Brown men the world over are rising in revolt. They've read the latest J. K. Rowling book, Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince, and it contains much that deeply shocks and disturbs them. They do not particularly object to Ron's unexpected gory death on page 459. No, fatalism is at the very core of brown men's beings. They shrug and read on.
They even readily forgive HP & the HBP for being another tiresome tale about the Cosmic Conflict between the White Side & the Dark Side. Brown men know that no matter what giant strides they make in world politics or world population, no one will ever talk of of Yellow vs. Black or White vs. Brown. The image of brown and yellow men as peacable non-violent vegetarian bystanders is here to stay. True, the white man kills quickly, and the black man kills with flair, but the yellow man kills more quietly than these two, and while the brown man lacks swiftness, style or stealth, he has sheer numbers. However, the brown man will never get credit for all this world-class killing he does, and he knows it. In the world's grand epics, the brown man will never be hero or villain. He's stoically resigned to being forever a sidekick.
Nay, what has finally set brown men's blood boiling is the indiscriminate snogging, smooching, necking, pecking, coo-chi-cooing, jalabulajungs, whisper-it-softly-KISSING that abounds in HP & the HBP. The damn book has more physical intimacy than the average PTC bus in Madras, and more R-rated content than The Transcendental Metaphysical Reverberations of Disgusting Sexual Acts and other art movies that intellectual people seem to watch for purely intellectual reasons.
Every page of HP & the HBP has serious adult material. To suitably explain this, it is best to use algebraic notation, where X is somebody, Y is somebody who is not X, and Z is somebody who is neither X nor Y. In every page of HP & the HBP, either X is necking with Y, or X is imagining him or herself necking with Y, or X is imagining that Y is necking with Z, or X is imagining that Y thinks that he/she (i..e, X) is necking with Z (who you might recall, is neither X or Y), or X is imagining that Z will rudely interrupt when he/she (again X, big day for him/her) is necking with Y, ...
The terrible thing is that this sudden epidemic of incessant, universal necking features Harry Potter and his band of punk teenagers. Yes, teenagers. Not Bill Clinton, not the poor old people who came out of retirement to act in Swabhimaan, not even middle-aged Mallu matrons of giant proportions incongruously called Babykutti. No, sir. I repeat: these teenagers do with practised nonchalant ease, things that the average 25 year-old brown man only fantasizes about blushingly while boiling his daily glass of milk-with-no-sugar-both-my-parents-have-diabetes- and-i'm- watching-my-weight.
"So what?", you smikingly say, my white friend from Boston, Southern Canada. You think the brown man is a prude (yeah, like that'll stick. there are a coupla billion of us and counting, baby), or that the brown man is just a sex-starved middle aged mama. Worse, you call him a hypocrite, a raving conservative lunatic, a jihadi.
You're wrong. There's one thing no self-respecting brown man will tolerate, and that's being accused of moral values. It's not outraged virtue that's driving the brown backlash, but jealous rage.
Imagine that! Teenagers black and white are necking like there's no tomorrow, and the brown man, at the ripe old age of 33, has never so much as kissed the hem of a maiden's robe. Heck, even his fantasies about necking are based on pure guesswork. He hasn't seen the darn thing being done, even on film. When there's the remotest sniff of a smooch in the next five minutes, brown men's movies start showing flowers dangling, or birds feeding each other juicy worms, or most terrifyingly, a picture of a laughing baby. Brown men nearing retirement age naively believe that a smooch is a sure-fire child-producer, and avoid it like the very plague.
Thus it is that the brown man has, pardon the poor pun, impeckable chastity till his parents wake up and arrange a marriage for him, when he's nearly thirty five. Not for him the pleasures of youth: he has to slog his behind off and pass some entrance exam or the other. Not for him dates with pretty young things, for he's too busy learning English, Hindi and other foreign languages that are constantly forced down his throat. Not for him the tender joys of young love, for he is invariably locked up in a men-only engineering school where the sight of women's footwear is enough to send thrills down people's spines and spark off wild orgies.
Isn't the brown man, then, right to feel hounded? Is it fair to tell him that love, to him, is a spectator sport, and he can but cheer forever from the sidelines? Is it rational to expect him to just stand and watch when half-grown manlings and womanlings smooch away? Isn't it understandable that he wants to join the party or burn down the building? Can anyone help but sympathize with him?
Women of the world, particularly you lovely sisters of my white and black brothers who are yet not my sisters! Repent. Make amends. It's still not too late. Show the brown man all the affection you can.
He's nasty, but he needs it.
He's horrible, but he hungers for it.
He's disgusting, but he deserves it.
