Baboon Logic

In recent years, particularly after the third Nobel prize, a lot of people have asked me about my first brush with Physics, and why I chose Physics over Priesthood. The following short note is an humble attempt at answering those curiosities.

If I said that I was one of those precocious child prodigies that people read about in dailies, then I would be understating the case.

By the age of six, I already knew the difference between a Monet and a Manet, and by the age of 10, I was translating Shakespeare into English in my spare time. In class four, when we were first introduced to Euclidean geometry, I gave four different (and new) proofs of the Pythagorean theorem within the first two months, and then proceeded to work out the theorems of “Elements” in the exact order in which they appear in the book. True, I never proved the Riemann Hypothesis and then lost the proof by reinventing paper-napkins as they tell in the anecdotes, but I came pretty close. The actual accounts can be found in the version of Einstein’s paper on General Relativity containing my margin notes, which will be published five years after my death. Advance bookings are already available in Amazon.

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The day before yesterday we went out for a dinner in the evening.

I was depressed. The night before, I had watched this funky little movie called My Sassy Girl, which, too exaggerated to be interpreted even literally (it’s a bad old habit of mine, interpreting movies metaphorically, which once led me to state, to the great disapproval of my friends, that Gangster, King Kong and Silence of the Lambs shared the same thematic attraction dressed up differently), made me contemplative about my life nonetheless, and any time I think about my life, I get depressed.

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I was messing around in the GNU humour section when I came across the Unix Error Messages page, which is an inventive collection of funny error messages you can get in a Unix shell. A lot of them don’t work any more, but some do, and some do it in unexpected ways.

% ar m God
ar: God does not exist

That is what the page says I should get in a C shell. Here is what I got -

$ csh
% ar m God
ar: creating God

Now That was funny.

Much goes in the name of science in this country, and if I were to believe what I read, the rest of the world is not much different.

My personal favourite is Ravan and his Pushpak Viman (a flying machine that he used to kidnap women). Whenever priests, old men and the wise old men of the community described to me the greatness of the ancient Indian civilisation, all of them came to this inevitable conclusion - the western science is now trying to rediscover / reinvent / imitate what had been done in India 5000 years back (the number of years varies from person to person).

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I got this picture in a forwarded mail, but it was so funny that I just had to put it here.
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You just have got to see this! He is - the one and only - Makkadman!

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Time and again I have been at the receiving end of A(rna)b’s vernacular idiosyncrasies and eccentricities. For a long time, longer than it should have been, I had believed that A(rna)b faked it, that he must realise the usual puns behind his expressions at some level. The incident yesterday, however, has put an end to whatever hope that I might have had in this regard.

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Prakash doesn’t come in his trademark leather jacket, goggles and helmet any more, but his exploits continue to inspire our lives. Here are two anecdotes uncovered in a recent conversation with Puneet.

1) When Puneet joined C** as a research scholar, he had only two seniors, Prakash and Saket. Those were his greener days, and he didn’t know better than to call them Prakash Sir and Saket Sir.

Eventually, bored with the tedium of formality, Saket told him one day, “Don’t call me Saket Sir, just Saket will do!”

As it happened, Prakash told him the next day, “Don’t call me Prakash Sir, just Sir will do!”

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