...just a dream

Continued from the last post. Please read this before you proceed.

“But that was just a dream, just a dream, just a dream…” Michael Stipe would’ve crooned. And I would not have bothered either, if it hadn’t happened the way it did.

Though it faded out smoothly, the waking was sudden, not the sit-up-sweating-sudden, but the eyes-wide-open-and-completely-alert-sudden, immediately reminding of that scene from The Matrix where Neo wakes in his room, after the night at the party where he “followed the white rabbit”. Was very similar to how the loud music at the party perfectly leads into the alarm clock sound.

The last thing I can remember is going to sleep in this train that I’m travelling from Bengaluru to Mumbai in. Mind you, I did not fall asleep in the middle of anything. Distinctly remember putting all my things- the valet, mobile phone, digital camera, headphones, everything away in safe places and then going to sleep. But when I woke up, everything except the valet was simply lying between me and the wall of the berth. And the valet was placed on my chest! As if to return something after some sinister business has been completed, and explicitly warn the victim. Like a decapitated pet.

Checked everything thoroughly, nothing was missing. Maybe it’s nothing, but if IT WAS YOU, TURN YOURSELF IN. NOW!

Based on a true incident...

This really happened, so visualize it in first person.

You’re in a room. A regular-size rectangular room. It has 2 doors at opposite ends of the longer dimension. Through both these doors you can goto other very similar rooms, only they’re perpendicular to this one, extending on opposite sides. Forming like an “S” or “5” on the 7-segment calculator display with the top and bottom horizontal lines missing. That’s it. No way of getting outside of these three rooms. How did you get here? Don’t really know, but fact is, it doesn’t matter now!

You’re done exploring, and are in the central room. There’s nothing in any of these rooms, nothing to do, nothing to do anything with, just nothing! But there’re two women you don’t recognize, dressed in lawyer-like suits.

Somehow you start understanding the place, ancient lore, a hunch, don’t know how, but now you know a little about it. As long as nothing happens, nothing happens. But when the time comes, something does happen. Each room has its own story, a particular phenomenon going for it, its own method of killing its inhabitants. One is supposed to fill up with some poisonous gas, other with water, and the third with vacuum. Each room gets “activated” at random times and stays that way for a random duration, and you simply move yourself to one of the “safe” ones. Nothing to worry about, just some rules of the game that you’ve found your way around.

After sometime, you’re in one of the safe rooms, and suddenly it gets “activated” and you notice that the unsafe one hasn’t “deactivated” yet. Yup, two randoms do sometimes overlap! There’s still one safe room, but now you begin to panic. If two random series can overlap, so can three. You told yourself these things were random, but fact is you don’t know the pattern yet. Just because you didn’t pay a lot of attention, because you were busy being “new to the game” doesn’t mean it’s random. Nothing is random. There’s always a well-defined rule; however complex. So, you try to make sense, and find a pattern that’ll help predict this. But wait. How’s that going to help? Knowing when you’ll run out of choices doesn’t improve the situation. Instead concentrate on finding a way out.

So from now on whichever room you’re in, you closely inspect its each and every surface, for any hints of a way out. This goes on for a very long time. You can’t find a way out, and the ladies aren’t helping either. They just follow, because they’re just as clueless. Then you accept it, you’re stuck.

It’s just a matter of time. All you can do is wait, for when three random series overlap, there’s no place you can go to. Try to imagine the situation. You’ll be in one of the safe rooms, and it’ll get “activated”, while the other rooms are still “unsafe”. You should probably hold your breath and run and stand at the junction of the other two rooms, so that when one of them “deactivates” you can hop onto that one. Yeah, that, for the time being, is the best strategy. But wait! What if the last safe one gets deactivated before these two? Well, it is possible, you see. Randomness is a queer beast. Heck, screw it! So you play along, running listlessly from one room to another.

