Our story begins on a Wednesday morning, the kind that evokes the same sort of dread that the sight of Ganguly’s chest hair does in opposing captains. Perhaps it was the worldfamous Madras weather messing with my head or there is such a thing as “too much vettiness*”, but in any case I found myself afflicted with a sudden bout of masochism, which even drinking Horlicks instead of my morning coffee could not cure. In first world countries, people indulge in sophisticated acts of self-abuse: slashing wrists, drugs, marriages, etc. Au contraire, we Indians have a government approved safe method embellished with red tape that would put even the Gulag to shame. And it was with this in mind that I decided to head to the nearest aRghTO to obtain my license. A license to kill quite literally, given the amount of road accidents that occur every year.

The aRghTO offers a unique experience for it is a place untouched by time, technology, and the Internet- the filtered essence of what a Sarkari establishment is really about. Sure you have movies like Anniyan and Ramana, and comedy shows like Satyameva Jayate and Anna Hazare which drive home the need for a corruption-free society. But expecting such media to change the aRghTO is like trying to break an adamantium wall with a Natraj pencil. Thus I waited amidst a sea of people- old men who probably weren’t around when Henry Ford introduced the automobile and youngsters who make you go “Jesus, Kidsthesedays!”.  And so I waited, lost my body weight in sweat and then wondered as to how much of a character building exercise this place was.

• Patience Nothing prepares you for life like waiting for hours in an ocean of sweat.
• Bonding Nothing helps people bond like a common adversary, and a 3 hour wait results in close ties with people around you, irrespective of social status, IQ or Thala/Thalapathy preference.
• Skillset Greasing Palms, Respecting officers, sucking up,… the list is endless.

In short, the establishment encourages you to develop all the necessary skills to be a good human, except of course driving. However, I was soon forced to snap out of my reverie and assemble outdoors for the ultimate driving test. Naive I was to not realise that the real test would be the fact that the photo on my application looked nothing like me. Like school boys waiting for the chief guest, we were made to stand in the sun for almost an hour, and trust me, there is nothing that lends some perspective to your life like the noon sun trying to fry what’s left of your hair. As I was lost in ruminations about the quasi-metaphysical strings connecting the Higgs Boson and T.Rajendar’s beats, I was once again brought back to reality by the arrival of the inspector.

The aRghTO inspector is really hard to miss- in a queue of anxious people waiting to pass their test, his eyes look like that of Paris Hilton’s Chihuahua, totally uninterested.  As the man got down from his vehicle, several asslickers ran to greet him with cold drinks and biscuits. One chap with a rejected application was literally begging him with pleas which included his starving family, old mother, sister of marriageable age and dog with a kidney failure. As I watched in awe, a Bolero whizzed by, 2 ministers stepped out to have a private word with the inspector. Requests were made, a suitcase containing the annual income of a few middle class families exchanged, grim nods of the head and as we watched in silence, the Bolero drove away. I kid you not, this part is true. I decided then that when I grow up, I would become an aRghTO inspector. Now to the part where I’m supposed to talk about how my driving skills bedazzled the man but frankly speaking, he was probably more interested in the packet of biscuits and the stain on his shirt than my driving.

As I trotted back to the office, I assumed that the major chunk of my work was over and the processing would get done soon. Right? Wrong. I returned and joined a line longer than the longest gult name that I knew and then Murphy called. They say that with great power comes great responsibility and therefore as long as there are power cuts in Chennai, its denizens will remain irresponsible pricks. As the unruly Sabarimalai-esque crowd was told to wait sine die, frustration tended asymptotically to 1/(Sin 0).

When Gandalf said “Thou Shalt not Pass”, he was probably referring to time, for time passing is a science that makes even String Theory wet its pants. As the clock ticked my youth away, I memorized the various patterns on my palm, got to know that the smelly, sweaty foul-talking fellow behind me was actually a PhD in biosomethingortheother (serious!) and got down to solving P vs NP when power finally returned after three full hours.

Long story short, I finally did get my license and have successfully been causing havoc ever since. All’s well that ends well and all that pointless jazz but it did strike me as to how wasting whole mornings is taken as a part and parcel of life in India. Perhaps it is this frustration, accumulated in the aRghTO that leads to most accidents on the road. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any time to devote to analyse the socio-political causes of this because I had to return home to crib on twitter.

