Note 2: To those who received the drafts – The reference to Robert Kolker was incorrect, which I discovered after going painstalkingly through his mammoth book again in an effort to quote him exactly (it contains the whole of GRE word list many times over). That would explain the delay. He said some nice insightful things though.

Note 3: This story, and its prequel, are officially declared to be ficticious accounts incorporating no characters inspired by anyone living or dead.

The Interview with the Professor

I didn’t understand the conclusion of the movie Micky One when I saw it for the first time. In fact, I didn’t understand it till I had seen almost all of Arthur Penn‘s defining works, till it occurred to me that violence was the underlining theme in his movies, violence overcoming a distance of some kind – distance created by blindness in The Miracle Worker (this is one reason I considered Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Black plagiarised, he lifted this motif from Penn’s movie), impotence in Bonnie and Clyde (the doggerel was the immediate cue), paranoia in Mickey One (if you never understood the movie’s ending, this is the clue), the list goes on.

If one were to look at the underlining theme behind my fateful interview with Professor SS the next day, he would have discovered Mad Max, women, dope, James Bond, gang rape and Professor KV, all in that order.

But I am getting ahead of myself. Let me begin at the beginning.

To put it without much ado, I have never been the man for the bright sunny mornings, partly because I have never been an early riser, but that was a day well worth making an exception for.

I was up early for a consecutive second day. There was sunshine in my heart and there was sunshine on my face, and it made the world outside look more than it was worth. My heart swelled with the scent of the early morning breeze, cold and generously sprinkled with the dust from the construction sites around C**, and when my heart could hold it no more, it spilled out and became music for my soul. I joined it and sang with gay abandon, though my hostel mates later gave a different description of the events, but that might have been due to the quality of my singing. Nothing could get me down that day. Well, almost nothing, till I remembered my appointment later on that day with Professor SS.

That was my mood when I proceeded to the breakfast table. In retrospect, I think Ni(ved)ita and Pad(mav)ati might have been giving me murderous stares on that occasion, which, I am sad to report, were completely lost on me. An(irb)it did cast the hostile glares in my direction as usual, but that he did always anyway; except when he was mad with anger at me, in which case he took extra pains to be friendly with me and flashed all of his white set of teeth at me at every opportunity. Every time he did that, I would grab someone nearby and ask him to take our photographs together. Two old friends dining amiably. Two old friends looking at each other amiably. Two old friends smiling at each other amiably.

But this is not about that.

I took my usual place next to An(shu)l, Sou(men)dra and Riya on the breakfast table. After some moments of uncertain silence, Sou(men)dra spoke.

“You know what, I have a solution that will solve all your problems at one stroke.”

An(shu)l observed nonchalantly that the last time someone had said that, he came up with the nuclear bomb.

This made all of us contemplative for some time, at the end of which I asked Sou(men)dra about his solution, which turned out to be a bunch of excuses, brilliant and intricate but convoluted excuses, to evade the responsibility for my mail. I like to face the consequences of my actions, however, mostly because they are funny, and Riya supported me in this.

“You realise what you have done, right?”, she asked.

I was going to answer that yes I did, but then I remembered the last time I had said that. I asked what had I missed, and was made devastated in return.

To cut a long story short, SS had thought that my remark was intended for the girls, who also happened to be a minority (only three in the entire undergrad program). It wasn’t until much later that Shree[vat]sa remembered what was to us the only known abuse of Rolypoly, and it was a boy who had been the victim. Had this information come out in time, I could have been saved, but the smart chap who observed that comedy is all about timing forgot to notice that tragedy is all about mistiming irrespective of its Greek or Shakespearean or modern origins. Such is life!

I finished my breakfast and started for SS’ office with a heavy heart dragging my heavier feet.

When I coughed and said my slurred “ess-use me” to SS in his office, he was busy checking his e-mail. He looked back with a questioning glance and I introduced myself. He turned off the monitor, wheeled his chair towards me and rolled his sleeves.

“So you are that Mad Max character, eh? What the hell do you think you are?”

I couldn’t say that I was not pleased by that comparison, but etiquette demanded that I look guilty and sorry.

“You think you are smart huh? You think you can get away with this? What did you mean by that letter?”

I thought it was an invitation to explain myself. I am perpetually in the habit of committing this error. I mistake rhetorical speculations for literal questions and proceed to answer them.

“Sir, I think there has been a misunderstanding, I wasn’t thinking of the girls at all when…”

“Shut up,” he roared, “enough,” he paused for breath, “I thought what anyone in his right mind will think reading that disgusting mail, and you have no excuses to defend yourself. You have behaved very very irresponsibly, and you better be ashamed of it.”