Please, please, please.
PS: To all Harry Potter fans, I'm one too. No offense meant. And Ron doesn't really die on page 459. He only starts his sentimental speech on that page. Actual death, which experts agree occurs only when the heroine wears white and snivels before a bloke's garlanded photo, occurs only on page 462.
Monday, August 29, 2005
Saturday, August 20, 2005
A Brief History of Rakhi
When the wolves in the woods die of mass diarrhoea, do the doe and the deer sing dulcet tunes and dance in delight, or suffer dreadful dullness and dolefully dream wistful dreams of deadlier, more dangerous days? I do not know. All I do know is that it's that time of the year again, and a strange emptiness fills my heart. I've never known a rakhi day when I wasn't slinking away from the postman's knock or the beckoning beauties or the new grad students whom the sirens use as their messenger. (The last mentioned are the most psychologically challenging: you know you've got to hate the smirking face that hands you the rakhi cover, but deep down, your heart cries for him. Did you not, with similarly unseeing pride, deliver rakhis for Haritha Hazaarbhaiya last year, and will not this trusting lad suffer the same cruel blow next year?)
I should perhaps explain my lament to my non-Indian readers, if any be so loserly as to read a brown man's blog. The rakhiis an ancient North Indian custom, and like all ancient North Indian customs, it has a history of horrible bloodshed and suffering behind it. It's a long tale I'm going to relate, my friends, and I beg your indulgence.
It is well known that the sex ratio in India is slightly skewed, there being about 51.3 men to every woman. Long were the lovely dark tresses of the ancient Indian woman, and longer still the snaking queues of lustful lads longing for the merest glance from the lissome lass. Of course, a lady can't like every suitor, and so it is that some were put to labour and some to death. But there came a time when ladies tired of saying no, the Hindi phrase for "no" being Chullu bhar pani me doob maro, shaitan ke santan. Further, reports had reached the ladies that some men found being fried in oil a touch uncomfortable, and we all know that the Indian Woman won't tolerate discomfort, even to an excessively persistent suitor.
A gentler, more humane way to refuse proposals was needed. Many ideas were considered, some of which have led to various contemporay conveniences like cold fuel, sweetened rat poison, musical electric chairs, and so on. But the breakthrough idea came, as breakthrough ideas always come, from a burger-selling, hair-gel using Gujarati called Piyush "Bobby" Shah, who was looking at quite a different problem.
It is common knowledge that North India is a strife-torn land, where killing is common and bloodshed blase'. After all, the Hindi word for the commonplace "chop off his head, drink his blood, feed him to the dogs, save the remains for shahi korma" is katl, while the Hindi phrase for the abstract and unusual term "peace" is kya ghaati batein kar raha hai, be! Dimaag ghas char raha hai kya. In such a land, people from different villages of course had to kill each other, but tragic and too frequent was the accidental killing of brother by brother, comrade by comrade, neighbour by neighbour. Brown-skinned people, as you might notice in any high-tech firm, tend to look sinister and suspicious, even when they're just going to take their hourly leak. When you sight brown skin, it's always better to lop the head off first, and ask questions later.
It was this problem of incestuous killing that Piyush "Bobby" Shah solved by using the colored turban. Each village was to have a friendly color. All the residents of that village got to have that color dyed on their turban free of cost. If, for some reason, two villages, say Rampur and Srirampur were to become friendly, then Rampur's people could wear the sporty light saffron color of Srirampur on their turbans, and Srirampur's citizens could proudly bear the sportier lighter saffron color of Rampur on theirs. One look at a man's turban, one quick look at your own village's "do not kill" list, and you knew whether to throttle or embrace this dusky stranger. Also, to avoid cheating, it was your duty to kill anybody who wore the colour of an unfriendly village.
Like all great ideas, Piyush's brainchild pervaded popular culture. To this day, North Indians celebrate Holi, a one-day voluntary ceasefire when people daub each other with all known colors, indicating that all villages are to be on friendly terms that day. On Holi day, all men are brothers and one can go on unarmed into the lush green fields of the Great Gangetic Plains and relieve oneself without fear of gruesome death.
Seeing the stupendous success of the color coding scheme, the gentle ladies of ancient India wept for joy and decided to adopt this idea for their Humane Suitor Refusal campaign. Their requirement, was of course, much simpler. It was not necessary to indicate who had refused a given man, merely to indicate that he is being refused. Colors, with their costly need for dyeing, were not necessary. A mere token of refusal would do.
And thusly came into being the lovely custom of rakhi. When a woman wished to refuse a man, she simply gave him a piece of thread, marked red tilak on his head, and called him bhaiya. Like all other Indian customs, this one is deeply symbolic on multiple levels.