*vettiness = velagiri

Appendix A:

The relationship between blog post frequencies and social life factor of a person can be represented as a Gaussian function.

My mutation finally culminated yesterday. I stood in between two gentlemen conversing in a language that I’ve heard all in my life, feigning ignorance with a face placider than R2D2. I even hummed the tune of a despicable Hindi song in case my reactions gave me away and they would start suspecting my origins. Life has come a full circle. The centrifugal force wasn’t particularly enjoyable though. May the force have mercy on my soul.

I hear that quizzing cliques in the US of A are as rare as Paneer in my mess’ Sahi Paneer (that’s the spelling they use). Paraphrasing some famous man, “Of all the things that I’ll miss, I’ll miss quizzing the second most”. (I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to work out the first and the others.)

The funny thing is, I still don’t know what the capital of Liechtenstein is.

P.S: I initially wanted to name this post “The Bravery of Being out of Range” after this Roger Waters song. But my obsession for cheap puns got the better of me.

For reasons unknown, the word Tardy seems to associate the same feeling in Chennaites as do the words Arson, Murder and Rape. And maybe a little less fear than the letters T.R (T.Rajendar or Supreme being, for the uninitiated) do. The word tardy also rhymes with Jeff Hardy. Okay, I don’t know why I said that but coming back to the point, Tamilians have this affinity for reaching any place well before the well-before-designated time. Not only is it fashionable to arrive at the railway station a good three hours ahead of the train, it is also becoming to rub it in the large noses of the latecomers- yes, i’m referring to those who arrived two hours before the train. Of course, one does not dare to argue the rationale behind this exalted practice. After all, it makes more sense to arrive well in advance and brave a queue for the next few hours (because most people got there ahead of you) than to enjoy the same few hours in an air-conditioned room and make it on time.

I believe that most Chennaites have a skewed sense of time, especially when it comes to deadlines and appointments. When a normal man says, “Let’s meet up at 5PM, dude”, he means… you guessed it right, “Let’s meet up at 5PM, dude”. However when a Chennai uncle utters these very words, rest assured he wants you to be there by 4:30 or else his boot shall connect with your rear when you arrive at 5, or god forbid later. Perhaps we take this whole race against time business too personally. I imagine, the average Chennai guy believes himself to be this dude:

Meet Keanu Ramachandran in Speedu. (Pardon my poor photoshopping skills)

Lest I forget, there is also the god-awful habit of waking up before the poor Sun even gets a chance to peep in and say Hello. It’s very common to expect people in most families to rise, shine, (head)bathe, finish morning pooja, finish more pooja for brownie points, Coffee 1, peruse all Editorials in the Hindu, Coffee 2 and strongly criticize the deteriorating quality of the paper to the crows on the windowsill while the aforementioned normal guy hasn’t even got a chance to press snooze yet. This complete disregard for time may owe its existence to a variety of reasons. A Freud might blame it on the tendency of the typical Indian male to … finish everything quickly. Frank Miller might view the Chennai guy as “a dionysian figure, a force for anarchy that imposes an individual order”. Karunanidhi might attribute it to his non-existent hairline as might Rakhi Sawant to her assets. But as any automan in the city might tell you, “This is not madness. This is Madras da Kaidha (Donkey)”.

I find it strange that I miss this place more than anything now.

*Dear Feminist,
Please to note, just because I take a dig at the intellectual pursuits of the South Indian woman, it does not necessarily mean that every male down under is a Sheldon replica.
P.S: If you are a feminist, get the hell out of my blog.

**Short for Madrasi. Not as offensive though.

A recent survey[1] established that cribbing is the third most popular activity in IITR after,
1) Bugging seniors for chapos
2) A certain activity that takes place in the dark inside hostel rooms under sheets. (I was talking about sleeping, you sick pervert)
(Ghissing finished 42nd).
It is no secret that finding the words ‘satisfied’, ‘Roorkee’ and ‘IITian’ in the same sentence is as common as finding Salman Khan with a shirt on. But I digress from Salman Khan’s attire, as alluring as the topic may be.