He softened a bit at this point, “You see, women are a minority here, and we have to make them feel safe. What you have done is not only demeaning and insulting, it might also scare them,” his temper seemed to rise at the thought. “What are you, an egomaniac bastard? Do you think you are James Bond or something? Do you think you are so sexy that you can insult any of these girls?”

Again, I was flattered by the comparison and the compliment, but couldn’t thank him for it. He went on bellowing at me. Inspired by the excitement of the moment, he even stood up from his chair and started moving towards me little by little as he continued shouting at me. I thought it might be safer to stay close to the door and started inching towards it as he tried to corner me. At the end of ten minutes, we had both moved on to the corridor, and he had moved on to the gang rape part of my mail.

“And how, how could you write about such a sensitive issue like that? You think joking about rape is funny? Do you think gang rape is funny?” From there on, he went on to talk about something related to Dalits and Gang Rapes and the social problem that it is. He must have yelled “sex,” “dope,” “rape” and “gang rape” at least a dozen times within a span of a minute, at the end of which Professor KV, whose room was next to that of Professor SS, came out of his office to take active part in the discussion.

He listened silently for the next five minutes as Prof SS cruised through me. And then came the conclusion, “One should never do such irresponsible things. I think an apology mail should be sent.”

Finally seeing his chance to participate, Prof KV intervened timely, “Yes yes, I think that will be appropriate. You should immediately send a mail apologising.”

Except that he said it to Prof SS.

I was stunned for a moment. So was Prof SS. Then he recovered his speech and started yelling at Prof KV. “What do you mean I should send a mail? Why should I be sorry? What are you talking about?”

As the explanations and arguments grew in length and intensity, I decided that it was time I gave them a slip.

Everyone lived happily ever after.

And gave birth to that greatest of all date rape drugs?

Sweet Rolypoly, make my inbox immortal with thy presence.

It was one of those rare mornings when I stepped out of my room after a night of peaceful slumber and not a night spent in doing whatever it is that idle hostellers do while not sleeping in the nights while fitful gusts whisper here and there outside among the bushes half leafless and dry, and while stars look very cold about the Chennai sky. Keats, sonnet IX.

I am a bit fanciful as far as the outside world is concerned. I spend almost all of my time in tiny rooms, so I feel excited whenever I have a chance to step outside. My brain might have been culturally preprogrammed, but I like the feel of bright warm sun on my skin, and I like the way my hair feels when the wind brushes past my neck and my ear.

As I stepped outside, the coolness of the morning breeze filled my lungs. The almost dewy air touching my cheek felt like pricks, but they softened the sight of the bright sun rays. It looked almost as radiant as that bright morning scene in a Tim Burton movie where the hero, pronounced dead in the Vietnam war, had returned to kiss his betrothed. It was my first morning sun in two months.

To many the best part of waking up early in C** might seem to be the beautiful mornings. But as beautiful as the mornings are, to a more discerning mind, no doubt it is the breakfast in the mess which would be the best part, particularly when one didn’t have it in the past two months in spite of being charged for it. I guess all undergrad hostels are full of such optimists who plan turning a new leaf in their lives starting with regular breakfasts, but never wake up in time.

Since I had neither been pronounced dead nor was I engaged to any girl waiting for me to be kissed, not that I mind kissing girls I am not engaged to, I proceeded towards the canteen.

As I was making my way, I spotted Riya in the distance. The basket in her hand was full of Jasmine. Her white dress and the white flowers and her wet hair filled up my head, and I yelled to ask her if the spring had arrived. She stopped near me while passing and like always, bent her head slightly, looking at me from the corner of her eyes with a nice smile that always demands reciprocation. Usually she speaks coyly after this ritual acknowledging my existence, “Yeh tum ho kya (Is that you)?” But today she only offered me a flower and went away. I wanted to stop and tell her that she had made me a fine day, or a fine morning at least. After a moment of hesitation, however, I decided that not missing my breakfast was more important.

The first hints of grey clouds appeared in the horizon when Jay(ant)h stopped me while I was entering the mess and exclaimed, “What were you thinking?” I was going to observe that that he looked incredibly handsome, but he did not wait to hear the compliment. I realised that the question had not been literal. It meant there was something I did not know, something I should have known, something I must know at once.

I finished by breakfast as soon as possible and went to the lab to check my mailbox. There was only one mail waiting for me there. It was from Professor SS, who had no business sending any kind of mail to me. I opened it anyway. It had two lines, and all the letters were capitalised. It ran thus -

WHO IS THIS INCORRIGIBLE INTROVERT?

REPORT TO ME AT 9AM SHARP TOMORROW.