1. Bhaiya in Hindi means "sucker! loser! The next batch of grad students is in. They can wash my clothes and do my dishes. And Sameer next door has bought a car, so I don't need you to give me rides. I have no more use for you. Become scare. Drrrr.!"
2. The red tilak is applied to all animals before they are slaughtered. The color red, of course, indicates blood, but also refers to Ek Handi dal chaval which tastes very good with fried fingernails.
3. The piece of thread says, "I should actually kill you right here and right now, but the smell of rotting flesh interferes with my digestion, and cremation is both costly and environmentally unfriendly. Kindly have the good sense to go far away and hang yourself. This rope isn't long enough, but this is all I can spare at the moment."
It is understood that the rakhi, once given, is final. The recipient of the rakhi, even if he be so ungentlemanly as to not move out of the district, should maintain consistently a cold attitude towards the giver of the rakhi, going any length to avoid even being seen by her. In other words, he should treat the giver of the rakhi like he would treat his own sister. Thus it is that the word bhaiya, explained above, has also come to mean brother in contemporary Hindi.
This beautiful ancient custom, started first in the sixteenth century B.C., has survived to this day. So it is that Indian lads, in a touching but vain effort at prolonging their license for lustfulness, try to go undercover on rakhi day. They go to Timbuktoo, practise deep undersea diving, take a cruise to Antartica, become astronauts and escape into deep space, hide in manholes and septic tanks, attend classes, go to work, visit their parents, and conceal themselves in other unlikely places. But long is the reach of a resolute lass, and many that have imagined themselves safe have had rakhis delivered at the very last moment. As Bill Shakespeare has wisely said, "Verizon hath no coverage like a woman determined to scorn".
I should perhaps explain my lament to my non-Indian readers, if any be so loserly as to read a brown man's blog. The rakhiis an ancient North Indian custom, and like all ancient North Indian customs, it has a history of horrible bloodshed and suffering behind it. It's a long tale I'm going to relate, my friends, and I beg your indulgence.
It is well known that the sex ratio in India is slightly skewed, there being about 51.3 men to every woman. Long were the lovely dark tresses of the ancient Indian woman, and longer still the snaking queues of lustful lads longing for the merest glance from the lissome lass. Of course, a lady can't like every suitor, and so it is that some were put to labour and some to death. But there came a time when ladies tired of saying no, the Hindi phrase for "no" being Chullu bhar pani me doob maro, shaitan ke santan. Further, reports had reached the ladies that some men found being fried in oil a touch uncomfortable, and we all know that the Indian Woman won't tolerate discomfort, even to an excessively persistent suitor.
A gentler, more humane way to refuse proposals was needed. Many ideas were considered, some of which have led to various contemporay conveniences like cold fuel, sweetened rat poison, musical electric chairs, and so on. But the breakthrough idea came, as breakthrough ideas always come, from a burger-selling, hair-gel using Gujarati called Piyush "Bobby" Shah, who was looking at quite a different problem.
It is common knowledge that North India is a strife-torn land, where killing is common and bloodshed blase'. After all, the Hindi word for the commonplace "chop off his head, drink his blood, feed him to the dogs, save the remains for shahi korma" is katl, while the Hindi phrase for the abstract and unusual term "peace" is kya ghaati batein kar raha hai, be! Dimaag ghas char raha hai kya. In such a land, people from different villages of course had to kill each other, but tragic and too frequent was the accidental killing of brother by brother, comrade by comrade, neighbour by neighbour. Brown-skinned people, as you might notice in any high-tech firm, tend to look sinister and suspicious, even when they're just going to take their hourly leak. When you sight brown skin, it's always better to lop the head off first, and ask questions later.
It was this problem of incestuous killing that Piyush "Bobby" Shah solved by using the colored turban. Each village was to have a friendly color. All the residents of that village got to have that color dyed on their turban free of cost. If, for some reason, two villages, say Rampur and Srirampur were to become friendly, then Rampur's people could wear the sporty light saffron color of Srirampur on their turbans, and Srirampur's citizens could proudly bear the sportier lighter saffron color of Rampur on theirs. One look at a man's turban, one quick look at your own village's "do not kill" list, and you knew whether to throttle or embrace this dusky stranger. Also, to avoid cheating, it was your duty to kill anybody who wore the colour of an unfriendly village.
Like all great ideas, Piyush's brainchild pervaded popular culture. To this day, North Indians celebrate Holi, a one-day voluntary ceasefire when people daub each other with all known colors, indicating that all villages are to be on friendly terms that day. On Holi day, all men are brothers and one can go on unarmed into the lush green fields of the Great Gangetic Plains and relieve oneself without fear of gruesome death.
