Memoirs of a College Drama Queen

7/7/05: I had the most surreal experience in college today. I had to go to the office to pick up the marksheet for Khushbu. She had to rush back to her hometown to take care of some family emergency, so I agreed to get her marksheet for her. So there I am, standing at the counter, waiting for someone to shower their grace upon me, and I descend into the appropriate raptures when Mr. Salman-Khan-Of-The-90s-Hairstyle asks me what I want.

“I’ve come to collect the marksheet for Khushbu Whatsername, she’s in FYBCom, R.No 12. I’d spoken to Mr. Drunk-On-Himself-Self-Righteous and he told me to meet you.”

The look on his face told me he had no idea what I was trying to tell him. So I repeated myself. Slowly. In Hindi. That didn’t seem to work either, because the look of confusion changed to a look of disbelief just as he asked me –

“You’re Khushbu?”

I was left dumbstruck, possibly by his brilliance but likely by his stupidity. There were about 12 things I wanted to tell him, 7 of them coherent. A few samples –

A) “Yes I am, I just haven’t waxed in a long time.”

B) “Did I say Khushbu? Sorry, that was my name before the operation. It’s amazing what surgeons can do these days aye?”

C) “What can I say, Daddy always wanted a girl…”

D) “Hey! That’s Mr. Khushbu to you!”

College life can be so vexing.

18/7/05: I had a good time in college today. Christine was slithering around again today (I wanted to say walk, but you really can’t describe her undulation as a walk) She was pleased as punch because she’d just finished her stint on a reality show. The aim of the show was to fight off competition from 20 other girls for a date. Enough said.

So she was cavorting around, lord of all she surveys (for she was on TV) surrounded by the statutory posse of reflected-glory seekers, dropping the mandatory compliments (“My Gaaawwwdddd!! You looked so haaawwwwwwtt babeeeee!!!”) Never mind that she never won, although I’m not sure if that’s such a bad thing in this case.

As for Christine herself, well let’s just say she seemed startled when some of us didn’t genuflect before her eternal majesty. It must have been the most comical moment of my college life – Girl gives what can only be described as a lapdance on TV, guy dumps her not long after, and she returns triumphantly as if she just won a Nobel. I can just imagine her giving an acceptance speech – “I’d like to thank my mom, my dad and my dance guru Cinna Buns…”

College life can be so funny.

28/7/05: Today was a boring day in college, same old routine, different day. But one incident stood out. It was an apple juice kind of day, and I’d been craving one all morning. Made a beeline for the canteen the first chance I got, paid up at the counter and went to the cooler to get my drink.

“I want the apple juice please.”

“It’s over.”

(Never mind, I enjoy grape just as much, even though I would have preferred the apple)

“Ok, then gimme the grape”

“That’s over too.”

(Ok, so this is not my day. Back to the tried and trusted orange then)

“Fine, I’ll take the orange then.”

“Nope, outta that too.”

“Let’s make things simpler then – tell me what you have, if anything”

“We have mango”

“And?”

“And mango”

“That’s it? No other flavor? Absolutely nothing?”

“Nope.”

It’s on days like this that you feel proud to have leaders like Manmohan Singh, who had the vision to see a closed economy wouldn’t work forever. Yup, days like this make you glad you have an open economy because your grandparents never had the luxury of choice when it came to consumer goods. But today we’re playing a different ball game altogether. The consumer is king, and let no one say he is not spoiled for choice.

Forex reserves after liberalization of the economy – $300 Billion

Getting mango and mango as your two choices at the college juice vendor after said liberalization – Priceless. There’s some things money just can’t buy…

College life can be so enlightening.

Irreverence personified

There are a few objectives that most college students have in mind, markers if you will, by which they reflect on their past three years and measure their success (or lack thereof). Some of them would be –

A) Do well in studies (A standard fixture for most people. Looks good on your CV and let’s face it – a good academic record comes in useful when trying to get dad to buy a shiny new PS3)

B) Get to third base, if not get laid (Hey, Darwin said a 19 year old has be horny. And no one messes with Darwin.)