I noticed that the mail had been CCed to all undergraduates. It was true that I had attended only one of his lectures that semester, but that was not reason enough for such a rude mail, particularly when one considers my attendance in other classes. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t even know who I was, because he had once chastised A(cha)l mistaking him for me.

Then I checked the mail it came in reply to, and my heart sank.

An(irb)it, whenever he is inspired to be kind to his fellow human beings, sends them spam. On the previous night, he had sent us a spam about some phoney Date Rape Drug called RolyPoly, and had warned us that someone might want to try it on us.

I found the suggestion extremely ridiculous, of course. For one thing, a significant proportion of the population wouldn’t even mind being date raped (yes, scarcity of girls can do that to you. it’s all hormones.). And who in his right mind would want to dope and date rape a C** student anyway?!

Before going to sleep, I said as much in reply to his mail -

Who in his right mind would want to dope and date rape a C** student anyway?!

For some inscrutable reason, An(irb)it’s recipient list had included SS, which I did not notice before hitting on the “reply all” button. That explained the state of the affairs that far.

My mail had been an instant success. Everyone who had considered me a waste of space before now wanted to give me all sorts of advice, and assured me that even though he lacked that thing called temper, SS was fundamentally a nice man. I couldn’t go through the corridor without being interrupted by people who wanted to know all about the affair. I was an instant celebrity.

I tried to live up to everyone’s expectation for a while and tried being miserable. After being miserable for some time, I went on to join An(shu)l in watching a movie in his room. That night, I went to bed early so that I could wake up in time to meet him. With a curious sense of foreboding, I fell asleep.

To Be Continued… (very soon)

1)B(han)u and A(rna)b were chatting.

S(hou)vik – A(rna)b, don’t listen to him, he is gay.
B(han)u (indignantly) – I am not gay, I am broadminded.

2) S(hou)vik – Are you changing your room partner to Ramprasad?
Bhanu – No no, it’s difficult to make a new relationship in such a short time.

For the sake of records, Beli was Bhanu’s partner in room (and anything else that we don’t know of yet).

3) S(hou)vik – I am a narcissist. I look at myself in the mirror and masturbate.

The Annie Hall Effect

And this one time in our hostel ;), we watched Annie Hall after I insisted that everyone does so. The following scene inspired us, and a string of comments followed -

Alvy Singer: Oh stop it, you’re having an affair with your college professor, that jerk that teaches that incredible crap course, Contemporary Crisis in Western Man…
Annie Hall: Existential Motifs in Russian Literature. You’re really close.
Alvy Singer: What’s the difference? It’s all mental masturbation.
Annie Hall: Oh, well, now we’re finally getting to a subject you know something about.
Alvy Singer: Hey, don’t knock masturbation. It’s sex with someone I love.

4) Ar(ghy)a (when An(shu)l suggested that we should have a GBM (general body meeting) as soon as possible) -
What’s the point? Democracy is just vocal masturbation.

5) S(hou)vik (when I asked about his physics experiment report) -
That is experimental masturbation.

6) S(hou)vik (on Einstein and Philosophers and their futility) -
All philosophical orgasms are faked.

7) I don’t remember who came up with the question, but we all seeemed to come up with the answer at the same time, though independently.

Q: What’ll A(nir)bit’s autobiography be called?
A: Physical Masturbation!

8) An(shu)l (when I said I am going to put all that in my blog) -
History will be on your side, because you’ll be masturbating it.

I am an awkward man. I have struggled with myself for some time trying to decide whether to write you this mail or tell you in person. I have not been much of a conversationalist, however, so I decided to write this mail.

Forgive the folly of a man who doesn’t talk much about himself when he finally talks about himself, for this mail is going to be long.

I am aware of the impression I have made on you and those around you in general. My apparently apathetic and indifferent disposition, however, comes from my own innate paranoia of rejection, the fear of not getting talked back to, the fear of not getting a smile back. It’s not an air I intend to put on, it’s just how I come across after my over-active imagination compensates for my lack of confidence.

You were one of the few to smile at me first in spite of what has been described as my unfriendly appearance (it happened early in college, you probably don’t even remember). I wasn’t in love with you back then, but still you made a deep impression; very few people ever smiled at me without having known me for some time first. It was a nice gesture from you, one that had made me immensely happy, because I didn’t consider you as a friend back then. It’s just a silly irrelevant detail, but this is probably my only chance to tell you what a big difference it made.

Inartistry in the name sensibility would be no fit tribute for you, and though much less I must say than what I mean, much more I must mean than what I say, for what is the man who insists on calling a spade a spade but a farmer? I am no farmer, but the want of sensibility and the risk of being mistaken for mockery with my flattery restrains me.