Seeing the stupendous success of the color coding scheme, the gentle ladies of ancient India wept for joy and decided to adopt this idea for their Humane Suitor Refusal campaign. Their requirement, was of course, much simpler. It was not necessary to indicate who had refused a given man, merely to indicate that he is being refused. Colors, with their costly need for dyeing, were not necessary. A mere token of refusal would do.
And thusly came into being the lovely custom of rakhi. When a woman wished to refuse a man, she simply gave him a piece of thread, marked red tilak on his head, and called him bhaiya. Like all other Indian customs, this one is deeply symbolic on multiple levels.
1. Bhaiya in Hindi means "sucker! loser! The next batch of grad students is in. They can wash my clothes and do my dishes. And Sameer next door has bought a car, so I don't need you to give me rides. I have no more use for you. Become scare. Drrrr.!"
2. The red tilak is applied to all animals before they are slaughtered. The color red, of course, indicates blood, but also refers to Ek Handi dal chaval which tastes very good with fried fingernails.
3. The piece of thread says, "I should actually kill you right here and right now, but the smell of rotting flesh interferes with my digestion, and cremation is both costly and environmentally unfriendly. Kindly have the good sense to go far away and hang yourself. This rope isn't long enough, but this is all I can spare at the moment."
It is understood that the rakhi, once given, is final. The recipient of the rakhi, even if he be so ungentlemanly as to not move out of the district, should maintain consistently a cold attitude towards the giver of the rakhi, going any length to avoid even being seen by her. In other words, he should treat the giver of the rakhi like he would treat his own sister. Thus it is that the word bhaiya, explained above, has also come to mean brother in contemporary Hindi.
This beautiful ancient custom, started first in the sixteenth century B.C., has survived to this day. So it is that Indian lads, in a touching but vain effort at prolonging their license for lustfulness, try to go undercover on rakhi day. They go to Timbuktoo, practise deep undersea diving, take a cruise to Antartica, become astronauts and escape into deep space, hide in manholes and septic tanks, attend classes, go to work, visit their parents, and conceal themselves in other unlikely places. But long is the reach of a resolute lass, and many that have imagined themselves safe have had rakhis delivered at the very last moment. As Bill Shakespeare has wisely said, "Verizon hath no coverage like a woman determined to scorn".
Wednesday, August 17, 2005
All for a chick, or Charlie and the Prelate Factory!
The Church should wake up, smell the coffee, have a long shower to get over the hangover and make Charlie Darwin a saint. Noone else has ever composed a more beautiful hymn to God, fondly known as the Big Boy.
You see, the Church thinks God bought an assembly kit from K-mart, spent six days making up the Earth, the Heavens and All things bright and beautiful, had a nice nap on the seventh and has since been keeping score of men's sins till the Big Audit comes along. In other words, the Big Boy is some kind of mechanically talented accountant.
Along came Charlie, and proposed the theory of evolution, which essentially says nature, like any other large dynamic system, will constantly go towards its equilibrium, without Big Brother watching it. God didn't have to be a control freak. He just had to make conditions to form the big soup somewhere. From the big soup came bacteria, thence fish, thence birds, worms and Tamil Iyers, thence mammals, thence monkeys, thence man.
It is tempting to say that Charlie just proposed gibberish. After all, no one has really seen a monkey suddenly quote the Vedas, or at least no one officially admits to it. More to the point, Charlie's dynamic system, nature, is hopelessly huge, and it's impossible to write down the steady-state equations for it, leave alone the initial conditions and the transients. In other words, you can only cook up explanations based on Charlie's theories, not realistically predict the result of a Bihar bye-election, leave alone the future of life. Essentially, one might argue, Charlie just did a Fermat, wrote 2 + 2 = The Collected Works of Ayn Rand on his toilet paper, and conked off without giving the proof.
So have all Republicans, Southern Democrats, Evangelicals, Creationists, Baptists, Anabaptists, Unitarians, Protestants, Catholics and other sorts of Jihadi Christians argued. So, too, did your humble correspondent wax non-judgemental till last Saturday when his eyes were opened by The March of the Penguins, a must-see documentary if ever there was one.
The basic story is that Emperor penguins, like South Indian men, defy the elements, dare death, and conjure miracles of patience and persevarance just to get a chick. It goes as follows: Sometime before the beginning of winter, Emperor penguins collect in huge groups walk 50 miles inland in the Antarctic winter to the very spot where they were born. There, they pair up following decorous, well-defined courting rituals. Then they do it, and the she-penguin lays an egg. (Note: Penguins seem to have read too much Tolstoy. They go in for a 20-second quickie, considering sex only a means to procreation, one assumes.)