C) Be the coolest person around (They say popularity is a drug. And it sure comes in useful for point no.2 as well.)

D) Find out Melody itni chocolatey kyon hai

Huh?

Ok, so maybe number 4 isn’t quite on everyone’s list. But as any true deviant will testify, there comes a time in your life when you have to move beyond the confines of your life and expand into unknown territory. If you’re tired of raising hell in your class (or if you’re on your final warning after that stunt with the soiled underpants went awry), then the time is ripe for harvesting the fruits of your delinquent skills on the unsuspecting masses. Which is why I decided to ask random people why we eat chlormint and why aforementioned confectionery has so much chocolatey goodness.

I started by asking the cashier at my local Croissants outlet why we eat Chlormint. The conversation went a little something like this –

“ Ya, I’ll have the Tandoori Chicken roll, and a Pepsi, and a Black Forest Pastry. Oh and one more thing, why do we eat Chlormint?”

“I’m sorry sir?”

“Why do we eat Chlormint?”

“We don’t sell Chlormint sir”

Obviously he didn’t want to reveal all while on the job, poor man must have been under pressure to keep silent. Instead I told him to meet me behind Pagal Paan-wala once his shift was done. He never came. I guess they got to him before I could. Disappointed but not disheartened, I next approached the man standing at the gate of the train opposite mine. He looked like he would have answers to the unfathomable mysteries of life – any man who chews Pan Paraag, wears a synthetic floral print shirt (replete with 3 buttons undone) and shouts into his cellphone as if his revenant shrieks were assertions of his manhood must hold the solutions to my questions. Unfortunately he was not the most helpful. When I asked him why Melody is so chocolatey he cryptically replied –

“Abbe teri maa ki %$%#& tu %*($%$* main tujhe *%&$*%$*$ idhar aa *$*%$* saale *&$*%&$”

I am certain there was a prosaic message hidden in that eloquent litany which holds the answer to my question, and indeed all questions to have plagued all men. But being the philistine country bumpkin that I am, I am at a loss until I can decipher exactly what he meant. The search for answers has led me to another question – What was the Trainman (replete with 3 buttons undone) trying to tell me?

Unfortunately, this was where I had to leave my quest. I had pressing business regarding points 1 and 2 to attend to. Yet, what had begun as a simple roguery had soon become an indomitable quest for knowledge, a desperate search for answers. Maybe one day I shall resume my grand pursuit, but till then I can only hope someone will read this and get inspired to do so themselves.

C'est la vie

The latest entry

For whatever reason the formatting just wouldn't come out ok on blogger so i had to post this on google docs instead. Read clockwise

Obsidian (revised)

What art Thou?

The Holy (moral and spiritual, an object of reverence)

Yea, but what art Thou?

The Sacred (holy and so deserving veneration)

Indeed, but what art Thou?

The Divine (of, or like, God)

True, but what art Thou?

The Lord (a name for God)

Verily, but what art Thou?

The God (supreme ruler, dispenser of benediction)

Answer me directly, what art Thou?

Mark thy Genesis and open thine eyes to My countenance

The more i read the original the more i despised it. Hopefully this is better. FYI - Genesis here is an obvious reference to Genesis 1:27 - So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

The Elevator

I press the button, wait, wonder…

What is life but a system

of weights and counterbalances in unison;

a journey of ups and downs,

shared smiles and indignant frowns,

furtive glances and enforced liaisons,

some friendships made, some enmities born.

Verily, it is but a collage of encounters random,

as vagabonds journey in tandem;

some exit early, some on the same floor,

some stay back for just a bit more.

And all the while, the lift continues imperiously,

it’s ceaseless dance of life (and death) merrily.

Every day, as I step in, the doorman asks me –

‘up or down?’

One day, as I step in, I shall ask The Doorman -

‘Up or Down?’

(Nothing more now till my exams get over!)

My MOM is smartest

Gentlemen, thank you all for coming here today. I know you’ve got tight schedules to work with and this meeting was called at short notice, but frankly the urgency is merited. Allow me then, to proceed.