Bad literature, more often than not, is an expression of genuine feelings. That alone couldn’t have stopped me either, but the social cynicism fashionable in this place ties my tongue.

Besides, I don’t think I could do enough justice to what I have to say no matter how long I prepared for it or how sincerely I said it.

So I’ll simply say this – you are the prettiest angel I have seen in my entire life, and I love you. I have loved you to distraction, with all my desperation, to the point of utter misery and bitter happiness from which I never made it back. You have been the woman of my life.

I am hopelessly in love with you.

I barely know you, it is true, but it has been too long to give any name to what I feel for you other than love. Idiotic, I know, but love is such a blind fool!

I had a hope, for some time. I hoped to know you better. I hoped to spend some time with you. I don’t know if I tried enough or not, but all I could manage to do was sweating profusely in front of you while nervously waiting for others to finish their conversation. To my relief, you have always smiled at me, and at times I have felt that that is more than I could ever take before being overwhelmed and melting at your feet. You have no idea how much your smiles have meant to me.

Time has run out, I guess, but not before I finally told you of what I felt, and I am glad for that. I have probably made a colossal fool out of myself!

My only excuse for writing this letter is my faith in the epigram that women forgive adoration. Please don’t be offended, all I am offering you is my admiration, and I am not asking you anything in return. I have been thoroughly miserable all these years being in love with you, and I assume I couldn’t ask for any more happiness than that given our
circumstances.

Please don’t get mad at me. And anyway I won’t have the courage to come before you after this ever again.

So goodbye, and good luck in whatever you do in life.

Truly yours,
Incorrigible Introvert

While I have no sympathies for the cultural fundamentalists, I don’t subscribe to my friend’s perspective as it is either. That probably doesn’t mark me as a liberal.

The thing is, nobody is really embracing the western culture because it is better (do excuse the generalisation, I am speaking for the masses). They do it because everyone is looking at those higher in the socioeconomic ladder and trying to imitate them. Various marginal process do exist which do not follow this pattern, but as I said, they are marginal, having originated mostly from compulsive nonconformists.

It’s like the defenders of Islam trying to project Islam as a civil and rational/decent religion by dissecting The Qur’an and other Islamic literatures. The point is, everything can be made to look good on paper; it is how a religion is actually practised that counts.

I am not saying Islam is all bad. I have quite a few Muslim friends myself, and they are terrific human beings. I think the Islamic values they were brought upon had as much to do as their upper middle class background to make them what they are, but I am not looking at them either as counter examples or exceptions. I don’t see them when I am looking at the masses.

Ending our digression, we come back to our mindless obsession for the west. For the youth, a vast majority of which comes from the middle class, defining their individuality amounts to classifying themselves according to the entertainment products they consume, and where else to turn but the west for the best?

We imitate the west because we see it as the stronger than ourselves, because of its economic and scientific progress. Adopting the nuisances of western manners and lifestyle, however, won’t make us as strong as they are. We can never inherit their ideas by imitating them. We have to earn it ourselves.

I am reminded of what the protagonist of R N Tagore‘s Patro O Patri had to contemplate. He refuses to marry the doll whose whole life orbits around Hindu religious rituals. Consequently he leaves home after a heated argument with his father, who pronounces that blind faith is better than intelligence.

He goes out into the world and makes money and a name for himself. The doors to the society of urban high class ladies, that had once seemed inapproachable, now open up to him. He is soon disillusioned, however. Those sophisticated high class ladies turn out to be mere westernised versions of the Hindu doll, orbiting their own western versions of the centre of the world. If the Hindu kid couldn’t live with the slightest slip in the details of her rituals, these other kids couldn’t forgive a mistake in dinner table etiquette either. They had merely substituted the rituals with table manners.

In the end, I guess I just don’t care. The public is dumb. Let them do whatever they want to do to occupy their time. We could fuss over it if we wanted, particularly if somebody paid for it, but all of it is a sheer waste of of time, just like this post. It all boils down to the lower intelligence of the masses, and there is nothing we can do about it but wait for it to grow up!

I also wrote some poems for him when he wanted to know how poems are written, but I subsequently used them to flirt with a girl and have to deal with my ambivalence towards them before I can put them here.

Sunday, Bloody Sunday

It was a dark and gloomy Sunday. The sun wasn’t shining. Calvin’s mood was cloudy like the sky. He knew something was going to happen.

He was sitting next to Hobbes, his brother, watching him type when Rosalyn, their overweight sister, entered with a plate of khir, greedily licking the spoon. She was looking at them and laughing when she suddenly dropped dead.

