has no clue about the time set on the timer.
Most people are experts at this kind of stuff. They somehow just “know” when it’s time. I lack this skill. I don’t feel bad about this though. I am pretty good at tying my shoe-laces. That compensates for it.
In any case, I do have a temporary solution to use until the time I come up with an actual good one and it is this – I concoct an imaginary appointment with someone. So a typical conversation with me goes like this
The Other Guy : So, we are at the coffee house and suddenly the prof comes in with his underpants all visible and then …
Me : Nice nice, I would sure like to hear the complete story, but hey, I suddenly remember that I had to go snorkelling with a friend right now.
There are problems with this method too. First of all, your excuse has to sound authentic. To test whether your excuse is authentic or not, you can try imagining telling it to a toenail. If you think it will understand that it’s a lie, then almost anyone will understand it’s a lie. For example, you should avoid saying something like, “Sorry friends, it’s my hanging-upside-down-from-the-ceiling time again. Catch you later.” This is just plain wrong.
Secondly, you must ensure that you don’t end up using the same excuse again and again. If you are making too many excuses about visiting the tailor, you should have a very large number of pants too. If you don’t people will understand.
So the best way to do this is to be creative and come up with new excuses every once in a while that sound authentic. This is difficult. But somehow I prefer it to the more conventional figuring out the person’s state of mind from his body language trick.
So yeah, anyway, it’s 11:30 now and I have a tennis match with Jesus Christ.
Oh snap.
Whose fault is it anyway?
When someone gives me a mathematical proof for a theorem that holds for an object A, I like analysing the proof and trying to see what properties of A have been used in the proof. The proof doesn’t know that we are dealing with A. All it knows is that we are dealing with an object which has the properties that have been used in the proof. So if we can imagine an object that’s not A and still has those properties, the theorem will hold for that object as well. This gives new insight.
For example, the circumference of a circle is pi times its diameter. The proof does not really require the thing to be a circle for this property to hold. Any closed curve whose width is the same in all directions has this property. In fact, there exist such curves that are not circles. This is pretty interesting. You can find the details at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curve_of_constant_width .
So any closed curve whose width is constant in all directions will have its perimeter equal to pi times the diameter. It does not have to be a circle. Now, a circle is more complicated than a curve of constant width in the sense that all circles are curves of constant width but all curves of constant width are not circles. To put it in a different way, a circle is a curve of constant width with some additional property (let’s call it The Circle Property). So, even though a circle might look simpler because it can be drawn with one stroke of a compass, it is actually more complicated with respect to the number of constraints a curve has to meet in order to qualify as a circle. It is like the difference between a guy and a really smart guy. Any human being possessing the guy chromosome is a guy. But a really smart guy is a human being who possesses the guy chromosome and has a lot of intelligence stuffed in his head. Intelligence, here, is the equivalent of The Circle Property.
Now let’s say you are a person who is completely ignorant of mathematical facts. You suddenly realise one day that you have a compass and so you start drawing circles with it and doing lots of crazy things with them. One day, you discover that whenever you draw a closed curve using that compass, the ratio of its circumference to its diameter comes out to be a constant quantity. This, now is an empirical observation. You have just observed that something holds in several cases. However, this annoys you. You don’t like the ratio and you are very depressed about the fact that whenever you draw a curve this stupid fact holds for it.
In such a situation, it is fairly easy to be tricked into believing that the stupid fact holds because you are only drawing circles. This, obviously, is not true. The stupid fact holds because you are drawing curves of constant width. So to avoid being annoyed, all you have to do is to stop drawing curves of constant width. You can still have The Circle Property with you. It won’t disturb you in any way.
In my post on human poop, I dealt with a similar empirical observation – the fact that human poop is disgusting to humans. This fact is pretty annoying because it leads to a huge amount of effort being put into industries that just wouldn’t exist if human poop was not disgusting. So once again, it will be interesting to try to find out the reason why this fact holds. If it is because of something big (like, may be someone is drawing too many circles), we will just have to accept it. But it might be because of something smaller (like, may be someone is drawing too many curves of constant width). In that case, we can try to come up with a solution.