One of our favourite whineyards is the absence of good electives. Every semester before the endsems, IMG (now Campus Skunk) opens its floodgates exposing the naive R-ites to hitherto unheard of terms like Cosmetology, Snorkelling and Far side Entomology. The experienced lot are forced to disown trivialities like interest and learning in favour of easy proxies, no backs and the absence of an 8AM class. The choices offered on IMG’s hallowed portals are much like the choices one has during elections:

1) The Rahul Gandhi Elective: Glamorous and promising on the outside, but mostly all noise and no signal.
2) Shashi Tharoor Elective: Taken by the charismatic teacher who puts up assignments on facebook and tweets students about cancellation of class, but in general a pointless course.
3) Mayawati Elective: Shh… I hear this is going to the best elective in 2012.
4) Suresh Kalmadi Elective: The one where the professor forgets to attend class.
5) Yedyurappa Elective: The elective which promises to get over soon but stretches till the day before the exams.

I recollect an article from my first year in the moronic magazine, aptly titled “Hobson’s Choice: All roads lead to the earthquake department”. But no more! With the influx of many a young turk, the days of gerontocracy were over. The institute had final woken to the sound of the clarion. New electives with fancy names were floated by departments above the slope, and held in class rooms that were actually near Nesci. The times, they were a-changing.

One fine Saturday morning (read 1PM), I was forced to defer a meeting with Obama regarding the ceiling debt, my usual weekend escapade with Natalie Portman and the regular blog post thereby sending millions of loyal readers into depression, for profound thoughts on life, the universe and all that jazz. “Enough was enough”, I came to a conclusion. “I am in an IIT to learn, and learn I will”. So I registered for one of those baroque, hard-to-pronounce electives offered by the MIT return. Four months later I enter my first class five minutes late, having missed 3 classes the previous week. Cold walls and the icy demeanour of 20-odd enthusiastic (read ghissu/muggu) juniors greet me. The young lecturer coolly informs me that I have missed five attendances as he had to take two extra classes the previous week, and a even a single case of absenteeism hence will result in my not being able to write the exams. “Oh and by the way, we have extra field trips too. Two hours every week in a field pulling strings to understand what String theory really is”, he added with glee. Any wise man in my situation would have decided to go on and take the bull by its horns. But that wise man was not I. And so I decided to throw Douglas Adams’ favourite instrument, the towel.

2 Days, 101 signatures and a few thousand applications later, I was one of the teeming millions in an elective offered by a department dealing with disasters. “But sir”, I argued. “How can anyone not appreciate the subtleties of Fire-Extinguising 101′. An argument that he could never refute thanks to generations of farzi* seniors who had populated the course and proven beyond doubt that Fire extinguishing was indeed every engineer’s ultimate fantasy.

My close encounters of the fourth kind had me thinking (mostly during class hours when I couldn’t be bothered to listen). Given that most of us have as much an idea about our future as Arnab Goswami has about shutting up, not to mention the delusions we seem to be harbouring, do we even need a choice? After all, isn’t the illusion of choice yet another exercise in futility till we realise that we don’t really have one. China, which forcibly united its provinces under one language and culture seems to be thriving enough to buy Greece whereas democratic India is floundering under the banner of disunity in perversity. Maybe we are better off with the blue pill, and without questioning whether or not it is air that we breathe. May be we are better off with mindless action and Karan Johar instead of “beautifully scripted journeys of catharsis”. Maybe Harbhajan Singh has made it large.

Maybe, maybe Hobson’s choice is better than Sophie’s after all.

*farzi – Having lost all interest in any form of technical education and can currently be found spewing out management gibberish

References
1. “Bakar and Cribbing: 2 sides of the same coin”, Thashi Saroor, Kamal R. Khan and Satan Bhagat.

I strongly believe that, God, weary of six days of arduous labour, decided to give the seventh day a miss, thereby making seven the magically most indolent number. As he was resting, he saw a bunch of aunties roaming around in oversized shades, and conversing in an accent even he couldn’t fathom. Impressed by their demeanor, and mindful of their esotericity, God in his usual benevolence uttered, “Let there be a place teeming with such elite individuals, abounding with beauty and kindness. This place shall be known as Krowsville”, creating what we call today our national capital. This is why Krowsville is so affluent, be it the magniloquence of the people, or the resplendent beauty it provides to the beholder. Wise men proclaim that there are two sides to every bed. Krowsville-ites unfortunately have heard of only one, the wrong-side.