And here's where the fun begins. The penguin's egg in the sub-freezing Antarctic winter is like a 5-paise coin in Trivandrum. You drops it, you loses it before you can say Babykutti Kunjumon. So the egg has to be balanced on the penguin's feet and kept warm under their fur till the chick hatches, some two months later. Now, mama's already laid an egg and can't starve no more, so she hobbles back to the ocean to hunt for grub, after handing over (OK, legging over) the egg to papa. Here's the killer : the fathers just stand there, all huddled together to keep out the cold, for two months with the eggs under their feathers, on their feet. No grub, no evening visits to Ethiraj college to check out the babes, no booze, no cigarette, nothing. They actually take turns standing on the circumference of the huddle, where it's coldest. Winterstorms rage around them, but they don't make sentimental speeches about dad's unrequited love like King Lear. No, sir: they just huddle a little closer, and swear in genteel undertones.
The chicks hatch by and by, but after a brief dekko from papa, Junior goes right back under the apron. The mothers return after two months, and after a tearful reunion and a censored kiss, papa trudges to the ocean, while mama takes over the tending of munnoo. Finally, after the chicks are grown up enough to demand cable TV and sleepover rights, mama leaves them to their devices and trudges back to sea.
The chicks don't go the ocean. The ocean comes to the chicks. It's summer, you see, and all the ice has melted. The chicks then enjoy fishing, swimming and other junior league sports, and prepare for grown-up life, consisting as always of much ado over chicks, very little sex, wives that leave the hearth untended and hubby unfed, brats that need constant sheltering, and air-conditioning that doesn't work.
Here's where Charlie comes in. Noone who see TMotPcan fail to see the crushing, stunning elegance of Evolutionism and the loserliness of Creationism. To say that all the beauty, greatness, nobility, grace, courage, drama of this tale came because Big Boy chaired an Emperor Penguin Orientation meeting on Day Five is ridiculous. More than that, it's profane and completely blasphemous. Consider, then, the Evoultionary explanation of this is, i.e., that penguins evolved this elaborate rigmarole in response to gradual climactic change as the Antarctic broke away from the equatorial mainland. It's beautiful, spellbinding, uplifting, divine.
It may be that Evolution is the wrong theory. At least, it may be that it's unnecessary, since it doesn't reduce one's hair loss any more than Creation does. But it sure gives more elegant explanations for everything, and that, mes amis, is enough reason to believe.
Note:
This unduly long post was written as my personal birdie to S~, who thought I cannot be serious for more than 5 minutes at a stretch. S~, you blister on bin Laden's bottom, louse on Lalu Prasad's head, pimple on Pol Pot's face, coveter of other people's underwear, you BITS-ian! I've proved my worth again. I've torn your j~. I'm serious, dude. I'm the Crown Prince, Director-General, Program Manager of seriousness. I'm more serious than Terri Schiavo ever was. I'm so serious the liberals want to kill me to prove their kindness and the conservatives want to keep me alive to show their commitment to moral values. Paul Wolfowitz has more humour in him than me. I won't know a joke if it comes and bite me on my arse. Whenever anyone says joke, I think it's a mallu saying chalk. You'll die laughing, you vile comedian, and I'll survive forever with a face like a funeral. After all, the bible does say that the geek shall inherit the earth. Ha, ha, ha!
On this extremely grown-up note, I leave y'all to your petty crimes till the next one. Stay out of jail. Peace.
You see, the Church thinks God bought an assembly kit from K-mart, spent six days making up the Earth, the Heavens and All things bright and beautiful, had a nice nap on the seventh and has since been keeping score of men's sins till the Big Audit comes along. In other words, the Big Boy is some kind of mechanically talented accountant.
Along came Charlie, and proposed the theory of evolution, which essentially says nature, like any other large dynamic system, will constantly go towards its equilibrium, without Big Brother watching it. God didn't have to be a control freak. He just had to make conditions to form the big soup somewhere. From the big soup came bacteria, thence fish, thence birds, worms and Tamil Iyers, thence mammals, thence monkeys, thence man.
It is tempting to say that Charlie just proposed gibberish. After all, no one has really seen a monkey suddenly quote the Vedas, or at least no one officially admits to it. More to the point, Charlie's dynamic system, nature, is hopelessly huge, and it's impossible to write down the steady-state equations for it, leave alone the initial conditions and the transients. In other words, you can only cook up explanations based on Charlie's theories, not realistically predict the result of a Bihar bye-election, leave alone the future of life. Essentially, one might argue, Charlie just did a Fermat, wrote 2 + 2 = The Collected Works of Ayn Rand on his toilet paper, and conked off without giving the proof.
