Redemption

The stinging smell of cordite woke him from his coma, or so the doctors would say, when they found his empty bed. The fire alarms, his clarion call, had woken him from what seemed to him a short nap, but what had, in reality been a decade's slumber. Rumpelstiltskin, he thought, only, he had awakened to a dsytopian world where things seemed to be perpetually falling apart. But what sort of world had he fallen asleep in? For a decade, his wife had waited for him, showing up everyday at the allowed visiting time, and praying by his side, with an infinite patience, which was even now reflected on her peaceful countenance as she lay blown ten feet away by the full force of the explosion. This must be Hell, he thought. It would hurt a lot more if I remembered any of this. Thank God for small mercies, he mused grimly. He looked at her with dumb incomprehension, trying to remember who she was and what she meant to him. His brain was working overtime to protect him from regaining his memory. All he remembered was heavily censored and practically useless bits and pieces of information.
He tried to get out of bed, but slumped back, too weak to move, his muscles wasted by the immobility. He could discern hooded figures moving towards him a few feet away. They proceeded to yell at him. Who were these idiots? What were they doing here? Had they killed this woman? He found himself criticizing the choice of cordite as an explosive material. The fools, too much sound and fury signifying nothing. A strip of Semtex would have been more than sufficient.
Breathing was suddenly made exhausting by this attempt at movement, and he tried to fight off the mists of sleep that were descending upon his shrinking sight. He inhaled deeply, as the tunnel vision erupted into a white fireball of light, and the cacophony of yells and screams in a strangely familiar tongue gave way to the piercing silence of unconsciousness.

A twig snapped under his feet, as he found himself upright, clawing at the air to shield his eyes from the harsh sunlight. “Delivered again, from darkness into light”, he thought grimly, remembering a half-forgotten prayer from his childhood.
“What if this darkness is what I really want?”
A glance revealed a lot of details, but explained nothing. His brain was clever, a protective force that had recently run amuck, and much more of a formidable opponent than his waking self, if that is the term to applied to a conscious persona that is permanently marooned in the cavernous depths of an overactive imagination.
He was in some kind of jungle, cloaked in greenery so vast and bright that it made him squint. The air was blanketed by the fresh smell of the earth after a rain spell. He suddenly remembered what childhood was like. He remembered how it felt to run barefoot on the wet earth, with the mud between his toes, chasing after his accomplices, with the smoke of his village lazily wafting over the horizon. He remembered yelling with all the strength he could muster, out of the sheer happiness that belongs to a child who knows no responsibility, and has no concept of the idea of actions and consequences. Those lessons would come later. But for now, he could taste freedom and happiness, for this one brief moment. He celebrated it exultantly. It was a rebirth, the re-birth of an emotion he had thought long since to be dead.
He caught sight of a settlement in the distance, much like his own. Smoke drifted peacefully out of the chimneys, diffracting the rays of the reddening sun. He found himself gravitating towards it,as the Voice continued droning. All living things must eventually return to the place of their birth,to be taken in again in the arms of an innocent happiness long since lost, a place where all sins are forgiven, and the pain and sorrow of every lesson learned in life is washed clean by the swiftly raging torrents of bliss, of extinction.
He had not staggered three paces when ruins suddenly appeared all around him, rising out of the ground, the trembling earth torn and bruised as large chunks of rock carved out by forgotten artisans started crashing all around. Crumbling towers of granite shot upwards, seeking union with the vastness of space. Were they the pillars of his forgotten beliefs, so eager in their desire to reach upwards, to reach the nothingness above, that they cared nothing about the destruction they caused?
As he looked around uncomprehendingly, his flight instincts were suddenly suppressed by a new understanding that was dawning on him. His mind was playing out his life in metaphors. The village was now on fire. Children were running, screaming, on fire. Men and women were writhing on the ground in flames, trying to shake themselves of everything they could, to be given a chance to live again. The thick sting of cordite was once again in the air. “Things always start to crumble when happiness rears its head”, the disconnected Voice in his head lectured, as his disoriented stagger turned into a full fledged run in the direction of the town. Out of all this destruction, came discovery, the nauseating discovery that he was somehow responsible for all of this. He was responsible for the lives of those children. He was responsible for why there was a hideously disfigured body in the town square. As he moved closer, he started to recognize details about the corpse. It had once been known to him. It had once been a living, breathing, talking, moving mass, that had much to say about the state of the world, and what should be done to improve the lot of the people that it considered allied to the Cause. He found himself in tears at the sight, conscious of the fact that it had happened once before, yet, there was no memory of tears that time. “Why now? What is happening to me?”. He looked at the bodies of the children that were innocent casualties of his personal war. In each of those little bodies, lay his happiness, a happiness he had worked hard to build, as he remembered slowly, what he meant to these people, and what he had ended up becoming. A torn red vest lying next to the corpse caught his eye. Little details,colors and smells form the patchwork quilt of our memories, the Voice said. Out of this shredded and stained fabric, a myriad details were now unraveling, too swiftly for his dull mind to process. The sudden onslaught of memory pulled him to his knees, as shots rang out. Uniformed men appeared, firing indiscriminately at everyone and everything. Those in flames were consigned to the merciful hail of bullets that immediately cut short all their suffering. The soldiers seemed to be moving in his direction. They moved slowly, unsure of their surroundings, yelling to each other in strange tongues, strangers in these strange lands. But this was home to him. He felt he knew the land. He belonged here. He felt a connection to it, he had a stake in its prosperity, a stake these destructive strangers did not have. They were looking for him. They had destroyed everything trying to find him. A new word came to him. Infidels. His brain was now fighting a losing battle with his memory as the torrent of forgotten memories advanced, bursting with their new-found potency, in much the same way as he was losing the battle against the Infidels with guns. He screamed, the impotent scream of a crippled leader who is face to face with the inevitability of a defeat he had long seen coming. The more discriminating marksmen in the uniformed lot took aim, a burst of fire in his direction, and all was silence once more.

He woke up screaming in a tongue he did not know. A shocked old woman sat in front of him, the jar of water in her hand knocked off by his ferocious return to consciousness. Discarded explosives lay everywhere. Amidst the metallic clatter of the falling jar, he tried to come to grips with his identity. It could not be true. He felt like he had woken up from a slumber, and that everything bad was a dream, and it was his redeeming qualities that constituted reality. It could not be so, he told himself. One does not do these things, especially a person who has devoted his whole life to the betterment of younger, more innocent souls, so that the innocence he lost in the holocaust of his youth, could be preserved in these children. He had been a teacher before he had been overtaken by the madness “What have I become? What have I done?”
“You have done God's will, Brother”, a voice said from outside. A tall, bearded man walked in. Even though he had not seen his reflection in at least 10 years, he was struck by the man's familiarity, the resemblance to himself. It was almost as if this figure were an external projection of his own self. He did not know who his parents were, but he knew now that his mother had given birth to twins.
The man embraced him. “Your wife is dead, we did not know she would be by your side. We were given to understand that the only people around would be the prisoner detail that was responsible for your safety during your internment. She took care of you for all the years that we could not, and even though she is not one of us, we pray that the Almighty will make space for her in his heart. The world thinks you are in a coma and will never awaken. We must now continue the fight for the oppressed, and as soon as you are better, we will send you again into the occupied lands. Strike where it hurts, and again, do us proud. Brother, you are indeed back from the abyss. Our parents would be proud of you.”

Pride?, he thought. There was no pride left. What little that was left, had died with her. He became conscious of the realization that while his conscience was asleep, he had been little more than a mass-murderer. A sociopath masquerading behind a professorial countenance.