Yet, even the sharpest critic of Krowsville cannot but laud the sheer impeccability of the Krowsville metro and amount of foresight that must have gone into its construction. Madame Diskhit, a self-confessed fan of the inimitable Mallu accent, decided to call a 75-yer old Keralite out of retirement just so that she could sit back and laugh at the accent in press conferences. All was well with the world, till some guy pissed the above-mentioned Mallu off. Deciding to punish every single male on the face of the city, the Mallu engineer created a separate cabin for women in the Metro. The rest as they say is history.  Deprived of my primary metro sport and what is probably the national male pastime, of bird-watching, I decided to turn to my secondary avocation. No, not guy watching but the lost art of observation. Observing people always gives me kicks. Paraphrasing Al Pacino, “Big ones, small ones, stupid ones, scratchy ones”; I’m not too sure if god was a fricking genius, but he sure did have a good sense of humour. The Krowsville metro reminds me of Lord of the Rings, and middle earth in general. There is always a venerable dude with a “Fly you fools!” expression on his countenance. A slovenly, shaggy fellow flirting with a fair maiden (Yes, in all probability the only lady in the cabin), a couple of blokes shivering as if they are on their way to Mordor and a short, fat, belligerent man. Of course,  the rest of the cabin can be divided into goblins and orcs, who get into a brawl every time the door opens.

In the interest of safety of the few people who do read my blog, here are some general guidelines for the Krowsville Metro.

Dos

1)      Keep your hands in your pockets all the time. You’ll appear suave and worldly to the few female passengers inhabiting the cabin. More importantly, you won’t get pickpocketed

2)      Sit or stand next to someone who is on the phone or is messaging furiously. Eavesdropping is an excellent source of amusement. In fact, I was sitting next to a guy on the phone with some girl and he kept me entertained from Kashmere Gate till Gurgaon. Overheard:
“Yaar, just because he said so, why did you remove me from your friends on facebook? This is just not fare yaar!”

3)      Twitch your face to act as if you are in great pain, or constipating. It’s hard to tell the difference but at least people won’t come anywhere near you.

Do nots

1)      Keep your hands in your pockets all the time. People will know you have something valuable in there.

2)      Give up your seat to the single ladies who enter the general cabin. It’s like encouraging begging really. The more you give, the more you’ll find.

3)      Offer to play with babies or little kids. Before you know it, they’ll have peed all over you. Or worse.

But that’s enough cribbing about Krowsville. In other news, Ricky Pointing is a rich, rich man, my old school cricket coach has invited the West Indian board for an 3-ODI away series, Saina Nehwal has left her lucrative Squash career in order to patent her new discovery – oil which ain’t oily and oh, I seem to have achieved something big. Or at least, so enunciate the myriad congratulatory messages on my wall. For some inexplicable reason, I find the nomenclature “Wall” extremely comic, not that “Scrapbook” betrays any superior intellect. “Writing on Walls” – as Chandler would say “Come on! Surely, that’s got to be funny”. But I digress. Anyone afflicted with facebookerlust stumbling on to the aforementioned wall would mostly assume I am getting married this weekend, glimpsing at the sheer deluge of laudatory posts. Nothing succeeds like success, it seems. Strange are the ways of people. Stranger, the ways of the Social Networking clan. The reclusion has begun.

I am not exactly a bibliophile nor does my done-reading list come anywhere close to that of the few abstruse nerds this place has introduced me to. And yet, there is something about holding the papyrus and savouring words that can bring cheer to even the most despondent of aortic pumps. Combine this with the 20% discount that Midlands offers and you have all the makings of a sweet dream. Thank you Messrs. Rajaraman and Mateen and wishing my (non-existent) readers all the very best for the upcoming test series.

*For the uninitiated, the word krow is also known as “Peter” in some dialects and “Show-off”/”Pretentious Moron” in the queen’s tongue.

And they wither with the wind,
And they crumble in your hand.

The quintessential tam-brahm wedding has a few key features – nosy aunties adorned in bling weighing a few hundred tons

There are some keywords that are bound to arouse any respectable tamizh woman from a respectable family. IIT, Siligon valley, YummYes, Sun DeeVee, 24-Carat and Palag Pannneeer reci-bee.

IKEA burst out with the noble intention of imparting geography to the simpletons surrounding her, “Roorkee, isnt that the place in Orissa with the steel plant”?

“No, it’s near Haridwar”, mother corrected.

