The Adventures of Random Walker, Episode 1: Of Individuality and Insomnia, Futility and Fumigation.

(Statutory Warning: Serious stuff coming up in a couple of lines. If found funny, pathetic reader is welcome to the club.)

Stuff happens.

The world's a big place. You meet a hundred people a day. 

You go to the market. You meet a hundred people. 

You go to the theater. You meet a hundred people.

You go to Chemistry class. You meet thirty six people. Fifty four signatures in the attendance register. 

Stuff happens.

A hundred people, a hundred minds. A hundred minds, a billion thoughts. 

None the same as the other, none much different from the rest. 

All of the very same objects, yet each as unique as can be.

All of a hundred people, all of a hundred noses.

A hundred right legs, a hundred spleens.

All the same, yet each distinct. 

All of the same, yet each truly individual.

Each to his petty obsessions, each to his pretty goals.

Each to his own corny jokes, each to his fantasies.

Each to his own Chemistry prof.; no wait, you aren't generally awake long enough to know who that is.

Each to his own Easter Bunny, each to his own Santa Claus.

Each by his own principles and morals, each by his own rules and laws.

Each with his own strengths and standings, each with his own wrongs and flaws.

Each to his own, each to his best, does anything else rhyme with "laws"?

A hundred ants scramble all around, three hundred untiring pairs of legs, scramble all around, gathering every morsel they reach, dragging every single bit back to the hill, the hill where a thousand more ants exist, all gathering, all scrambling and all surviving, only to feed their queen and perhaps feed themselves.

A hundred dogs roam the streets, barking here and barking there; barking at the post-box, at the ringing bell, barking at what you never can tell; they roam the streets, eating what they get, minding their business, and those of others. What do they do in life, where are they needed? Married men have a wife, and their word is seldom heeded.

A hundred men roam the world, and hundred thousands more. A hundred read comic books, a hundred Calvin and Hobbes. Hundreds walk the very same Earth, hundreds toil all their life. Hundreds go sleepless, hundreds love; hundreds dream dreams and thirty six literally so. Hundreds strive to be better, strive to learn more, strive to get better, strive to be fine. Hundreds work hard, hundreds work in vain, hundreds die, and thousands are born again. Hundreds learn lessons only to forget them, hundreds are sent to computer labs- these hundreds curse that unholy sem.

Hundreds live long, hundreds die hard. Hundreds exist, and I wonder why.

Told you it would be serious.

No, dear Watson, Cadbury's Dairy Milk is just not a good enough reason for the existence of humanity.

Justification for 'Fumigation' being in the title: Mosquitoes have finally discovered my room. The public health guys gas them away with this addictive-smelling white kind of gas that gases mosquitoes away.

This is NOT a sitcom. If it was, it would've been called "The Adventures of Random Walker, SEASON 1, Episode 1: Of Individuality and Insomnia, Futility and Fumigation."

Life on a Tuesday Evening

The run-o'-the-mill teenager residing in the austere premises of the forest that calls itself the Indian Institute of Technology Madras finds himself, even on the very best of Tuesday evenings, thoroughly defeated in his strongest and most sincere attempts to maintain a state of wakefulness in spite of the ongoing discussion on the fundamental principles of organometallic chemistry. Mustering all the will power bestowed upon him in blood and soul by his illustrious ancestry and peerage, your humble narrator, scarred and wounded, valiantly stages a counter-offensive against the indomitable forces of chemistry and boredom, which are no less fixated upon their motives to undermine his consciousness. War cries fill the fateful classroom, blades clash, shields are shattered, lances make pincushions of helmets, walls shudder with the voice of the esteemed professor, instilling slumber in the hearts of the forces of light, formations are broken, battalions uprooted and platoons devastated, elbows limp, vision hazes, fingers lose their grip on writing equipment (if any), eyelids droop, the head drops, and before you know it, the battle is over, and darkness prevails yet again.


But of course, ladies and gentlemen, everyone wakes up at the end of the class (with a tolerance of 3 minutes), unless you're the prof, in which sad case you're committed to stay awake the whole while. The next two dozen minutes are largely un-Tuesday-ish, involving an appreciable amount of activity dedicated to homing in on your friendly neighbourhood bicycle, followed by the tour-de-IITM, cumulating in the regular two puffs, yo-ho-ho and a bottle of  milk (neither shaken, nor stirred).