Then as you’ve been expecting, it happens. You’re in one of the side rooms, and all three are unsafe. You don’t know what to do so you decide to run to the junction between the other two rooms, feeling lucky it didn’t happen while you were in the central room, how would you have found the junction between the two side ones! With held breath, you’re running through the central room, but you overshoot, damn! Turn around and get back to the junction. Hey wait, you just saw a door at the end of the other side room, but can’t see it now. Was that a hallucination? Hanging between renewed hope and disbelief, you decide such great an opportunity shouldn’t be dismissed. Though it seems far-fetched that you hadn’t noticed it, a whole open door!, for so long, you step back into this side room, and see in the opposite direction, and there you see it again! Ditching all reason, you make a mad dash for the door. Once you’re through the first junction, the door isn’t visible anymore, but you still keep going. All through the length of the central room, the other junction, and the breadth of the other side room, you can only see a wall, but you don’t stop, because you know you saw a door there, and now you want to believe it, because it is your only way out. As you reach the wall, you close your eyes, and just let the momentum take you. You feel no resistance, no wall, no push from the front, but instead a pull from behind. The wall should’ve passed by now, so you open your eyes. It’s very dark here.

At this point, as if due to the momentum, the viewpoint gets ejected from the body, and changes from first person to third person, and you’re looking at yourself from the front, and you can see that the wall is now behind you. Your body, fighting between the accumulated momentum and the pull from behind, keeps moving in the same direction for some more time. But now you see that the wall that you just came through is, in reality, the roof of a building. Gravity starts acting in a new direction and this is why your body was feeling the pull from behind, and this new direction is the one you have to follow now. So the momentum you acquired from running is actually getting you higher and is slowly decreasing. At this point, you twist your body, in such a way as to land on your two feet, maybe just at the edge of the building. The viewpoint continues to move away, and you see yourself, dressed in a smart funky suit, balancing in one corner of the building. There’s some smooth dance music playing in the background, and the two women are on two other corners. They’re no longer dressed like they were, but in a very party-dress. The viewpoint moves further away, like a helicopter-view, with music fading-out, and the surroundings become visible. It is very city-like with a few high-rises, and many just like the one you’re standing on. All buildings bearing arrays of happily-lit windows, but none will give away the laws that govern life within, and yet they do, each one of them. Fade to black.

IT slaves

long time no post
hence posting something that i wrote a few months ago


every once in a few month, thinking of it as a detox, i deliberately detach myself from the internetwork.
so this time when i returned to my mailbox after a month, there was a pile of about a thousand unreads.

(un)fortunately, i have only 2 ppl who fwd all this to me, and it is anybody's guess that they work in and are paid by the IT industry. now this is what some fast math revealed

1000/2 makes an average of 500 mails per fwder in a month

for the sake of this analysis i'm assuming it takes them on an average 3 mins per mail, and it is a fair estimate, considering they read it through, then decide to fwd it, then populate the fwd list (it takes me more than 3 mins to just read those mails)

3 mins * 500 mails = 1500 mins = 25 hrs

now assuming an 8 hr workday, 25 hrs = 3 workdays!
that is 3 out of 20 working days a month, these ppl r going thru their inboxes, reading each n every mail, and judging whether it is good enough for me
that is 3 out of 20 workdays a month, they're working for me!

now thats not it, recently it came to my notice that there was a great mistake in these calculations. one of them mentioned in casual conversation that he fwds only the best, ie just about one in four mails that he gets.
that takes my estimate to 12 days!!!

now that i have your attention, i take this opportunity to thank their respective employers for paying them for this, and admit that i personally enjoy most of those fwds a lot. i hope they dont take this mail seriously, just like all the others, and keep those beautiful fwds pouring in

now if i had to tweak with these figures, i could've taken an easy estimate of 5 mins per mail, and that would've thrown the stats right upto 20 workdays a month, but i'm not here to make you IT ppl feel more pathetic about yourselves than you already do, which btw is the content of more than 25% of the fwds

also noteworthy is that a lot of these mails r common, and my mailbox simplifies my life by grouping them, so the total number without the overlaps is 1000.
now if i were to seperate them out, both of these employees of the IT industry, whom i'm very grateful to btw, would score way above 500 each, my guess is at least 20% mails r common, so 600 and it affects the whole analysis by 20%

so if u actually played with the numbers, assuming they fwded 600 mails each in one month, that they read 4 times the mails they fwd, with an average of 5 mins per mail, it can be proved that 24 days a month these ppl r doing this
and another observation, there's less characters typed in all of those mails put together by my dear friends, than i have typed in this single one

Cheers!
-Anshuman

seventh sem result came out yesterday
caught wondering later in the day:

birds on a wire

what happens when you shoot one of them?
the one falls down, others fly off, right?

what happens when you shoot in the air, instead of at them?
they all fly off...

what happens if the same set of birds, sitting on the same wire, and you keep shooting in the air everytime they gather?
will they ever come to a point where not one of them, so much as, twitches a feather?