He remembered now, how he had met her. The long evenings spent under the canopy of the huge oak tree in the town square. He remembered the musical sound of her laugh, the idle chatter of the shifty-eyed village urchins who were jealous of him for possessing what they desired. He remembered how easily she submitted to him, how easily they fell in love. The long, seemingly interminable years of their romance flooded his consciousness as the tears freely rolled down his cheeks. In his re-birth, he had lost his soul, the one person who had given him the strength to carry on when the weight of his beliefs became too heavy for him to carry. She had never asked him a question about what he believed in. He wished she had. He wished he could have told her everything, he wished he could have confessed, that he was not just a teacher of science, he was also a maker of bombs, a “merchant of death”, that he was also an ardent fanatic, firmly committed to a Cause he had only the dimmest understanding of. A Cause that had destroyed his life so completely that only shards of the broken mosaic were left for him to gather. He wished he had surrendered, he wished could have given himself up early in the game, and not have had to suffer this crushing loss of everything he held close. His beliefs had destroyed everything. Reaching up towards the sky, they had left a trail of destruction in their wake.
The sunlight glinting off the barrel of his brother's discarded AK-47 brought him back to reality. There was only one thing left to do, the right thing.
In a hamlet 3 miles away, locals reported hearing a burst of sustained gunfire. The screams went unheard, as the leadership of an entire insurgency was annihilated. Witnesses reported hearing a solitary shot an hour later. Flocks of frightened crows flew towards the sunset. The scattered band of leaderless insurgents gave statements to the press, citing the insanity of one of their leaders as a reason for the alleged massacre. The occupying army countered, stating that a double agent had successfully infiltrated and eliminated the leadership. The woman was quietly buried in her hometown by her weeping family, and the world did what it does best. It forgot.

The Man in the Mirror

“Maybe this world is another planet's hell.”
– Aldus Huxley

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Ravi caught his eye in the bathroom mirror, as he prepared for his morning shave. For a moment, he couldn’t place the man. It was a common enough face, easily forgotten. He took in the graying stubble and the receding hairline, the face puffy from too many late nights in the office and too little sun. One of the many middle-aged men you pass everyday on the streets – of no consequence.

A common face, defined by a common name. And now, framed in one of the cheap plastic mirrors you find by the Bombay roadside in the hundreds.

Hell isn’t a snake pit filled with righteous fire. It isn’t a little red man wielding a farming implement.

Hell is a mediocre life in a planet of infinite possibilities. It is your bald landlord squeezing his luxury out of your necessity. It’s watching your dreams merge into grey nothingness, and slip away unnoticed among the cubicles. It’s the fourth seat on a Bombay local that feels like home. It’s winning a fight for love, only to lose it in the battle of life. It’s typing your name in google and getting 16,000,000 hits – none of them about you.

Hell is waking up one morning and finding a common stranger in your bathroom mirror.

Ravi stared at the man in the mirror. Was he trying to tell him something? The eyes didn’t look quite as dull as they had a moment ago. In fact, they were shining fiercely now, as if he wished to transmit his very soul through the glass and into Ravi.

Then the man spoke. “You don’t need to stay. There is a better world. All you have to do, is step through.”

The voice was his, and the words had come from him, but it was the man who spoke. Was he losing his mind? But he had always known that things weren’t quite as they seemed. He’d always felt the void. In a sense, the man in the mirror had always been there, watching him – waiting for the right moment.

The moment was now. Ravi felt it in his bones. He finally realised that he was the one in the mirror – on the wrong side of it. In Hell. On the other side, was the real him. The one he’d lost on the streets of Bombay a long time ago – the man in his mirror.

Once he’d realised this, stepping through was easy. In a way, he was already there, existing in both world’s simultaneously. It was just a question of perspective.

Reality is arbitrary – you can choose the one you want.

He was through. Everything seemed as before, but the man in the mirror was gone. Ravi smiled at himself, and felt ten years younger. He was out of Hell. In a new world, things would be different. He could be different. Time to change.

A little apprehensive, he headed for the door. He hoped the people would be kind, and not shun him. But he knew that however bad things got, they could never be as bad as Hell.

He opened the door and stepped out into the light, to find a sea of people prostrated before him. All of them chanting the same thing:

“Welcome, visitor from paradise.”

15 Minutes

In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes. Everybody will have their faces transmitted across the ‘global village’ to the proverbial idiot box for at least 15 minutes. Tom will finally have his day in the sun, Dick will not be denied his fan following and Harry will see himself lit up on every billboard in Jaisalmer.

The future is now. Today, so called ‘reality shows’ are just the rage. Even as I write this piece, some enterprising suit in some multi-million dollar media corporation is cooking up a revolutionary new idea for yet another reality show – shocking, scandalizing and even more titillating than ever before. And of course, it is going to star you and me.

Stars have to look the part. People are getting better looking with every generation, women get better looking every day. Pretty soon, ‘plain Jane’ will be extinct. Or as near extinct as won’t matter to the rest of the world. This genocide is, in part, the responsibility of the innumerable beauty products of numerous cosmetic and health care companies.

The gap between the faces we see on television and the silver screen, and the ones we see in our high schools, colleges and local pubs is getting shorter every few years.

Every once in a while, you are struck with the strange feeling that the World just got prettier. Well-proportioned, healthy people, with perfect skin and complexion. Above all, people who know how to make the best of what they already have.

Throw in the miracle of plastic surgery, laser treatment, hair replacement and the myriad other ingenious ways by which technology helps us regain our lost youth and beauty, and you have a pretty formidable mix. Especially when the new you can be a whole lot better than the real you ever was, at least externally.

Technology is the fountain of youth. And it comes with a price tag.

Value is always relative. If everyone is pretty, no one will be beautiful. If everyone is on television, it won’t be enough to make you famous.

Earlier, you had to be special to be famous. Now, you are considered special if you are famous. In the near future, you’ll have to prove yourself special if you want to stay famous.

The trend can already be seen. Most people who turn up for the American Idol auditions are not really there because they think they have a shot at the title. They’re there to be on television. But they won’t be, unless they make a fool of themselves in some outlandish way – unless they entertain.

And when all you have is 15 minutes, you have to be very entertaining if you hope to be remembered.

The conclusion? In the future, everyone will be Famous. And Special (in the same way that a child with half his brain missing is special).

But hopefully, the sun will burn out before that day dawns.

The Last Words

“So, you want audience with the King, huh?”

The fat soldier’s thin friend laughed at his ready wit, relishing the look of acute discomfort on the visitor’s face. It wasn’t often that they got sport like this, trapped as they were behind their desk job. But when it happened, it was good. Only the truly helpless come knocking at these doors and they make soft targets.

Growing truculent, the fat one spat out “We have orders not to let anyone in. Now get out of here before we hand you the same fate as your King!”

The visitor didn’t seem unduly worried by the threat. (He was an old man, the lines on his face making it impossible to judge his true age. Looking at him, one only knew that he’d lived too long for his own liking) He merely reached inside the rags that served as his robe, and pulling out a piece of parchment, placed it on the table in front of the soldiers. Face up, so they could not mistake the seal on it.

One glance was enough. The fat soldier took his feet off the desk, and sat up straight, his face ashen. His thin friend was already escorting the visitor to the cells downstairs. It didn’t even occur to either of them to read the note.

The thin one was back soon enough. First he had a swallow of the glass the fat soldier had filled in his absence. Then both stared at the parchment in silence, as if wishing it away by the combined power of their fear.