Bad move mom, bad move…

Upper class tamil women are like Soviet Russia: you don’t chide them. They chide you! Clearly miffed at my mom’s audacity and general lack of social manners, the noble lady arrived at the only possible logical conclusion: my mom had raised me up in a terrible manner and that I needed professional help.

“Surely, your son plans on doing an MS abroad? Masters means more dollars.”

“Actually he wants to do a PhD.”

“Surely you must be joking? I bet this is yet another of his silly whims. My son wanted to pursue robotics after watching Rajnikanth in Endhiran.”

“Actually he has decide…”

“Don’t be silly ma, he’s just a child. What does he know? When a kid sees a vendor selling pani-puri on the road, he’ll obviously want it. It is our duty to protect them from their own innocence and stupidity. Besides, a PhD will result in a complete waste of atleast five years and by the time he’s done he’ll be totally bald and no one will want to marry him”. Blood Pressure shooting up, mom just nodded praying that the counselling session would soon come to an end.

“Infact, you remember Savithri’s son, don’t you?” Savithri who? “That young man completed his masters from Univ-of-some-obscure-corner-or-the-other-in-Iowa and immediately secured a $6000-a-month job in Krowgle Inc”. And then she went on, and on, and on. And then a bit more. The rest of her eloquent speech has been snipped in order to preserve of the sanity of the readers, if at all any are left at this juncture.

Deciding my future, it seemed, did not provide this woman enough stock to gloat over her own brilliance and she proceeded to pounce on my sister, who was probably discussing the applications of fantasy in real-life and the genetic feasibility of mythical creatures (read Twilight, Edward Cullen) with her friends. “Surely dear, you want to follow in your brother’s footsteps.”

As much as my sister would have loved to scream “Noooooooooooooo” in her best possible Darth Vader imitation, civil manners dictated that she say “No, I want to become a teacher” instead.

Blank stares. These fine women had enough experiences in life to fill many a megaserial, but nothing and absolutely nothing had prepared them for this. “Teach what dear?”, another woman asked in the most derisive of tones. Now one must take a moment to appreciate the potency of a middle-aged woman’s sarcastic tone. It is said that there are only three sounds in this world more distressing than the same. Namely

a. Vuvuzelas
b. Wailing Banshees
c. Future Ted Mosby with his “Kids back in the fall of 2009”…

“I want to teach school kids”, came the reply; voice quivering. That was the last straw. The wolves were about to pounce, the lamb about to breakdown and my mom about to violate all known rules of social conduct and swear at these ladies and just then, the gates of the dining hall opened. Voila, the aunty gang ever so eager to not miss the first round of hot food, disappeared before one could even utter thanks-for-all-the-fish. Then, my mom went on to prove that my sagacity was in no way the result of some weird genetic mutation. She and my sister finished dinner (of course!) and quietly exit.

But… this was a Maddu* marriage and the concept of a quiet exit can never appeal to a class which would rather broadcast, “The inception had evolved from a mere fluttering of the human heart. Our beloved protagonist, the quintessential young male knew he had developed strong feelings for the girl. The taxonomy was perhaps not love, but definitely much more than just infatuation” than simply “The boy liked the girl”. A discussion of exit strategies is in order here as the probability of running into either of the bridal couple’s parents is very high and awkward questions then lead to awkward-er answers – no the elder one has JEE class and the younger one has a test tomorrow; no, the grandma has arthritis; no, our dog is grounded because he pooed on the carpet ,and so forth. My own extensive knowledge of such revolutionary tactics owes its existence to years of playing AoE. When your enemy whups your ass even before you build your first barrack and archery, these strategies are a must for survival. The most accepted method of exit is to create a diversion and leave silently while people are looking elsewhere. Three simple ways are:

1)      Shout “Bomb, Bomb!”
2)      Shout “Namitha, Namitha”. (This method is guaranteed to create a frenzy among all males above age twelve, and drive the rest into puberty.)
3)      Hire a Chuck Norris lookalike to hold the bridal couple at gunpoint and run for your life before he finishes off the entire hall and comes for you.

Just as I had predicted, dear old mother was intercepted by random old dude and his nagging wife, and waitforit… waitforit… was gifted a free coconut and betel leaves in a paper cover. Ah! Free coconuts, what any self-respecting maddu family wouldn’t do for one of these.