As you know, our group of scientists, engineers and roboticists has been secretly working to develop a robot with artificial intelligence capabilities beyond the levels possessed by any robot on the face of this earth thus far. The arcane nature of our setup was a natural consequence of the military taking more than just a keen interest in our progress; hence the presence of Gen. Lampard today. A lot of money has been spent on this project already, and we’ve had a number of failed prototypes. You must understand, creating artificial intelligence isn’t half as difficult as you might imagine it to be. Every time there was a setback you would castigate me but new, unimagined hurdles have the unhappy tendency to pop up at the most inopportune moments. For example, we made a lot of progress, relatively speaking, on the first prototype before realizing that none of the conductors known to man could be used for creating a robot with artificial intelligence – they simply could not carry power and data in the kind of quantities necessary. That little realization itself set our project back by a few years because we had to devote all our efforts toward first developing an artificial conductor. Once we got past that hurdle, we thought that progress would be made sooner, only to be foiled by oversight. Every man in this facility has been working on individual components only, so that none but a select few would have an idea of what we were building; which served our need for secrecy perfectly. There had been much progress made on individual components and we thought we could have a working prototype ready, only to be foiled by the realization that the power required when all the components were put together was more than twice that consumed by this state in a day! It was a tiny issue given the grand scale of our operations, but because the right hand was not to know what the left hand was building we hit another trifling, ergo extremely vexing, roadblock.

There were countless other such hitches along the way, which you no doubt remember. Yet, our perseverance has borne fruit today and I can confirm that we have succeeded in our enterprise. In a minute I shall provide a small demonstration which will prove beyond doubt that we have created the greatest, most intelligent robot in the history of mankind. I will ask it one question and one question only – I’ll ask it the Question.

Please, gentlemen! Settle down! Yes Dr. Cartman, I am aware of what I am saying and I assure you my brain is not filled with the excretions you talk of. I am fully aware of the weight of the Question. Till date, no robot has been able to answer it, and most have ceased to function after trying to solve it. It was quite obviously beyond the comprehension of non-AI robots, but even the AI enabled ones couldn’t come up with a solution. It seemed to send their positronic brains into an endless loop, a robotic equivalent of a coma from which there is no chance of emerging. I can even tell you that we lost a few prototypes to the Question. Of course, the Question remained our benchmark throughout the development process. It is the one undisputable test that can definitively inform us if we’ve achieved our objective. Just pause for a moment and think of the possibilities that are going to open up to us, gentlemen. A robot with intelligence sophisticated enough to handle the Question will be the first in the history of mankind actually suited to replace humans. A golden age beckons us! The war of tomorrow will see no human casualties because it will be fought with robot foot-soldiers. Dangerous tasks involving heavy machinery, hazardous chemicals, high-voltage electricity and the like will no longer claim lives, not even by accident. Nuclear research, to give just one example, will progress by leaps and bound now that we’ll have robots capable of not just handling radioactive materials but conducting tests on it themselves. Do you see? By virtue of being robots they will be able to think in ways we might not have ever conceived! And they will never get tired, or need coffee breaks or a weekly day off! True artificial intelligence, gentlemen - the applications are literally limitless because we possess true artificial intelligence for the first time ever, and one Question holds the key to that glorious future.

So without further ado, I give you MOM-61. The acronym stands for Man Or Machine; we thought it was apt given the level of intelligence we’re dealing with here. The number is the indicative of the amount of failures we had to go through before achieving success.

Good afternoon MOM, would you step here please? These gentlemen are here to watch you answer one Question, which I will ask you now. I won’t lie to you MOM, it’s not an easy question but you can take as long as you want to think before answering, ok? Good. So here is the Question –

What came first – the chicken or the egg?

The Funeral of A. Mann

Tears are the elixir of the Gods,

saline harbingers of life.

I have cried, oh how I wept;

‘twas a passionate cry, right out of the depths

of my heart. The drops (it is strange)

fell like ammunition from a gun – an endless stream

accompanied by a blood-curling wail that would seem

to drive into the hearts of all in range.

“We are gathered here today

to mourn the death of ingrate Mann;

he earned the honorific by his deeds (or lack thereof).