“I thought he’d washed his hands off it,” the fat one finally ventured.

“Do you think they’ll release him?”

“If they do, it’ll be our heads. You weren’t there that day. The people will have his blood. Or ours.”

“I heard rumours that many were incited by a few. Do you think…”

“Shh! You think too much for your own good.”

X--------------------------------------X---------------------------------------X

The cell was small, filthy. Rust coloured stains covered the walls – reminders of the trials of others. And also served as warning to the new guests: “Countless men have been broken here, spirits crushed, futures erased. Do not think you’ll be any different. Soon, your pride will be gone, and so will all resistance. All that’ll remain, will be these four walls. And an eternity.”

Huddled in the corner, he seemed to have lived his eternity already. But had he been broken?

The visitor was there as well, the sight almost too much for him to bear. But he too, had a job to do.

He opened his mouth, but the other spoke first:

“It is done.”

Silence, as both men contemplated what was to come next. Hard as the last few days had been, the visitor knew that the worst was far from over. Finally, the visitor spoke:

“Pontius has done what was required of him. Everything is at the ready. But remember, a nation hangs on your final words. We have come this far, do not...I pray... do not fail us at the end.”

“A kingdom, not a nation. The kingdom of God.”

The visitor felt uneasy as he heard these words, escaping like life itself from the still form. A whisper, yet more than a shout. Was he, in his final moments, falling prey to his own myth?

“You know that this miracle cannot come to pass, as others have. It is outside our hands. Your last words must give a reason for this – a reason for the followers to believe. Without that, all this will have been for naught.”

The visitor paused, waiting for a reply – some sign that he understood. None came.

There was nothing more to be said. The visitor had done what he had come for. Now, it was up to God.

X--------------------------------------X--------------------------------------X

The next day, the visitor joined the carnival. There was no other word to describe it. He winced as he saw the enthusiastic crowd milling about, waiting for a man to die. Housework was put aside in favour of endless debate on whether he would beg for mercy in his last moments, or die in the same silence with which he had borne his trial. School was forgotten as the young ones ran alongside their elders, boasting how they would have shown their courage in the same situation.

One good man’s life for a million saved. It seemed a fair enough bargain. And yet, the visitor wasn’t sure anymore.

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

It was done. The visitor turned back, away from the crowd waiting for an encore. It was done. The faith would live on. The endless debates, theories & counter-theories about why the promised miracle didn’t happen would see to it. As long as there’s room for doubt, there’s room for faith. And so, a nation would be built from the ashes of another.

But as he walked away, he couldn’t help wondering, ‘and what about the Kingdom?’

An exercise in futility

Life is incredibly frustrating. All the while you sit, and to an extent it allows you some amount of freedom to believe whatever little insanity you call a philosophy, and to use that as a coping mechanism, and then when it really starts to settle in, and you get comfortable, you get hauled out and you have to start all over again, you would think that this is a solid warning to not go i nthe same direction again, but no, the mind is an incredibly fucking stupid organ. It will go the same route, saying "I'll fashion something different this time, albeit with th same tools" , and 2 years later you'll find yourself in the same ditch you had to dig yourself out of some time ago. It's general really. It could be love, relationship, falling for the same psychotic women again and again, it could be a career, not knowing what you want and so condemning yourself to the tedium of basically raping your soul everyday when you get to work and have to deal with people you'd rather see under a tombstone with a cute little epitaph marking their unremarkable lives, and then making that statement, looking at the elitism and arrogance that caused you to say such a 'mean' thing and then realize that that arrogance is contributing more to your isolation from all the things that life on this planet is about.
The more miserable you get, the more you surround yourself with this wall of impenetrability, the more you try to appear composed to people around you so they wont see the cracking foundations within, the more you try to keep up appearances, to hold on to concepts you consider "constructive" while desperately trying to hide the big gaping holes of doubt that come across whenever you or someone else deliberately or innocently questions a core fundamental precept of whatever crap you chose to call a belief.
Life doesn't suck though, it can be nice, but the head won't let you see that, and when you are down, it will kick you in the shins some more so you can crawl a little longer. But eventually you have to crawl out, you either do that by abandoning yourself completely to nihilism, which is really not advisable, because then you have a "nothing can stop me now cos i don't care anymore" attitude, which makes you into a pretentious little bitchy goth, or you can say "we add our own meaning to life" and embark on your own quest to redefine your concepts again and again and again till you either go mad, or weave something so durable that it can withstand anything life throws at you, from random deaths of people you love, to instances that appear out of nowhere and have no tangible lesson to offer. Naturally, this does not happen often, many people who do try have incredibly ridiculous (to me) ideas wihch do not stand up to any form of scrutiny. These people are best left alone. These ar enot the only two methods. I am sure there are more, but unfortunately my moods are being severely limited by my criticism of every observation i make. I am stuck at a stage where I am trying to build something stable. A concept that involves having no concepts of life, which well, is completely self-defeating, and yet i do it, for the few moments I am able to look past that paradigm i am able to experience balance equilibrium, and this fleeting feeling that maybe life is not an ordeal after all, that it can be pleasant, that there are squares of light in the dark. But like all things, this too will pass, and it leaves you again with the uncertainty of doubt, the vulnerable feeling in the morning, the pain on seeing someone you don't wish to speak to anymore, the hundred things that make existence a roller coaster, and they keep washing on over you and spinning you around in an unstoppable vortex of change. I am desperate to get out of it, to be in it, yet be outside it watching myself be in it and not feeling numb, feeling things yet realizing the futility of emoting about something that is entirely out of your hands, yet I realize that that very desperation also keeps me very firmly in it.
Unfortunately, I fail to see the point in many things these days,love perhaps being the only exception, because it has some good benefits as far as mental health is concerned, other emotions,anger,rage,despair, they come, they stay, they go, and i still stay the same. I won't say i don't care..i do care, but there is only so much you can do for yourself and others. The exhaustion that follows the realization of futility is indescribable. I feel it pretty heavily now, so I think I'll spare you the torture of reading more of this tripe, not because I am kind, but because I can't go on without sounding like a complete charlatan.

8 steps to being a better corporate whore

These are some random guidelines i have compiled that might help you be a better employee/manager, and might help you prolong your stay with your company, for upto two weeks at a time.

a) Kiss your director's ass thoroughly, reaching into every cobwebbed nook and cranny, make sure there is no kidney stone left unturned.
b) Never turn down a promotion by saying "i hate the people, i would rather work in my old group because atleast i didn't want to die everytime i opened my eyes in the morning". It will cause people to say untrue things about you..like "he is negative. unnecessarily mean, rude. not a team player" that last sentence is pretty much the nail in the coffin by the way. if you get that not a team player tag around your neck, you may as well go shoot yourself.
c) Never ever ever ever say "dude this code is totally gay man!" to a gay guy who has stopped by to help you with some fuckup. It will make a serious difference in both your day(s).
d) If some senior management guy has no teeth and happens to be gay, do not make statements in public relating the two *seemingly* disjointed facts together. Sorry, i can't be plainer without being disgustingly explicit.
e) If big bitchy senior lady asks you why you have turned down a promotion, focus on the positives, the positives of being in the older group as opposed to the newer group, never ever say, "There wasn't enough work". you won't appear honest. you will simply be looked at with the "too good for himself" lens, which as you know, is notoriously misty, and will get you fired before you can say "hello HR guy. how are you today?"
f) If someone in the toilet did their big job all over the floor instead of in the pot (as people are apt to do when they simply forget the purpose of a toilet, a common enough occurrence in IT companies, owing to people being too full of it), make sure to send a lot of company wide emails lamenting the fact that you've never had to write an email like this in your entire career. If you are a manager, and you want a headcount of all the kiss-asses in your company, simply wait for the Reply-to all mails you get from various employees who say "Well Said!" or "Hear Hear!" and do a brief count, and there you have it.
g) Fire those bastards the coming friday, because they wasted company resources saying well said and hear hear when they could have used the bleach and the mop.
h) The HR manager in every company is usually a sub-human product of his parents' lust, often a symbol of failed family planning programs. Have him do it. This will also give you a chance to glow from within, and feel warm and happy when you picture him muttering to himself.. "chief recruiter..and i am fucking cleaning up shit. This wasn't in my job description you goddamn sons of bitches"

That's about all i can think of. I might add to it from time to time, but don't count on it. I have a job to keep too.