She later explained over the phone, “The ironic thing about tamizh weddings is that you have a bunch of self-obsessed morons, constituting the so-called intelligentsia of our nation fighting with one another to exhibit age-old cliches”. Every wedding has these aunties (maamis), 99% of whom scale the price of their carefully selected silk sarees by a factor of 3.14, when asked. The remaining 0.98% are adorned in salwars and churidars and generally ignored by the venerable lot as being young and foolish. The final 0.02%, in all probability, US-returned, promenade in T-shirts and jeans. This lot is classified by the rest as being slu belonging to the same class as female canines. There are always these NRIs and their ABCD kids with the fakest of accents which people invariably find cute. These wannabe-firangs’ sole motive is cribbing about the state of affairs in India and comparing it with the united states. The NRIs can generally be found seated next to grey-haired, pan-chewing uncles, receiving advice on how LIC is the best option for financial investment during recession. And then there are the kids. Those annoying little brats – a few running around and knocking us elderly people down, the ones which managed to smuggle a tennis ball playing catch-catch and aiming the ball at various unsavoury parts of passers-by’s bodies and twelve year Casanovas flirting with girls under the umbrella of fraanndsheep. At times like these, one can’t help but subscribe to the juvenile neanderthal’s oxymoronic philosophy that every kid on the face of this planet ought to be chained up and starved for weeks to inculcate discipline.

“Times have changed”, mum lamented in a pensive tone. “A wedding is no longer just a union of hearts but a commercial affair, a show of status.” “Yes, Yes”, I cut her short with every intention of avoiding yet another of those Back-in-the-80s-son-things-were-so-different stories. “I am glad that I’m far away in Roorkee”, I added as an afterthought.

Truth be told, I am not glad. I miss the food. A lot.

*Maddu refers to the people who hail from the most awesome city on this planet. Yes, the one where Rajnikanth resides.

We digress here to discuss the optimal wedding attending algorithm, an essential part of any operations research or optimization techniques course. Recent research has shown that for an ideal wedding experience, one must enter the hall precisely 12 minutes and 42 seconds before dinner is served. Attending a wedding well before dinner is not very different from reading a Chetan Bhagat novel, in the sense that both are utterly pointless. First, the entry must be furtive in order to avoid a plethora of awkward social situations (ASS for a good reason), ranging from the sixth grader and his mom who want to know how to get into IIT, to patronizing uncles eager to give out free advice and the dude from thatLocalEngineeringCollege you once hung out with, who refuses to let go. The remaining 12 mins can be summarized by the following steps:

1) Try cutting the queue with your best ‘I need to pee urgently look’. The good thing about hitting the queue close to dinner time is that the bridal couple would be so exhausted after meeting a million people that the average time per guest would have reduced exponentially.

2)The Gift, the most important part of the wedding. As much as the invitation may croon, “We only want your blessings”, nobody really gives two hoots to your blessing. Yes, now get over that! The gift cannot be a random item you picked in the flea market on the way; the price of the gift must be chosen according to the following equation.

where,
is a factor depending on the MCP (Male chauvinist pig) coefficient of the family
closeness or degree_of_closeness is a number ranging from 1-10, one being the closest and 10, the farthest.

3)Give your fakest possible smile for the photograph. Putting your hands on the groom is allowed but frowned upon as most guests haven’t had a bath in ages, hands on the bride is a definite no-no. It is also important that you pull your chest up to hide that paunch. You don’t want little kids looking at the wedding pictures to comment on fat-uncle?

4) Run towards the dining hall at relativistic speeds trampling a couple of five year olds on the way to set an example for those dare to block your path. The same method however, does not apply to over-sized aunties. These fascinating women on the other hand, can be removed with the following 9 magical words “They are giving pineapple juice on the other side”.

Thanking Lord Ganesha and pineapple juice respectively for their parts in removing obstacles from your way, you go ahead and complete the ritual – eat to your hearts content and exit, stage right once again hoping to avoid those ASS’es on the way. Of course, my dear mother not having taken my wisdom all that seriously arrived at the wedding hall, sister in tow, well before dinner, blissfully unaware of the horrors to follow.

The middle aged ladies infesting weddings are primarily of two types – those who give you education funda, and those who sprinkle marriage funda; all for free mind you! Contrary to popular perception, the former, possessing the educational aura of an opposum, is no better than the latter. Stuck with I-know-everything aunty (IKEA for convenience), my mom probably understood how I felt in class everyday, an hour seemed like an eternity. After her dissertation on red sarees and every other shop in town, IKEA decided to move on to more irritating ventures.