So have all Republicans, Southern Democrats, Evangelicals, Creationists, Baptists, Anabaptists, Unitarians, Protestants, Catholics and other sorts of Jihadi Christians argued. So, too, did your humble correspondent wax non-judgemental till last Saturday when his eyes were opened by The March of the Penguins, a must-see documentary if ever there was one.
The basic story is that Emperor penguins, like South Indian men, defy the elements, dare death, and conjure miracles of patience and persevarance just to get a chick. It goes as follows: Sometime before the beginning of winter, Emperor penguins collect in huge groups walk 50 miles inland in the Antarctic winter to the very spot where they were born. There, they pair up following decorous, well-defined courting rituals. Then they do it, and the she-penguin lays an egg. (Note: Penguins seem to have read too much Tolstoy. They go in for a 20-second quickie, considering sex only a means to procreation, one assumes.)
And here's where the fun begins. The penguin's egg in the sub-freezing Antarctic winter is like a 5-paise coin in Trivandrum. You drops it, you loses it before you can say Babykutti Kunjumon. So the egg has to be balanced on the penguin's feet and kept warm under their fur till the chick hatches, some two months later. Now, mama's already laid an egg and can't starve no more, so she hobbles back to the ocean to hunt for grub, after handing over (OK, legging over) the egg to papa. Here's the killer : the fathers just stand there, all huddled together to keep out the cold, for two months with the eggs under their feathers, on their feet. No grub, no evening visits to Ethiraj college to check out the babes, no booze, no cigarette, nothing. They actually take turns standing on the circumference of the huddle, where it's coldest. Winterstorms rage around them, but they don't make sentimental speeches about dad's unrequited love like King Lear. No, sir: they just huddle a little closer, and swear in genteel undertones.
The chicks hatch by and by, but after a brief dekko from papa, Junior goes right back under the apron. The mothers return after two months, and after a tearful reunion and a censored kiss, papa trudges to the ocean, while mama takes over the tending of munnoo. Finally, after the chicks are grown up enough to demand cable TV and sleepover rights, mama leaves them to their devices and trudges back to sea.
The chicks don't go the ocean. The ocean comes to the chicks. It's summer, you see, and all the ice has melted. The chicks then enjoy fishing, swimming and other junior league sports, and prepare for grown-up life, consisting as always of much ado over chicks, very little sex, wives that leave the hearth untended and hubby unfed, brats that need constant sheltering, and air-conditioning that doesn't work.
Here's where Charlie comes in. Noone who see TMotPcan fail to see the crushing, stunning elegance of Evolutionism and the loserliness of Creationism. To say that all the beauty, greatness, nobility, grace, courage, drama of this tale came because Big Boy chaired an Emperor Penguin Orientation meeting on Day Five is ridiculous. More than that, it's profane and completely blasphemous. Consider, then, the Evoultionary explanation of this is, i.e., that penguins evolved this elaborate rigmarole in response to gradual climactic change as the Antarctic broke away from the equatorial mainland. It's beautiful, spellbinding, uplifting, divine.
It may be that Evolution is the wrong theory. At least, it may be that it's unnecessary, since it doesn't reduce one's hair loss any more than Creation does. But it sure gives more elegant explanations for everything, and that, mes amis, is enough reason to believe.
Note:
This unduly long post was written as my personal birdie to S~, who thought I cannot be serious for more than 5 minutes at a stretch. S~, you blister on bin Laden's bottom, louse on Lalu Prasad's head, pimple on Pol Pot's face, coveter of other people's underwear, you BITS-ian! I've proved my worth again. I've torn your j~. I'm serious, dude. I'm the Crown Prince, Director-General, Program Manager of seriousness. I'm more serious than Terri Schiavo ever was. I'm so serious the liberals want to kill me to prove their kindness and the conservatives want to keep me alive to show their commitment to moral values. Paul Wolfowitz has more humour in him than me. I won't know a joke if it comes and bite me on my arse. Whenever anyone says joke, I think it's a mallu saying chalk. You'll die laughing, you vile comedian, and I'll survive forever with a face like a funeral. After all, the bible does say that the geek shall inherit the earth. Ha, ha, ha!
On this extremely grown-up note, I leave y'all to your petty crimes till the next one. Stay out of jail. Peace.
Tuesday, August 09, 2005
I slogged, I blogged, and I went to bed!