Pogramming with your Cube Mates

I know it's been a while, but i've been saving and bottling up all my pissiness, so that my outburst will have finesse, magnitude, and direction.
Right.
So, let's get down to business. Praveen has been a little bitch that hasn't posted since...since a very long time. In that interval, i've even managed to have an operation, spend time in hospital, recover, and shave beards that would make mullahs proud.
I've been 'promoted'...i use quotations because it sucks, and i would rather have my old position back. Back then i was the groundling, the object of scorn and the curled upper lip by many a developer who thought his code was so important that the company would not function without him, in fact, they sure made it seem so..I work in a place where if you manage to do your job, they call your name out at meetings. It's like telling your wife she's not fat. It's something you're supposed to do, you don't get honoured for it. Either it is duly noted and filed away by the wife, or you get yelled at : "What do you mean i am not fat? What made you think that i thought i was fat?" (this often happens if you were idiotic enough to preempt her question)..and it's the same thing about work, atleast, that's how it should be. If you say nothing about it, some head honcho should stick his head out and give you a polite nod as you walk past his glass-walled office while he is burrowed behind his pc surreptitiously looking at porn, and, if you tell your boss very nervously, while standing on one leg.."you know, i did, like, this thing, you know, and it like, brought this company a lot of money, you know", in which case you are sent to your desk with a sharp rap on your knuckles, or if the boss is in a particularly expansive mood, a pen case. So yeah, you get the picture. if you go above and beyond your job, only then should your name be called out..otherwise what happens? Everytime some stupid senior ditz calls out your name and says "Couldn't have done it withoutcha!!!!!! *FLASHY SMILE*"(she will never make a mention of your name because you are not important enough for your name to be remembered. there is very limited brain space. it is used up by acronyms for words and sentences that do not make any sense when strung together, nor have any meaning), people make the mistake of assuming that they are somehow above mediocre, and they start throwing their weight around.
I program in a language that britney spears could pick up within minutes. It is not something to have an ego about, yet as you walk by people's desk, you will find them chewing their lip thoughtfully, and discussing issues about the language that a bored toddler could tell you the answer to. Case in point.
"How would we get the person's name from a database"
"Hmm..that is a good point..good point *long pause*..oh wait! isn't there code that already does that???!?!?! EUREKA. I AM A GOD!"
Horrible, isn't it?
So, you get the picture, a company where the code is easy, and most of the work involves finding already implemented stuff, carefully selecting, clicking "Copy" and then transferring over to the new destination. 5 minutes of tinkering and 4 hours of table tennis later..finished shiny end product that will promptly break because the old code never worked anyway, whereupon the reaction is.."oh well..let the bug fixers handle it. i worked hard on this and busted my balls"..so that was what i was..a bug fixer..i would fix their shit, and it helped me get a good understanding of how the world, and that particularly shitty program, "worked". it was good in a way, it was mostly easy, the guys around me were fun to work with..there was constant laughter and table tennis and endless hours of fun to be had by all...until i got promoted.
Now, i sit in a dreary and dark cube all the way on the other end. My companions are, let's call them hbfb, and peewee. hbfb=heavy-breathing fat bastard. 6 feet tall, 17 feet wide. One word description: Yokozuna. I can't even run him over with my car, because it would total my car, and leave him with barely a scratch, although i've wanted to on many an occassion.
hbfb happens to work in a company, as a side project, and they wanted my help to make a song that their product could use. The negotiations were as follows
1st day
hbfb: Hey i heard your music. I want you to write some songs, and we'll pick. we'll give you cash for it.
me: how about...no? i'd like a cut of the profits
hbfb: I will have to discuss with my compatriots on this issue
me: yeah, whatever. let me know.
2nd Day
hbfb : Hey, i spoke to my colleagues about this joint venture
me: yeah, and?
hbfb: There are two opposing schools of thought on the issue
me: you actually have schools of thought on this shitty issue?
hbfb: uhhm..yes we do.
me: That is the most pathetic thing i have heard in years.
hbfb: You're not the most positive guy here are you?
me: Not unless you mean blood group.
Day 3
hbfb: Apparently, they don't want to pay you
me: so i have to do this for free?
hbfb: yeah
me: it took you 3 days to tell me that?
hbfb: Well there were ongoing discussions
me: wow.gay.

hbfb is the type of individual that will look up something on the internet, some code-related issue, and then talk like he wrote a ground-breaking book on the subject. The talk will be merry-go-roundy, and any piercing questions will be cleverly deflected with "Well *important look* it depends on the context in which you refer to the subject material"
.."with assays and windlasses of bias, by indirections find directions out", only in this case, direction is a blank wall and me desperately looking for ways to end it all.

Onto peewee, peewee is smart, sassy, and kiss-assy. If there is a butt with upper management written on it, peewee's lips will be glued to it faster than hbfb's to his dinner plate. He has a nasal voice, and whenever he talks, plaster falls from the ceiling, and i turn the volume on my mp3 player up to levels that would make deaf adders uneasy.
The only problem i have with peewee, is the fact that he gets by doing no work at all. He comes in at 10:30, or whenever his calendar tells him is an auspicious time to do so, watches rap music videos, and says things like "Yo Wuassap man!" to his bosses (he is not black. he is simply cool and down with it, and we all wish we could be like him). Then when it's 2pm, he disappears, and you can't see him till 10am the next day. He logs 8-9 hours every day.He's quite smart though, so i have to give him that. When i become president, he will be the last against the wall, and there will be a special silver bullet for him.

So, these are my new cube mates. It is tough working..all i hear when i am not listening to music, is his heavy breathing..i feel like my chair is getting pulled closer and closer with every inhalation.
every day is a punishment, well mostly. I take out all the anger on my friend at table tennis.

What is worrisome is the listlessness that working with these two fucktards has spawned. I don't care about work anymore. all i care about is getting my 8 hours, and leaving the place. Which means, that there is trouble brewing on the horizon. If the only guy there who works is only working 8 hours, out of which 5 are spent playing table tennis, then, someone will have to pay dearly. hbfb is in wedded bliss..so he won't be fired..apparently...the best thing about getting married is "dude, she brings me food to my desk.how awesome is that" ..i wasn't sure whether i was supposed to be envious, or nauseated by that remark.

It won't be peewee, because peewee is down with all the head honchos, even if he doesn't do anything..so, guess who will be sent home early some friday because "Statistically it has been demonstrated that office workers are less likely to cause a scene if fired right before the weekend" ??