Not yet, ladies and gentlemen, have you been educated as to what essentially defines a Tuesday evening for your humble narrator. All of us, some day or the other, are bound by fate, the Geneva convention and the red herring prospectus to end up in a C-programming class. But only the unfortunate few way down in the gutters of fortune face the dread of a lab session and a chemistry class in the same evening. So there, ladies and gentlemen, was your humble narrator munching off in all glee and glory at the pathetic excuse for lemon rice that is regularly passed off on myself and my comrades in the infamous mess, when the bloke on the other side of the table (BOTOSOTT in short) makes a point.

BOTOSOTT: (candidly) Its 7:30. Methinks thou art perchance a tad delayed for thy laboratory session. (in a bit plainer English, come to think of it)
ME: (even more candidly) Yes, I am.

So off I went, off on my bike, no time to offer a lift or a hike, riding high, riding low, sometimes fast and often quite slow. Pomes apart, your humble narrator lands safe and in one piece in front of the Building Sciences Block, which happens to house the scenic computing facilities of the department of Computer Science and Engineering, which, sadly, is where the ominous TAs (Torture Administrators, for all I care) of the comp sci lab hold court.  Talk about a good room filled with computers ruined.

You'll know you're not way too high on the virtue of punctuality when you realise that nowadays your watch faces from you the query of, "By how many minutes am I late?" more often than ,"Am I late?". This revelation, ladies and gentlemen, struck your dear friend and humble narrator in the face like a crusted apple pie on the face of a feline fiend, hurled by a hunted rodent on an animated show usually seen succeeding the roar of one of the lineage of the royal family of the forest.

Minutes from the hall-of-an-eighty-machines-running-linux:

Prof: (without smile) You're late by 7 minutes. Why?
Me: (sullenly) No excuse, sir.
Mind voice: (confusedly) Hmm.. the watch informed me it was more like 10 minutes.

Prof: (with smile) You were late last week too. Any problems?
Me: (sullenly) No, sir. No problems.
Mind voice: (smirkingly) Gibbering goose-buns. If going late to class meant problems, I'd have been Bane's roomie in Arkham by now. But yes, the prof seems like a nice guy.

TA: (initially) Have you written down the programs for the assignment that you are supposed to code today?
Me: (nonchalantly) No ma'm.
Mind voice: (surprisedly) Of all the turquoise unicorns that ever roamed the plains of Andalusia!

TA: (non-understandingly) You didn't write last week either. Why is this so?
Me: (unabashedly) But ma'm, let me show you, I know how to do it. Thats why I thought there was no point in writing it down.
Mind voice: (amusedly) I'm perfectly sure I know how to input the radius of a circle and, after running a recursive algorithm with an exponential amortized complexity on the input float value, print its area.

TA: (irritatedly) No no. Rules are rules. Even if you perfectly well know how to do this, (in tone of "even if you are the President of India" ), I can't give you any sort of exception. You have to write down in your notebook a C program that takes the radius of a circle as input and outputs its radius. (note: nothing about the recursive algorithm)
Me: (protestingly) But ma'm, I've been learning C for 2 years. I assure you I can do this fine enough.
Mind voice: (even-more-amusedly) Circle? Circular queue, anyone?

TA: (even-more-irritatedly) NO. You write or I won't grade your assignment.
Me: (Resignedly) Oh, all right. I'll write.
Mind voice: (what-the-hellishly) Of all the sea cucumbers in the Baltic Sea! Just don't complain if you don't understand my handwriting.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how your dear friend and humble narrator ended up being pushed to commit the unforgivable cardinal sin of writing a piece of code on a notebook with proper syntax., as he figured that the TA (look for expansion a few paragraphs above) was but doing her job, and troubling people is actually not that nice a thing to do. After a few more such misadventures in the hall-of-an-eighty-machines-running-linux,

TA: (finally) NO. Even if you finish your programs in 15 minutes, you're not allowed to leave the lab until 9:30. And no, you're not allowed to do anything either. Just sit there and do positively nothing for the next one-and-a-half hours.
Me: (blankly) Oh...
Mind voice: (@%*$^-ly) &%*^#$@%&  &*^%*$*&% !!!


And that, ladies and gentlemen, is, for your dear friend and humble narrator, an average Tuesday evening - one unlike any other evening of any other day, one that demands extreme valour in the face of battle, one that serves you rice-mixed-with-baking-soda with a trace quantity of citrus flavouring to it, one that calls for superhuman hamstrings, one that introduces to you profs from Earth and TA's from Kerala, and beyond all, one that offers you experiences you can snigger about on the less happening Wednesday evenings.