We are testing our design in the lab, and of course, nothing works. So the last weekend was spent at work. I mean, the last weekend was really spent at work:I landed up there at 9 am on Saturday and left at 3 am on Monday, with two breaks of 4 and 2 hours respectively. Of course, one might say I slogged because I'm an anti-social, despo seengle luzaar (that's single loser in Bengali), who needs to get a life. Well, that's clearly true, but it's so boring that one should come up with a different explanation.
One might think I slogged because I wanted to be thaa man,and shine in Heaven's glorious light, and be considered a superhero, and get a raise and climb up the ladder, and gain recognition among my peers, and be known to upper management as the Rock on which the company stands, and all that. But this is not only boring, it's also untrue. You see, from generations of hiding in the forests from the invading Bhaiyas, South Indians have evolved to be camouflaged by wood. Like my other South Indian brethren, I just blend into the office furniture. Maybe I'd be noticed if I went to work in pink shirt and purple pants, but I seriously doubt it. Heck, even if I went naked, I don't think it'll register a blip on anybody's radar. The good thing, of course, is that I won't be fired, because nobody even knows I exist.
Let it also be said that I've been very understated about my weekend's achievements. The only time I talked about it was this morning:
Colleague : Hey, it's hot today, man.
Badri : True. I think it's 95, which is slightly less than 36 degrees celsius, which is actually less than the number of hours I spent at work this weekend.
Strange, things have been quiet at work today. Very little conversation with anyone. I guess everyone must be awed by my sincerity.
Anyway, the really amazing thing, and I guess the point of this blog, is that I absolutely, thoroughly, completely enjoyed the weekend slog in the lab, and I've been wondering why.
Well, first of all, there's the existential pleasure of engineering. (Yes, I use the word existential in everyday conversation, and no, I don't know what it really means, and no-ho-ho, I don't intend to find out! RIP!). I'm not one of those practical make-it-yourself blokes. I don't know a spanner from a rat's arse, and I usually call for qualified help when light bulbs need changing. When I set about removing an airhole in the electric motor at home, I flooded the room, caused a district-wide power failure (that soured Tamil Nadu's relations with Karnataka and almost made us secede from the Union), and launched my cousin's literary career. But even I can feel the thrill of wrestling with something real.
When you solve a cool math problem or answer a quiz question, you feel kicks, of course. In fact, it requires intelligence, so you'd think it's better than engineering, which doesn't really tax a man's, or even a woman's, brain. But making practical stuff work is not really the same thing as solving a difficult problem. For one thing, if you've been working with any reasonably complex system, you don't understand the whole of it, and like all reasonable people, you know that the parts that you didn't design will not work. Worse, like all truly enlightened people, you secretly fear that the Devil exists, and He's punishing you for not believing in Him by messing up the system. Finally, like all good engineers, you distrust logical thinking and believe that the scientific method should be restricted to developing extra-reach toothbrushes and effective contraceptives.
Out of a million random things, you pick one after the other, and after much trial and even greater error, some thing finally works. You know that this was pure chance and it'll stop working soon. If you're a hopeless optimist, you think it'll work again sometime that night. In any case, you try again, and hmm, it works still. And then you try again, and you reset everything and try again, and you go take a leak and try again, and go to bed and come back in the morning, and try again. Finally, you're convinced it really works, and then you cook up some logical explanation and tell your colleagues that you finally figured out the real reason.
In fact, I think all this goes back to our origin as hunter-gatherers. You see, in the old times, they didn't have central heating, and life was really challenging. Nature was not just some place you took your kids to for fun. It was something that you didn't understand or control, but had to work with. Blokes who liked to fight the good fight with muscles straining, brows sweating and hearts singing had a selective advantage over intellectual types who thought about the Human Condition. Thus it is that Nature taught Man to love fighting her, and thus it is that bull-fighting is more popular than chess. We all instintively thrill in working with complex, irrational, intractable systems. Why else would men marry and have children?
In fact, when you dig a little deeper, it's clear that anybody who genuinely loves engineering also loves Nature and believes in God, because he knows a complex system when he sees one, and he knows that there obviously must have been a designer to optimize the amplifier gain in the forward path, the time constant of the feedback path and the probabilities of detection and false alarm in the controller.
Even in a completely corny movie scene, like the bulb lighting up in Swades, you feel a secret thrill when some contraption works. When you spend 5 hours and finally see zero BER (or whatever) on the screen, you can almost hear Beethoven in the background.
That, my friends, is real kicks. Sex, drugs, mud-wresting and mountain climbing are nothing compared to it. (Yeah, I would know. I've seen all these on TV, and everyone knows that things are better on TV than in real life.)