The Indian "Talent" Show

I went to an "Indian Talent Show" on Saturday night. I felt life had been too easy and I needed to punish myself for being happy. Atleast, that must have been the only rationale that prompted me to go there, and also the vague hope that I might meet some nice Indian students at the university, preferably female, preferably quiet and nice and not overly yappy. We sat down, amidst a throng of babbling Indians. The show started 40 minutes late with a girl with a squeaky pseudo accent telling us in grating syllables that they were sorry they started late. Everyone clapped, whether it was in anticipation or despair, I couldn't tell. My friend who had come with me to see if there were any good looking girls, stirred in his seat uneasily. They handed out cards that had the show's schedule on them. I forgot what they are called, but at any rate, my friend was happy reading the names, according to him they all sounded like they'd be 'hot'. They then proceeded to sing the national anthems of India and the US. I have never seen a song being gang-raped before, but they managed to pull that one off smoothly. There were two groups of oily looking females singing the anthems, and they were both desperately fighting tooth-and-claw for last place. Everyone else had their hands on their crotch as it was too informal an occassion to stand at attention. The Indian anthem didn't sound as bad basically because everyone was singing louder and louder to drown out the squeaky voices of Oily Exhibits A. The american anthem however would have gotten us all deported if any of the sullen americans sitting listlessly in the corner had the energy to walk over to the phone booth and summon the justice department. It was an effort not to laugh out loud, and on many occassions i got glares from the local senior citizens who had surrounded us and were trying to threaten us into behaving like good boys. The show proceeded, true indian style..with item no. 17 on the list being performed first, followed by the introduction, a dance, more dances, and an intermission. The dances started and my friend leaned forward expectantly. "monisha will now perform mehboob mere" ...He uttered a stricken cry of anguish. Monisha was 7 years old, and definitely not his type, and the same followed for most of the other contenders for rock-bottom. There was one number by some actual college females of age, and it was very remiscent of peasant women stomping on great blobs of cowdung to soften it into patties ( a very common thing in rural villages in india). It should have been called "The Death March of Bataan-Anu Malik" but they give it a rather juicy sounding filmy title. There were some American girls seated in front of us. They couldn't take the excitement and had to leave their chairs to go forward and stand and clap. The funny thing was they left their purses there, and would glance back at us suspiciously from time to time to make sure we wouldn't do a quick number and disappear with said purses. "blady thieving indians"
At this point, a colleague from work and his girlfriend, both americans, decided to join us. "Hey Madman, What're you performing?" ...yes..because i'm indian, and this is an indian talent show, I must perform like a wound-up drummer monkey for your enjoyment so you can purse your lips at some weekly Poker meeting with your friends and make statements like "Hmm..You know, Indian culture is quite interesting, there was this one time...". fucking morons. You might think i'm being unnecessarily harsh. I'm not. This guy writes awful code. I have often fantasized about catching him by the tuft of his beard and beating him mercilessly because I've had to debug said code on many occassions.
The show went on, proceeding smoothly from item to item. The only way you'd know if a particular performance was over was by the listless way in which the 'contestants' would tangentially walk off stage, while the music was playing. now bows, nothing. it was like watching a group of mexicans get caught at the border. the same resignation, the same shoulder-shrugging acceptance of a harsh fate.
The DJ, a white guy, normally asleep, would suddenly realize the stage was empty, stop the music, and clap, and the rest of the herd would follow suit half-heartedly. He also decided to rap for us by the way, and that was the best performance of the evening. That should tell you how good it was.
The show sucked, so I thought the dinner intermission would atleast make up for it, but right before dinner they decided to make a few announcements. The audience, their appetite whetted by all this torture was clapping enthusiastically to everything the squeaky female was blabbing out, in the hopes that they'd be loosed on the food quite soon, then came the announcement. Apparently, the university had refused to fund this event(not surprising. If i were in charge of funding, I'd think twice about paying out good money to watch 8 year olds sing yeh tara woh tara with an american accent, rolling the r's), so there wasn't too much food, and what food there was, had to be rationed. There was a stampede when that announcement was finished. It was reminscent of photographs in The Hindu about the plight of Andhra farmers, and food rations. They literally served us half a spoonful of vegetables, two puris, and some rice, and if you asked for more, you'd get a mournful stare from two girls whom they had stationed expressly for that purpose. As a clever tactic to stop second servings, there were no spoons or forks to be found, only knives, so no one would come back for the rice, and the puris were anyways like Indian Railways material so unless you were dying of hunger, you wouldn't go back for that. At this point, i was saved by my work. I got a call from a guy at work saying something had to be uploaded to some servers, and I headed for the exit, and into the cool, comforting night.

The Revolution

“Let’s kill the Queen!”

A spilt his sugar and B nearly bit his leg off. They both looked at C, not trusting their own ears.

“What? You know she’s the cause of it all. Sitting in her cave, growing fat on our hard work. I say we bump her off…”

“Shh! Have you gone mad? How could you even think such a thing!”

“It’ll be easy! Precisely because no one’s thought of such a thing!”

“And for good reason! Do you think you can just waltz up to her and bite her head off?”

“Yes! There are never more than two or three soldiers near her, and they’re just for show. No one expects an attack.”

“But you’re insane! The Queen!”

“Yes, the Queen! She’s the reason we break our backs everyday in those terrible lines, living every moment in fear of those bullies she calls soldiers. And for what? So they can eat and get stronger, to go out and capture more like us. All to feed her highness, who seems to bloat up more while our people die in those bloody lines daily.”

“But it’s our job..”

“Not a job, it’s our caste! Just because we’re born into it. And they don’t help us either – the soldiers could lend a hand to an old one here, or a cripple there, but no! They just curse us and act tough because they go to the battles. Let them try carrying 8 times their own weight through miles of hostile territory to feed a whore who’ll spit at you as soon as say hello.”

“Everything you say is true, but still…to kill the Queen?”

“It’s not impossible. It’d be easier than killing one of those bullies in fact. She’s grown so fat on our sweat and blood that she won’t even be able to defend herself. And the soldiers are too cocky to suspect anything. We just have to remain cool, and not lose our nerve. Our people will be set free by our sacrifice. Here’s the plan…”

----------------------------------------X----------------------------------------

The next day, 3 workers broke the line and rushed up to the Queen. Everyone froze, even the never ending line coming to a halt. And then they stopped. The Queen’s large eyes were on A, B and C. Her hypnotic gaze sapped their will, emptied their minds. Then, with a supreme effort of will, C muttered “Bloody whore” and leapt on to her giant frame, aiming for the softest spot.

And then the world came to an end.

----------------------------------------X----------------------------------------

Jerry, driving home after a hard day’s work in the fields, felt a bump as his truck’s tire went over an anthill. He made a note to check the wheel – it had been feeling a little loose lately.