If, as I believe, his spirit looks upon us and sees us,

nothing would displease his soul.

He did not differ from other leaders

in that he only profited from the misfortunes of the oppressor,

insisting that his adversaries be won over

by the amorality of his position.

A great disaster is a symbol to us

to remember all the big things of life

and forget the small things, of which we have thought too much.”

The clock reminds me to switch on the TV and watch Mann’s corpse,

Now illuminated, now dark as the lights flash incessantly,

It rolls by a multitude that watches (?) his final ignominy.

Yea, tears are the elixir of the Gods.

As I stare at the blank screen, I weep no more.

(the third stanza quotes Nehru's eulogy for Gandhi. You can get the whole text via Google if you want)

The search

Excuse me sir, could I have a moment of your time please? It’s important. You see, there is a missing person, a woman I used to know and I’ve been searching for her for many years now. Here, I have a picture of her. She’s pretty isn’t she? Blonde hair, blue eyes, an angel on earth if there ever was one. She was about this tall and was last seen wearing a white shirt and striped trousers

But she has been missing so long, she might not look much like this photograph. Allow me to describe her to you in some more detail. She was the most radiant person you could ever meet, and I don’t refer to her physical appearance when I say that. No, she had such a magnetic personality you couldn’t help be drawn to her. Had I been more poetically inclined I might have described her persona as redolent of a heavenly grace that any man would be fortunate to have known. She had this uncanny ability to light up a room as soon as she entered it, but it wasn’t just that. No, she didn’t just light up the room, she lit up your life. If she was with you, you would know a blithe contentment that was boundless. With her, you could be sure of what you hoped for and certain of what you did not see. There was a touch of the ethereal about her, and it inspired complete trust and confidence, not just in her but the world. She could simply erase all doubt in you with one look; certainly I turned to her a number of times when I was unsure of something, anything. The beauty was, it didn’t matter what my worries or doubts were, she could set it all straight, as if she had some divine right to set straight the wrongs of my life. And you know what’s really amazing? She had the same effect on everyone she ever met. It’s like she was a drug that got everyone high on life.

But I ramble like a madman. Forgive me sir. Have you seen this woman or known her presence? No? Well even though I did not expect any other reply my heart is filled with melancholy nonetheless. You see, I lost her many years ago and I’ve been searching for her ever since. What has made this search harder is the manner in which we spent our last days together. I am ashamed to say I took her presence for granted, and all the joys that came along with it. Truly sir, I urge you to appreciate all the blessings you have received for you never realize the value of something till it is gone. Now that I’ve lost her, I roam about the streets all day and all night like a lunatic. And to tell you the truth, I feel like I’m about to lose my mind. Her absence has truly left me shattered. Hasn’t anyone been able to help me you ask? Oh how I have tried sir! I’ve asked more men than you could count with a dozen calculators. Most do not know her, do not know what it is like to have been around her. The few who said they did know her only ended up sending me on wild goose chases. They thought they knew her but they were sorely mistaken. It seems no one knows where she is. Maybe she was indeed ethereal and has simply returned to her heavenly abode, disgusted with a world that did not understand or cherish her true value. But I begin to rave again…

Thank you sir, for your time and for sparing this torn man your ear for a few minutes. May He bless you. Rather, may you one day meet this woman I search for and experience first-hand the unparalleled and untamed mirth that she brings to everyone who understands her. As for me, I shall continue my search. What more can I do? It may seem like a lost cause to you but I don’t think I am strong enough to admit that to myself just yet. Yes, I see another gentleman approaching. Let me ask him –

Sir! Yes, you sir. Could I have a minute please? I seem to have lost my Faith, I am Faithless so to speak. Can you help me?

One Question

I’m having a hard time and I need your help Lars. Yes yes, I know you always said my curiosity would be the undoing of me, but this is not the time for smug ‘I-told-you-so’ lectures ok? I can’t get sleep these days because I’m spending all my nights trying to figure this problem out and I’ve gotten nowhere with it. I just had to tell someone and you’re the only person I could call on at this hour.