“Shravan, your son, feels like a hundred years since I last saw him. Oh, he was so little then”. Liar, Liar. I clearly remember seeing this feminine menace a couple of years back and believe me, I haven’t grown a nanometre since. “What is he doing now?”

“Shreyas”, mom said. “He is in IIT Roorkee now”.

In what can only be termed as a curious case of reverse evolution, nature, for reasons beyond the scope of this post, saw it fit to bestow IKEA and her ilk with predatory hearing skills placing them on par with hawks, bloodhounds and owls. The mere mention of the magic word (IIT and not Shreyas!) was enough to bring the rest of IKEA’s clan to the spot. On hearing IIT, IKEA’s own eyes lit up. Now, there are some keywords that are bound to arouse any respectable tamizh woman from a respectable family. IIT, Siligon valley, YemYes, Sun DeeVee, 24-Carat and Palag Pannneeer reci-bee are of a few of them. Much to my chagrin, Rajnikanth, Chewbecca and 42 are not. Neither are IAS, B.Sc Sociology and gold-plated jewellery.

“Oh IIT! Our kids grow up so fast, don’t they?”, interjected another lady looking straight out of a saas-bahu serial, clearly having rehearsed this particular line around 6.023 x 10^23 times. My mom turned her glance towards the two unmarried, 25+ tanker lorries who happened to Avagadro aunty’s daughters. “Yes, they grow. A lot”, she concluded, the sarcasm missing the fine woman by a distance approximately equal to the radius of the earth (at the equators, not poles).

Not very pleased at having her flow broken, IKEA burst out with the noble intention of imparting geography to the simpletons surrounding her, “Roorkee, isnt that the place in orissa with the steel plant”?

It may be hard to believe but scientists predict that one day the sun will simply run out of energy, a day might come when Rajnikanth gets tried of bashing up baddies and a day when Master Yoda actually decides to attend grammar class. I am sure even on that day, IKEA would not shut up. “No, it’s near Haridwar”, mother corrected.

Bad move mom, bad move.

(To be continued…)

2006, a million RAM and motherboard failures later, we decided to go for one of those sleek new AMD Athlons. I was a man with a vision. Nothing less than a DWD RW +- would satiate my hunger, I growled. “Smart young man”, the chap who helped us assemble the system patronized, with sarcastic undertones that went totally over my head. 4.7GB was still a lot. I even bought a DVD RW with a friend, promising to update it with the latest software, a geek repository of sorts. Blinded by the constant burning, I was totally underprepared for the USB revolution that would follow. ‘Flash’y drives, no bigger than my own thumb had pied pipered my entire school. After that, I could never catch up; always two steps behind. My own 4GB pendrives became obsolete as the world oohed and aahed at those portable hard disks. 320GB, they claimed. More space than you could ever hope for, inside your palm. The following summers were filled with woes, and vows. I digress.

This summer was memorable in more ways than I myself could have ever imagined. Unlike the Pahadi Shutterbug, the sole purpose of whose internship was to return with a few million photographs, I do not have the fortune of sepia to relive my summer. No relics but for two Digital Versatile Discs with tales from a galaxy far, far away. This summer, I also treated myself to a Seagate Freeagent Hard drive. 1TB (931GB to be precise) of zeroes and ones shall fill my precious. And very soon, I shall once again be in vogue. Life comes a full circle.

P.S: I know that 2TB hard drives are commonplace nowadays but what the hell, Bill Gates once said

640K ought to be enough for anybody

A normal person would take the side road thinking not many would attempt this route, and hence he can reach faster. A smarter person would postulate, “I bet everyone’s thinking of taking the side route, so there’ll be less traffic on the main” – counter-logic or reverse psychology as you may have it. Then there will always be the guy whose thought pattern will be along the lines of, “What if everybody takes the main road thinking that the others take the side route.”. And the guy who says, “It is plausible that people take the side route thinking that others will take the main road in the false assumption the the rest will use the side route”. True, but there will always be the guy who goes one more level deep. It’s strange how the simplest of choices in life infinitely recurse on to themselves. It’s stranger as to how everything has an application in everything else.

Infinite Turtle Paradox

Chris Nolan, are you reading this?