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Note: Can't think of appropriate names for A, B & C. Suggestions welcome :)

Peace of Mind: And how to ruin it

I am at the beach. It is a beautiful morning. THe sun is coming up. There are glimmers all over the ocean, which is as placid as a millpond. There are dolphins in the distance, about 4-5 of them, and they're performing interesting maneouvres, either mating or feeding.Neverthless, it was fascinating to watch their bodies gleam in the sunlight and to watch the spouts of steam issue from their blowholes as they frolicked around. The pelicans were gliding along the waves. There is something very elegant about pelicans. I could go as far as to say that they are the only elegant denizens in this blighted marshland otherwise known as florida. Everything was all right with the world, and to amplify my good mood, the beach was deserted. Perfect time to do a little bit of self-hypnosis/meditation to steel myself up to face the idiots at work. But no, trouble looms on the horizon..Since i face the sun, whenever i close my eyes i can feel the light hitting my eyelids and everything is a brilliant red with eyes closed, but this time there was a shadow looming over me, for a while i thought it was a passing cloud and continued my ruminations undisturbed...then that somehow didn't feel right...there were odd sounds..and something licked my face... I turned, and there was a species of mottled old lady standing behind me. I winced and prepared for the worst.... No, she didn't lick me you perverts, it was the bloody dog.
"Are you meditating?" ....well, not anymore woman...
"I just saw you sitting there and felt like I had to talk to you"
I don't know what it is, but there is something about the sight of a person sitting alone and for once, enjoying the fucking solitude that seems to rankle the spirit of every ditzy sociable person within a 50 mile radius and makes them want to go about spewing chaos and irritability into an otherwise peaceful melting pot of emotions.
Then she went on about how she was from new york city, and then people around her had started dying, and about how it really got her thinking about the purpose of life, and about how she wanted answers....good god..
anyways...i kept thinking...'so where lieth the barbed point buried beneath honey'd words?'...and promptly enough it poked through..."then i found christ"
ugh.
At that point, i had to intervene, i had to tell her i was meditating for a reason,something...i hadn't said a word throughout this soliloquoy and unless cut off, she would continue to extend herself and nail her toes to her pedestal. The only thing i managed to bleat out was..."Well i have."....that was enough for her..for the next 20 minutes, she went on about the king james bible, and about how I should read that instead of other bibles, and then she also told me that she doesn't read that bible but instead reads the original hewbrew, whereupon i had to politely interject to find out if she really was a learned lady, in which case she'd have my respect, or just another locust from the Religious Yahoo swarm that's currently ravaging the country. No, she doesn't know hebrew, she uses a lexicon. A pretty nice way to describe a dictionary with frills. How do you appreciate prose if you translate everything to english anyways? I decided not to ask her that as that would only add to the fire...so on and on she went...at one point i had to stifle a giggle, i was thinking of odd things to suddenly yell out loud about...something on the lines of, "The Asiatic Lion was once a majestic species, its range stretching all the way to Rome! It's chief diet consisted of antelope, buffalo, and also the occasional Christian at the local Colosseum."
instead, like the idiot i am, i said.."I know all this. You see, I Don't like religion. I grew up a hindu, in a muslim neighbourhood, and went to a jesuit school where i saw priests doing bad things. I don't like religion" "but religion is a guideline, life is so much better with God"........i love you god, but save me from your followers. It was a long time before i could get rid of her. I totally lost sync with the mood, had to go late for work, and listen to the ceo of my company make it sound like his company was actually a charitable organization that brought happiness to so many people. in short, my day sucked.
Anyways, the point of the whole thing is, if you have peace, and if you are at an easy equilibrium with your surroundings, please, keep it to yourself. There is nothing that betrays insecurity as effortlessly as proselytyzing, besides, people can sympathize more easily with your pain than with your pleasure..and well, use your head..anyone who tells you that they are right and that most of the world is wrong is either fantastically arrogant, in which case they should be trucked off to Auschwitz, or they are hopelessly insecure in which case they have no business feeding you bullshit they wish they bought, and that brings me to the point of religion. I hate it. For all of you in other countries who think somewhat highly of the Indian diaspora in the US, i have some jarring news for you. They are a bunch of putzes. No doubt they are educated, but so is every mugpot who can learn hamlet by heart, miss all the beauty but is perfectly capable of telling you on which page Polonius got poked hiding behind the tapestry, but that's not what bothers me. IT's their religiousness. I should be tolerant you say, but i can't be tolerant of intolerance, and i tend to get very worked up when i go to someone's house for a nice meal of sambar+rice and end up listening to bullshit like "WE MUST STAAP THI MUSLIM APPEAJMENT!! NAUW!!".."we must build tembil in ayodhya"...." all muslims in india are muslims first indians later" ...?!?!?!?! This VHP poster-boy stuff coming from graduates from good colleges who've spent the better half of their lives in good families, you know, middle to upper middle class people, the arterial blood of the country..first of all..everytime you make a statement beginning with all or most but missing a reference to observed population, and not estimated population, it is patently false. to know that all muslims are bad, or most hindus are idolators, you'd have to know all hindus, or all muslims, and out of that you must have done a percentage study to determine the true opinion of every member of your subset and then have these facts on hand to support your argument, and even THEN you could be wrong, because some dick in that subset would have lied. That does sound ridiculous, doesn't it? To me it sounds about as ridiculous as "All muslims hate hindus"

not everyone is like that of course..there's also the daler mehndi crowd and a small section of the population that actually does think straight. you'll know them when you meet them by how refreshed you feel after a 10 min discussion with them...not the daler mehndi types. You'll know those by how refreshed you feel after getting away from their clutches and their "what yaar that bhangra beat is classss yaar..oye soni kudi" words of wisdom.

but anyways, religion has done nothing spectacular for india within the past 50 years...unless you consider Partition movies mesmerizing. We have "rich cultural heritage ok", which is basically our crutch. No power, cultural heritage. Poverty, cultural heritage. It's like a kid who fails in all subjects but does excellently at english grammar(i am using a real example. that kid was me). "You FAILED MATH???AND PHYSICS????" "but mommy..i did so well in Make Sentences!!"... Religious riots, cultural heritage. Our answer to everything, and no doubt it is there. I love it. I love going to temples. I love reading old texts and getting in touch with a forgotten past, it is no doubt very exotic, but when i am woken in the middle of the night by a phone call from my mom asking me to listen to "vishnu sahasrananams because it spreads good vibrations around the house", i tend to go on my God is dead trips....but otherwise culture can be very refreshing, and gives you a good feel for what you are, and what you can or want to be....but at what price? There are more widows than there are buddhas. Is it worth it? Give a human being an idea and he will corrupt it in an instant, and that's what's basically happening. Why does being proud about hindu mean having to hate muslims/christians for so many people? Why this (check previous post) binary logic? Why can't people follow the middle ground...actually, why be proud about anything? why be proud to be hindu? is it a culmination of personal achievement? born 30 seconds later you could be ethiopian, or worse, catholic..

anyways, i came out of that discussion feeling thoroughly disgusted. It's things like that that make me feel disgusted at everything that goes on back home. I love the country so much, and it is really painful to see it get raped by people like this, in the name of religion/caste/creed/. I don't have orgasms if i see saffron but I am a hindu, in terms of my upbringing,the sense of comfort i feel in sitting by myself in ruined temples, praying to gods that i am on more familiar, personal terms with(when i am content or afraid enough to believe in one). i don't feel a need to be proud of it, the same way i don't see a reason to be proud of who i am. We're six billion insignificant little shits swirling around in a universe that doesn't give a damn. It's about time we realized that if we're insignificant, so are things like caste,creed, race. Nobody cares, least of all your God. What's better? Dying and killing for a god, or living without one?
I'm done. I don't feel like I've done complete justice to my feelings, but if i continue i risk being stoned, or worse, sound preachy, which is exactly what i want to avoid.
Moral of the story: If you see a person sitting alone on the beach, or in any place of scenic beauty, and he/she looks happy, leave them alone. That way, they will have one less reason to post stuff that ends up making you wince.