There is, I think, one more reason why this weekend was so much fun. It's the same reason why people were happier during the War than they're now, and why we'll all end up killing each other. But that's for another blog. So much for now.
One might think I slogged because I wanted to be thaa man,and shine in Heaven's glorious light, and be considered a superhero, and get a raise and climb up the ladder, and gain recognition among my peers, and be known to upper management as the Rock on which the company stands, and all that. But this is not only boring, it's also untrue. You see, from generations of hiding in the forests from the invading Bhaiyas, South Indians have evolved to be camouflaged by wood. Like my other South Indian brethren, I just blend into the office furniture. Maybe I'd be noticed if I went to work in pink shirt and purple pants, but I seriously doubt it. Heck, even if I went naked, I don't think it'll register a blip on anybody's radar. The good thing, of course, is that I won't be fired, because nobody even knows I exist.
Let it also be said that I've been very understated about my weekend's achievements. The only time I talked about it was this morning:
Colleague : Hey, it's hot today, man.
Badri : True. I think it's 95, which is slightly less than 36 degrees celsius, which is actually less than the number of hours I spent at work this weekend.
Strange, things have been quiet at work today. Very little conversation with anyone. I guess everyone must be awed by my sincerity.
Anyway, the really amazing thing, and I guess the point of this blog, is that I absolutely, thoroughly, completely enjoyed the weekend slog in the lab, and I've been wondering why.
Well, first of all, there's the existential pleasure of engineering. (Yes, I use the word existential in everyday conversation, and no, I don't know what it really means, and no-ho-ho, I don't intend to find out! RIP!). I'm not one of those practical make-it-yourself blokes. I don't know a spanner from a rat's arse, and I usually call for qualified help when light bulbs need changing. When I set about removing an airhole in the electric motor at home, I flooded the room, caused a district-wide power failure (that soured Tamil Nadu's relations with Karnataka and almost made us secede from the Union), and launched my cousin's literary career. But even I can feel the thrill of wrestling with something real.
When you solve a cool math problem or answer a quiz question, you feel kicks, of course. In fact, it requires intelligence, so you'd think it's better than engineering, which doesn't really tax a man's, or even a woman's, brain. But making practical stuff work is not really the same thing as solving a difficult problem. For one thing, if you've been working with any reasonably complex system, you don't understand the whole of it, and like all reasonable people, you know that the parts that you didn't design will not work. Worse, like all truly enlightened people, you secretly fear that the Devil exists, and He's punishing you for not believing in Him by messing up the system. Finally, like all good engineers, you distrust logical thinking and believe that the scientific method should be restricted to developing extra-reach toothbrushes and effective contraceptives.
Out of a million random things, you pick one after the other, and after much trial and even greater error, some thing finally works. You know that this was pure chance and it'll stop working soon. If you're a hopeless optimist, you think it'll work again sometime that night. In any case, you try again, and hmm, it works still. And then you try again, and you reset everything and try again, and you go take a leak and try again, and go to bed and come back in the morning, and try again. Finally, you're convinced it really works, and then you cook up some logical explanation and tell your colleagues that you finally figured out the real reason.
In fact, I think all this goes back to our origin as hunter-gatherers. You see, in the old times, they didn't have central heating, and life was really challenging. Nature was not just some place you took your kids to for fun. It was something that you didn't understand or control, but had to work with. Blokes who liked to fight the good fight with muscles straining, brows sweating and hearts singing had a selective advantage over intellectual types who thought about the Human Condition. Thus it is that Nature taught Man to love fighting her, and thus it is that bull-fighting is more popular than chess. We all instintively thrill in working with complex, irrational, intractable systems. Why else would men marry and have children?
In fact, when you dig a little deeper, it's clear that anybody who genuinely loves engineering also loves Nature and believes in God, because he knows a complex system when he sees one, and he knows that there obviously must have been a designer to optimize the amplifier gain in the forward path, the time constant of the feedback path and the probabilities of detection and false alarm in the controller.
Even in a completely corny movie scene, like the bulb lighting up in Swades, you feel a secret thrill when some contraption works. When you spend 5 hours and finally see zero BER (or whatever) on the screen, you can almost hear Beethoven in the background.
That, my friends, is real kicks. Sex, drugs, mud-wresting and mountain climbing are nothing compared to it. (Yeah, I would know. I've seen all these on TV, and everyone knows that things are better on TV than in real life.)
There is, I think, one more reason why this weekend was so much fun. It's the same reason why people were happier during the War than they're now, and why we'll all end up killing each other. But that's for another blog. So much for now.
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