"I just hold on to nothing
and see how long nothing lasts"
- Beck

Queshun.

Why does a daredevil do what he does?

Roshun:

A daredevil, and here I assume you are referring to the guy who leaps with his motorcycle, over 100s of cars or trucks lined transversely, across many 100s of metres, without touching, or being able to think, anything between the launch from the upward ramp and the designed, and on most occasions successfully achieved, landing, within a few hundredths of a minute, at the downward ramp, without losing balance and then celebrates, ecstatically, still being alive, inspite of, finally doing, after dismissing each of the numerous times, the thought of backing out that bore into his, worried, not for lack of confidence or planning, but for the inexplicable will of the Gods, not of the mythological type, but of physical phenomena, that may be related to his experiment, and have some power to affect its outcome, mind, along with perfectly sensible arguments, which are bound to convince any man, willing to be reasonable, and not look like excuses, the most, except, perhaps, for his own first jump, foolish thing, more only by a slight degree than his own last jump, for the sole reason of being even less probable, to do, by delirious end-to-end front wheelies, thereby challenging his own gumption, and not competing with other men, by way of simultaneous presence in the secure expanse, most suitably prepared for the particular sport, and following a carefully laid out, and mutually agreed set of rules, nor by attempting to beat each other’s effort, by sequential attempts in identical or preferably the same circumstance, and emerging victorious, doesn’t do what he does for the look on the faces of the gaping audience, which may include, an obese man drinking beer from the tubes coming out of the two cans on his hat, and a tall blond having a mini-skirt, a cane hat and disproportionately large pair of sunglasses on, having finished a candy-bar, licking its remains off her poor ring finger, having a skull ring on its skinny self, and a bald short man with glasses who is thinking “Someday, I wanna do itt with a tall blond, with a sandwich in one hand, while I’m doing that!”, and a just-into-his-teens teenager who manages to distract others by saying a lot of things like “WaaaaaaaoooowwwW!!!” and “He’s so cuhooool!” and “I wanna be just like him when I grow up, mmm… I mean now!” during the short duration of the flight, and a just-out-of-his-teens guy msging “This would’ve been so much better if you were here with me!” to his girlfriend while think “ This could’ve been much more fun if only I had some money left for beer”, and just out of his impatience somebody’s grandfather croaks “When will these kids stop throwing popcorn, and the ballet-dancers start performing?”, and blinking frantically another wonders out loud “Itna sannaata kyon hai bhai?”, and a brawny biker shouting “Faakh mei!! He deed eet!”, and another proclaiming “Been there, don’t that.” before lighting up his own hair and trying to take a puff and startint to sing “I got a strong urge to fly, but I got nowhere to fly to, fly to, fly to, fly to, fly to, fly to…..”, as they, dumbfounded, behold him, and then, unless it ends in the undesirable, cheer him jubilantly, because he understands the fact that they all have their own petty lives, which can get quite consuming, and hence, they won’t, by choice, positively or negatively, affect his life just because he was successful in, though not with the sole aim of, but nevertheless, thoroughly entertaining them, and he, sure as hell, doesn’t do it for the seemingly enormous, but actually spent, all but little, on organizing the very event responsible for its gathering, money because of the realization of the fact that, howmanyever zeroes the total collection he attracted may contain, they will not engulf him, if anything begins to veer away from the precise, and numerously revised, by one and many dependable well-wishers, calculations, to cushion him, is essentially inconsequential, if he doesn’t, without any considerable and obstinate deformities, survive to expend it and hence is not a worthy trade-off, but does it simply for himself.