The Insignificant Other

I wonder how I’m going to explain this latest incident to my wife. It’s not everyday one gets the opportunity to be robbed at knifepoint by a prostitute, and then made to undress to satiate her inebriated fancies. Very obviously drunk, yes, but she took all my clothes, and the wife’s definitely going to look askance at the fact that I’ve come home without any clothes on, or money. The clothes bit is acceptable I suppose, but what about the day’s wages? Well, I guess it’s for the best, because if she doesn’t lose her head shouting at me, she might not realize the uselessness of her taunts, and if she doesn’t realize the uselessness of her taunts, she might not realize that she’s shouting at me for no reason at all, not that that’s stopped her in the past, but still, there’s no harm in hoping. Anyhow, enough about her. I shall move on to other more interesting details, and hopefully cure you insomniacs of your sleeplessness.

I’m 35 years old, have been married for 8 years now. I sometimes think it is the biggest mistake I’ve ever made in my life. You no doubt know what I mean. That statement might sound like the most recently ejected constituent of the cliché gutter, but it takes on a new meaning for me. You see, I met her at a party; she was drunk, and like all drunk women, was really attracted to me, possibly because my face looks attractive when vision is blurry. Indeed I am positively irresistible when there is no vision at all and also because you’re too self-obsessed when under the influence of alcohol; you’re incapable of hearing properly, and the other person has no choice but to listen, and you get the mistaken impression that that person truly gives a damn. Such was the case with me. I pretended to give a damn, and before I knew it, a month later, she proposed. I was of course what you would call a passive bystander in the whole process. She came along, popped the question, and then suddenly against all my wishes, I found myself nodding dumbly. The nodding lamb that is about to get its throat cut. A few minutes later, reason resumed her throne. I sincerely wish she had permanently abdicated, because I was conscious of feeling like I had just been hit and run over by something very large. I don’t know why I make these stupid decisions, I don’t know why I can’t shake my head instead of nodding, just one little tilt to the left, and my fortunes would have been entirely different, just a little tilt, and yet, I chose to nod my half hearted assent.

At that time, I was working; I actually had a job, as a software engineer in a large firm. It was like any other job, the salary was decent, and the actual work, was utterly pointless. We would fill out a thousand forms, most of these forms were about the progress we were making doing work, but it turns out, most of the work was, yes, filling out forms, a progress report to gauge how well we were reporting the progress of the process. The phrase, “the process is all there is” now meant something entirely different to me. But anyways, to veer back from the tangent, I had a job, I had money, but I had no life. My entertainment consisted of walking around aimlessly around the city, and collecting useless information about the habits of my fellow human beings, and for a hobby, I used to write. Bizarre stories, about gobs and gremlins, princes and princesses, eerie love triangles filled with improbable endings, endings that I wished my life would have. Wish fulfillment, in the form of dreary, endless, sloppy prose, and that leads me to the root cause of my so called condition. I am an emotional hypochondriac. The problem, you see, is the fact that my head will not stop buzzing with thoughts. I am terrified of my memories, yet I am unable to forget any of them. “ How lucky you are”, some of you might say, “You get to relive every happy moment again and again!” but no, greedy nostalgia has long since sucked the happiness out of any thoughts I may have, now they are simply like heroin, I need a fix from time to time to fill up the void with brief splashes of colour, laughter, happiness, yet, in many ways, it simply contributes to making the rest of my life a featureless vacuum, a barren desert, populated with ghostly mirages of fertility, for if you dwell in the past, you have no future.

Most of these memories, I am ashamed to say, still deal with love, the only time I’ve ever experienced something like that. Tina, the mention of her name still rankles, and yet, my brain loves to keep chanting it over and over again like some mantra, in the vain hope that repeated prodding of the heart will numb the wound. She was everything I could’ve asked for, attractive, intelligent, and most of all, innocent. I don’t know why I thought this to be an attractive quality; it’s something you need to be very careful of in another person. It is meant to be guarded against, not guarded. But anyhow, to make a painfully boring story more tolerable, she fell for me, and I for her. We’d take long walks in the half light and talk about everything from Dionysus to Hitler, and very soon we were falling headfirst into the abyss of the love that is often born of either complete idiocy, or complete innocence. Intense, and short would sum it up neatly. I wouldn’t have minded marrying her, but the problem was, she was never sure of how she felt about anything, much less a man(I flatter myself) in her life. In her more emotional moments, she was fond of telling me how I was like a cloak, her protector, to keep her warm in an otherwise frosty existence, but unfortunately for me, this protective warmth stifled her in the springtime of her budding adulthood, and she effectively had no problems discarding me into the proverbial closet of her memories. Moth-eaten and shriveled I’ve remained. Such is life, you love, you lose, and then you die.

I was devastated, and naturally, I turned upon myself. The buzzing inside grew even louder, it reached a volume where I could not hear myself speak, or listen to the sounds of life, all I could listen to were the endless voices in my head, each screaming out their frustrations, each of the myriad screams a diatribe against my own existence, the futility of purpose, the meaninglessness of every emotion my undeveloped mind could process.

At this stage of my life, a new and profoundly awful realization revealed itself. Breathing hurt, no, not in any discernible physical form. This pain was entirely mental. The slow process of inhalation and exhalation sent sharp stabs of pain through my chest. Breathing itself became an ordeal. A painful exercise to be endured for the sake of some intangible happiness, which in all likelihood was long dead. Was this born out of Grief? Fear? Frustration? I could not say, it would not let me sleep, or even live a normal life. The dying rasp of a man pushed too far by circumstance.

Out of sheer desperation (I woke up one morning completely unable to breathe, for the voices had now begun to strangle my sanity), I tried meditation. I sense a sneer of skepticism from the audience, and I would agree, your skepticism is well founded. Meditation is nothing but the murder of thought. That which causes you to think about not thinking, is still thinking, albeit of a very confusing, yet base nature. “Focus on your breath”, they said. “Think of the void, the silence”, they said. “Breathe”. The very idea of focusing on breathing in, and breathing out, was nothing but the slow suffocation of my thoughts, my voices, but not only those. It was also the slow strangulation of the very matter that gave rise to everything I associated with an idea of being. My head did not like this, and it exacted its own bizarre type of revenge.

“Attempted suicide: Death by drowning. The accused may please come forward.”

“How do you plead?”

“I plead ignorance”

“You may not. The two available options are guilty or not. Don’t waste my time, Mr. Ahmed or I’ll have you jailed for contempt. You are free to choose between your options.”

Great. I was being tried in a court for suicide. Suicide! Was this a nation of schizophrenics, where terminating your personalities, or lack thereof, would be viewed as gravely as killing someone else? And I was free to choose between a rock and a hard place, but no, the choice could not be extended to something as inevitable as death. Suicide is illegal here, you see. You don’t even have the right to stop living. The pointless hilarity of the situation elicited a strangled guffaw out of me. I struggled to recount the facts as the jury formally sentenced me to a week of psychiatric counseling. The sniveling little bastards, although, I didn’t hate even one of them as much as I hated the perverseness lurking inside me. Death by drowning, to counter the strangling I had been doing all this while.

I struggled to recount the details. I had started frequenting a bar of late. Alcohol always increased my immunity to the yelling inside, and left me with a pleasant warm glow that seemed very much like the heyday of my romantic youth, only this time I was caressing vodka, not Tina’s face, although she would inevitably appear to haunt me, after I had finished drinking. I didn’t even know that it wasn’t real. The hallucinations were more colourful, more meaningful than reality itself. Every detail of her being would be etched in front of me. Her big brown eyes, the beautiful way in which she would arch her shoulders, or shake her head, and that dazzling smile. It would say a thousand things, but the loudest of the silent statements would scream, “There is nothing to be said. I know your every thought.” It got too strong, and at this point I was urging myself to end everything, or rather, one of the voices was, I was simply too tired to argue or to exercise the tattered remnants that were once a very strong part of a complicated framework of inhibitions. I walked to the docks, and threw myself into the water. However, you can’t drown in four feet of gently sloshing brine if you’re six feet tall. What you will get is a concussion, and someone will more likely than not call the cops, after they’ve finished laughing at you.