Similar is the case with mood enhancing drugs. Somehow, all such drugs known till now have had some really bad side-effects. This is an empirical observation that has been found to be true. Is it happening because of something big? May be there is some evolution theory explanation for it, something that proves that if there were mood enhancing drugs with no side effects then human beings would have gotten extinct long ago. This is the equivalent of someone drawing circles. But that may not be true. It may be happening because of something smaller and in such a case we should be optimistic about finding something that enhances mood and has no side effects.
In the case of the man who discovered that he had a compass, it seems natural for the man to have a tendency to believe that the fact that the circumference of the curves he draws is always pi times the diameter is because he is drawing circles. In the case of human poop, we all know that people do not even think of asking for the reason. They have all just accepted the fact that shit is disgusting and that it cannot be changed. That’s like ascribing a really really big reason to it. In the case of mood enhancing drugs, a similar attitude is seen. I haven’t heard many people asking why mood enhancing drugs always have to be harmful in some way. So the point is that the human beings have a large tendency to ascribe a bigger reason to things than the actual reason. Discovering that the reason why something is happening is not something as big as was thought earlier, but is something that can be easily changed is always pleasing. Such discoveries can be made by doing an analysis similar in taste to the ones given in this post, which, in essence, asks the question – whose fault is it anyway?
Automatic Barber
Getting a haircut is tricky. You have to tell the barber the kind of hairstyle you want and there is no known language in which this can be communicated with ease and precision. “Chhota kar dena” doesn’t work. Different barbers have different perceptions about what chhota means and some of them are very religious about it too. They will not at any cost cut your hair smaller than a particular threshold size. It’s probably written in the barber bible. They will get sentimental about it if you insist and you will have to withdraw in the end. There are some others who fancy using their electric trimmers in their dreams and are thoroughly delighted on hearing a phrase such as chhota kar dena. They will run the trimmer brutally all over your head in order to satisfy their stupid but dangerous fetish and will leave you with a face you will be ashamed of showing in public for the next few weeks. Giving them the exact length in centimetres doesn’t help much either because that still leaves certain decisions totally on their discretion. So the point is, something should be done about it.
Something that should make things a little less complicated would be to remove all the subjectivity from the whole situation. There should be no barber sentiments involved and there should be some way to state the hairstyle precisely. Hairstyles can be stated precisely in .hst files, which will basically store the approximate lengths of the hair at different points on the head. And then there can be a machine called the Automatic Barber, which will look like a big metallic hat. There will be some software too that will be used for generating .hst files. This software will allow you to design hairstyles. It will show you a human face and will have certain tools that will let you play with different hairstyles and see which one will suit you the best. And then, once you have generated an .hst file, all you will have to do is to transfer it to the automatic barber and wear it for some time.
You can also publish your hst file on your blog. Or you can sell it on eBay if you are a celebrity. Making hst files can become a new art. There can be courses on it in universities. People with a degree in making cool hst files will have some fancy name. Freelancers will design interesting hst files and sell them. When you go to a hairdresser, you will have the option to either generate your own hairstyle or use the one you had saved the last time or buy a hairstyle from the internet or use some freely available one.
Hm, sounds like a fun world to live in.
A Social Paradox
Suppose you are a member of a community of ten people. The community lives in a small village where there is no electricity, no water supply and an intolerable weather condition. You, as a member of the community, should have certain feelings about it. Some kinds of feelings will be called morally correct by the society and the others won’t. I am giving you two scenarios. In each scenario, try to figure out what kind of feeling will be considered morally correct.
First scenario – One member of the community (I am not specifying which one) suddenly becomes the CEO of an awesome company and starts earning an awesome salary, starts living at a more comfortable city, buys a house, gets it air conditioned and does all kinds of cool things.
Second scenario – That member is you.
Let’s consider the second scenario first. The community you are leaving is a community you spent a significant portion of your life with. There were times of difficulties when you did not have food to eat and some other member of the community walked tens of miles in the torturous heat just to fetch you some food. There were times when you were sick and were throwing up every half an hour and so some other member of the community remained awake with you the whole night just to take care of you and to clean your crap. So now, if you suddenly leave that community in its own sad state and start living in an air conditioned house with all kinds of facilities and you claim you are happy about it, the society is going to call you a sick bastard.
However, in the first scenario, since the improvement of the living conditions for one person is an improvement for the whole community (because earlier there were ten people with bad living conditions and now there are only nine) the society will call you an idiot if you claim that you are not happy about it.
So, what’s going on?