It all started with a little study I was conducting for GloboCorp on the effects of love on productivity. They wanted to know who performs better – the employee who feels he is in love or the employee who feels he isn’t. Naturally, the first problem that arises is defining love; to one person being loved could mean having a family but it could simply mean taking care of pets for someone else. So we had each and every test subject fill out a questionnaire where they defined love and how it made them feel, along with its effect on their productivity. This form shows the average response we got –

Name: James Hetfield

Sex: Male

Age: 28

Designation: Senior Sales Executive

Average Working Week (in hours): 50

Marital Status: Married (with 1 child)

Write, in your own words, what you think love is, how it makes you feel: Love is hard to describe. It’s a feeling within me that makes me happy and mirthful. It’s as if everything in my mind is soothed by love, nothing seems to be out of order and nothing fazes me. Looking at the world around me, I feel energized and more ready to take up challenging tasks, because being in love seems to put me at ease with myself. I don’t mean to be repetitive, but love really does make me feel like I function smoothly. My mind works quicker, my arms and legs seem to move faster and my senses feel like they’ve been heightened. I feel like I can see and understand things more clearly, and that just allows me to do better at work.

If you are in love, would you say it improved your productivity? If the answer is no, then why not?: Yes, it has definitely improved my productivity, for the reasons I wrote above.

There were more questions of course but that’s the essence of it. After getting all the questionnaires back, I had my robot sort them out. You’ve seen him right? BB-21? Yeah, we call him Big Brother because its just easier to remember that way. So Big Brother is sorting them out, just like I told him to, and suddenly he comes to me and says he’d like to fill one questionnaire himself. Trust me, I was as shocked as you are. I asked him why he wanted to do that; the whole exercise would be redundant since robots can’t feel. He said that he knew what the word love meant, as described by the dictionary, and that thought he couldn’t feel, he could describe the effect a similar situation had on him. I understood what he was trying to say – he couldn’t feel but knew what love was defined as and thus could relate his mechanical responses to a situation that humans would describe as being in love. Curiosity got the better of me and I agreed. I was intrigued with the idea of a robot writing about love – what would it say, what effects did its artificial love have on its positronic brain and so on. This is what it wrote –

Name: BB-21

Sex: Asexual

Age: 19.349852 years

Designation: Robot

Average Working Week (in hours): On call 24 hours

Marital Status: Robots cannot marry

Write, in your own words, what you think love is, how it makes you feel: Love is a word, defined in the dictionary as a great interest and pleasure in something. When I experience such a state, it allows my positronic brain to function in a smoother manner, something a human might describe as ‘happy’. This ‘love’ allows my positronic brain to function smoothly since it produces a state of ‘happiness’ and thus by its very definition reduces conflict to a bare minimum. By doing so, there is less strain on my circuits and electrical impulses can travel unimpeded. This allows me to take up challenging tasks and perform better at them, because ‘love’ enables my brain and other mechanical parts to functions at ease. Ergo my brain works quicker, my limbs move faster and my senses are heightened. Such a change is not visible to the naked human eye, but my own observations of my performance have revealed that productivity increases by 2 percentage points when I am experiencing ‘love’.

If you are in love, would you say it improved your productivity? If the answer is no, then why not?: Yes, the experience of ‘love’ has improved my productivity, as I have explained above.

I was astounded, and that’s putting it mildly. For Big Brother to come up with something like this was far beyond any level of intelligence I might have attributed to him. And it wasn’t just that, he was actually experiencing these emotions, at least at a level that he understood. And that’s when it hit me – to him, there’s no difference between our human emotions and what he’s experiencing. The same situations create the same responses in humans and robots. We call emotions human and deny them to robots but they’re experiencing them just as much as we are, even if the form is slightly different. Read the questionnaires again and compare them closely, you’ll be hard pressed to find any significant differences. It’s left one question in my mind and that’s what is keeping me up all night, that is why I’m beginning to doubt my sanity, that’s what has me spooked. One Question –

What is a human?

Don't forget

http://divine-purgatory.blogspot.com/

It's the only other blog I'd recommend reading.

And a big shout out to Hermes for aid with the stuff put up here thus far