I was a complete failure. I couldn’t even kill myself effectively; ruminate on that for a second. To be so incompetent as to not being capable of ending that which is responsible for your misery, how much more ironic could life get?

Psychiatric counseling sessions are painful, especially state-sponsored programs. The shrinks, for want of a better word, and they do come in one size, small, mottled, and very pompous, seem to think of themselves as a self styled Jesus to the otherwise self-destructive Philistines. A week of preaching later, I was a changed man. I had decided. I had turned over a new leaf, well, somewhat. If I was going to kill myself, I thought, there must be no screw-up. I could not survive another session intact, but alas, the thought of failure, and eventual return to my freckled Jehovah put away any further thoughts of self destruction from my mind. I now had other things to think about. I suddenly wanted to excel at my pointless job, I wanted a wife, I wanted to be a part of the process that I knew I would eventually reject. I wanted to feel what it was like to be a normal human being. Perhaps the unending torpor of a routine would silence the voices once and for all, bridge the schism between my different selves, and maybe I would find love again. But no, all I found was Suman, waiting for me, buried beneath a mountain of progress reports and vodka shots.

And here I am. It’s been a long and tiring life, and that exhaustion is further compounded by the fact that I’ll have to put up with her tantrums when I get home. Maybe I shouldn’t go. I think I will run away, start again. I don’t know what I will do, but do something I must. I can’t go back to this job, and I can’t go back to her incessant yelling. Ten lifetimes of poverty are infinitely preferable to this intellectually impoverished existence that I misguidedly call a life. A smiling drunk hands me a cup of half eaten yogurt. Shamefaced as I suddenly realize my nakedness, I accept, and he throws me an added bonus, a gown. Now I have the necessary accoutrements to begin my new life. A brilliant blue phrase on the cup catches my eye. “Contest!” it says. “Look under the cup to see what you have won.” Spurred on by a sudden stab of hope, I turn the cup upside down, spilling everything.

“Sorry! You are not a winner. Better luck next time!”

Adam

In the year 2875, Mankind died.

It didn't perish in poverty, wasn't buried under a giant meteor, didn’t burn up with the sun. There was no nuclear holocaust.

Mankind just died.

Or rather, I should say, Adam died.

Quite ironic really, naming the last descendant of the human race 'Adam'. But then you couldn't blame his parents. He was their last hope. They named him Adam hoping for a revisitation of the miracle that first occurred in Eden.

He was Mankind's last hope too, come to think of it. Maybe it was all that pressure that did it.

Adam was sterile.

There was nothing that could be done about sterility. If he had had a low sperm count, or low mobility or any of the other hundred odd sexual problems that had been plaguing Mankind for thousands of years, there were medical procedures. Medical procedures invented over the years by a desperate race afflicted by prosperity and entertainment.

Tired sperm could be rejuvenated but for death there was no cure yet.

He and Sita had tried up to the bitter end.

Sita. His parents had traveled long and hard to find her.

When his mother's scan had betrayed his sex, a frantic search had ensued to find him a mate.

In a country with a reported population of 15, not a single couple with child could be found.

In a planet with an estimated population of 50, there was one.

When Adam's parents contacted them, they had been married for 25 years and their daughter Sita was already 14 years old.

But she would be the closest to Adam in age out of all the people his parents had met and spoken to. She and Adam would outlive everyone else on the planet by at least 25 years.

No one could've predicted that Adam would outlive her by a further 30 years.

Sita's parents were exceptions. They had opted to marry when most people were just living together for convenience's sake and had multiple partners.

But then, they had a healthy daughter and could afford the luxury of a commitment.

In a planet of 50, there were only 12 men. Most of the population suffered from some form of sterility. Even if some managed to get pregnant, there were usually complications at birth. Those babies that survived the multiple operations at delivery usually died soon after. When Adam was picked up by the scanners, there had been no successful child births, other than Sita, for 30 odd years.

The youngest couple on the planet were already in their 30s and sterile.

Adam's birth wasn't without its share of complications either. It left his mother incapable of having any more children and him half dead in an incubator.

It took two super computers working overtime to pull him through the critical period.

Once his parents were reasonably sure that he would survive, the hunt began.

In the year 2785, most people were very well connected and easy to reach.

As their numbers eroded, the few who remained gravitated to central locations and banded together in communities. People preferred moving to an area that was cluttered and overcrowded, rather than living in desolate separation.

Human contact came at a premium now, not space.

The fewer there were, the closer they lived.

Of course there were exceptions. Even in the early days, there were a few who rejected technology and the community and ventured out on their own.

Satellites kept track of them till they perished.

The rest returned to technology for the answer. Devices were built to do everything autonomously, making human effort redundant. Society was remodeled to suit a race of vastly depleted numbers. By the year 2520 the World was fully automated. The population count stood at 212.

Machines did everything, maintained everything and serviced everything.

They couldn't make a dead sperm swim.

Communication was one field that grew by leaps and bounds in the final two hundred years. Since the population was living in groups separated by large distances, they felt a need to stay in touch. The few left at the turn of the century were fully networked.

Transportation was another frontier. It was also completely automated. The few "city-communities" were very well linked. Power was no problem.

Coal outlives Man.

Still, it took Adam's parents all of two months to track down Sita and her parents. In that time they spoke to 98% of the World's estimated population and personally met more than half. By the end they were positive that there was no suitable mate for their son.

Then they met Sita.

The moment they set eyes on her, playing by herself with her dolls, they knew she would be their daughter-in-law. She looked almost angelic with her soft curly hair and melancholy eyes.

Adam liked girls with straight hair and lively eyes. He married her anyway.

Adam and Sita tried very hard. They tried enhancers, supplements and positions. They even tried God. In vain.

Adam's parents died waiting for the signs.

Sita's parents followed.

With their parent's deaths, all pretence of liking each other was cast aside. They fought daily for the next year on issues ranging from the trivial to the surreal. Then they separated.

But they never stopped trying.

Love was a non-issue.

Ten years later Sita died. Adam was at her bedside. He saw Life stare at him, out of her eyes. Then he blinked, and it was gone.

After her death Adam felt more alone than he could have imagined. He took to the bottle and travel as a two-course remedy. Knowing that he would outlive every known person on the planet, he started a desperate search for someone younger.

The satellites showed no souls on the planet other than the ones already accounted for, all of whom were dying.

So was he.

The journey was just longer for him.

Towards the end, with everyone he knew dead, he finally decided to make sure. After all, the satellites could be mistaken. Or the machines that monitored them. The last human being who actually understood the technology had died a hundred years ago.

Adam packed a few supplies, a lot of machines and got a car. He set out determined to cover every remaining inch of the planet. He had the time.

He had no idea.

He lasted for fifteen days. On the sixteenth day, sick, tired and filthier than he could ever remember being, he started back home. He never got there.

Lost in a strange land buried under snow two feet thick, with his car broken down and the machines unable to fix it, Adam spent the last years of his life in terrible deprivation.

The last survivor of the species was weak, hungry and homeless.

Ninety now, he had gone as far as he could. He was tired.

He lay down, and closed his eyes.

Mankind died.