Life, as they say, is a jumbo-sized blob of fun. Most of the time.

Child's Play

Some day not too close in the future, I shall probably have forgetten all about Injun Joe's gold, Becky Thatcher's engagement, the dead cat, their rafting along the Mississippi and most of the other tales about the Boy Who Attended His Own Funeral, but there is one particular anecdote about Tom Sawyer narrated somewhere in the earlier parts of the book that will never fade from my memory. Tom is punished (not so surprisingly) by his aunt, if I remember right, and ordered to paint a fence (three coats, mind you, is a hefty lot of work for a boy).

He surveyed the fence, and all gladness left him and a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit. Thirty yards of board fence nine feet high. Life to him seemed hollow, and existence but a burden.

So what does he do? (He can't do what he's told, no sir, he's Tom Sawyer). He sees some unpunished kid come along biting a shiny red apple. Suddenly Tom starts singing to himself (or performs some such kind of 'happy-times' activity) and makes the other guy believe that its actually fun to paint and trades some painting time for the apple. This goes on and at the end of the day wily little Tom is richer by a couple of toys, some sort of kiddy-treasures and a painted fence.

Twain ends this episode with this:

" He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it — namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to obtain."

He goes on to say state a fact thats quite easy to accept, but the ability to exploit which has avoided me till date:

" Work consists of whatever a body is OBLIGED to do, and...Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do."

What struck me like the tang of a glass of over-salted lemonade lacking half a glass of water for the number of lemons squeezed in when I read this was the remarkable manner in which Twain had presented such a, what to say, 'interesting' (for lack of a better adjective (owing to my largely inadequate vocabulary)) observation, one that all of us experience but never think about, in such a casual manner, giving Tom, a free-riding devil-may-care kid, to say the least, insight that many of us fail to possess.

Perhaps you smirk and reconsider the degree of my naivety, thinking I'm making too much of this, for writers may write as they please, and while their characters might be juvenile, they themselves are not, and at their discretion bestow even upon a newborn the judgement of Daniel. If your thoughts are so, I ask you to consider a certain brilliant short story called "Little Girls Wiser Than Men", by Tolstoy.

This one literally left me dumbstruck, almost paralysed by the profoundness of the message he conveys, and quite more so by the degree of simplicity with which he does it. And everything he says in it is completely plain-possible, stuff like that actually happens. (In case you haven't read this one yet, I'd recommend it anytime over answering questions about your pet puppy for the sake of finding out your gangster name on a particular website)

I talk about these two particular works, for I find in them a reflection, though fictional, of one of my long time beliefs that there are certain great aspects to childhood that one should be at a major disadvantage to grow out of. Children possess with them, among others, two important qualities- straightforwardness and ignorance.

First, children can never hide their emotions. You can always call little johnny's fib about the sugar, for he always covers his mouth after a lie. They're completely transparent, and have no idea how to lie convincingly.

And second, as Robert Lynd aptly puts it,

"To children, for all we know, the world may still seem to be full of people who laugh because they are happy and smile because they are kind."

Someone said ignorance is bliss. Presumably, they didn't mean not knowing whats going on around you, but rather being unaware of the seriousness of whats going on around you. As Oscar Wilde rightly says, in his truly classic spirit,

"Life is too important a thing to be taken seriously."

I'm sure you're by now leaning back in your chair with a smug smile under your nose, ready to educate me if only I was right in front of you that these qualities. Let me finish. You definitely can't be a child in a dog-eat-dog world, with what seems like half the nation ready to hoodwink you the moment you blink (exaggeration, my dear, is a marvelous tool to the inexperienced writer). No, I'm not, as no one is, going to be like that all my life, thats definitely not what I mean. When I would be like that is when I'm with a person with whom I can have a conversation along the same lines as this:

Batman: He gave me this ring with a kryptonite stone. He said -

Superman: I have many enemies who have tried to control me. And I live in fear that someday, they might succeed. If that ever should happen -- If I should ever lose control, There would only be one sure way to stop me.

Batman: Do you realize what you're asking?

Superman: I do. I want the means to stop me in the hands of a man I can trust with my life.

You get the point? Imagine you have someone like that and now try to make sense of whatever I said before, should be a lot easier now. To have someone with whom you can be like that is, actually, bliss.

Last point I'd like to make- when I said, "Imagine you have someone like that", if you were really only 'imagining' that you have someone like that, I've got one line for you: "Go get a life."