The postmortem report said it was potassium cyanide.

Now, the question was – could they eat the rest of the khir?

Calvin suggested that we send it to the lab for testing. But Hobbes suggested animal testing – that they should give a bit of it to that ferocious dog of their neighbours – lovely – who often interrupted their cricket matches.

Lovely was alive after eating the khir, so they strangled her and killed her and left a bit of that khir next to her body for the detectives. The khir was very nice to eat though.

Two enemies at one shot! It was a brilliant Sunday.

I held my breath and knocked on the doors.

VB opened the doors. I didn’t realise that he was going to be there. He was an added complication, and may be a part of the reason behind the events too.

He was there. On his chair. Looking frail as ever. I knew he didn’t want to do it, but there was a hint of determination in the sorrowful expression of his old face that told me that it has all been already decided, and that I had been invited only to be told about it. They did not want to know if I thought I was suicidal or not.

It was as ridiculous as that. But there may have been some truth in that if I am as deluded as everyone thinks. Probably I AM suicidal. Probably I should indeed be sent back home. I have no way of knowing what is true any more.

As I walked in, CS stood up and walked to me. It was a broken man’s walk. It had taken every bit of his strength to decide that we should be parted, and it showed in every bit of his body and soul. VB just stood nearby and frowned. He had never liked CS’ affection for me. Everyone thought that he was the right hand man of CS, and though it was him CS would always depend on for all his affairs, and though it was him who was going to succeed him, we both knew that the only man whom CS had ever loved from the depth of his heart was me.

“So you are here. Ah, come near me, come near me. How are you?”

I didn’t answer. The question was rhetoric. We sat down on the sofa.

We looked at each other for sometime in silence, till I looked away choked with grief. He knew that I understood.

“You know I would never have done this,” his voice was half tears, “you know that. But I must do this. For your sanity. For my sanity! Oh, please forgive this old man!.”

He said all that ceaselessly, restlessly, afraid that he would not be able to complete if he took a pause to breath. VB tried to look interested in the ceilings nearby. He had recently been married, which explained his mood.

I put my hand on his shoulder. He was my dear old man, and I still felt for him. I must have cried, because a drop of tear fell on his arm.

He looked up, and it was then that he completely gave up and broke down crying, sobbing into my sleeves. VB now shifted his attention to the cupboard nearby, and his lips were pursed. I didn’t know what to do.

That was when I left. I left the empty shell of a broken man on a sofa and a rival who took philosophical interests in ceilings and cupboards on a chair nearby, and I left.

I couldn’t tell you how it ended. As I was stepping out of that door, suddenly I no longer felt interested in knowing what happened to that crying old man on the sofa. There was a momentary sense of freedom before I became depressed again, and though I am sure now that VB would have walked up to CS to console him, I am perpetually haunted by the grey images of the pair struggling through the dusk, alone in their isolation and misery long after I was gone.

The boys were back from Kalpakkam for the weekend, and were down in the dinner table after having toiled their day through endless et sessions. The following conversation followed between A(cha)l and A(rna)b -

A(rna)b: So, what are (Jaya)nth and P(adm)a doing at IGCAR?

A(cha)l: (in his usual bored and detached drawl) Jaya(nth) is screwing P(adm)a, what else?

A(rna)b: (incredulously) But how could he do that? Only a professor can screw her!

Nobody at the dinner table could figure out for a moment what he meant by this, much less how to react to it. When we finally understood, we couldn’t decide what was more appalling, his remark or his presumed innocence (but we laughed hard anyway), which, as I have remarked earlier, I doubted upon. In any case, A(cha)l decided to explain to him the meaning of the word “screwing.”

A(cha)l: umm … , Do you know what screwing means? Do you know who can screw whom?

A(rna)b: Kyon, pataa hai naa. I can screw R(avi)tej.

I laughed for a long time at this, prompted by A(cha)l’s choking next to me. And then there was peace, having come in terms with A(rna)b’s peace finally.

When An(shu)l was out for a moment, (Jaya)nth added salt to his ice-cream (triple scoop). I thoughtfully prevented him from spoiling the strawberry scoop and enjoyed it while it lasted, till (Jaya)nth, overcome by his affection for An(shu)l, added pepper to it.

It is a known fact that salt, when added to ice, decreases the temperature. The ice in this case happened to be An(shu)l’s ice-cream. When An(shu)l ate it, he suffered instant brain freeze, which lasted for the rest of the party, for the length of which he kept insisting that Strawberry + Pepper is an awesome flavour to have, and that it would be an instant hit if somebody were to release it.

An(shu)l was not the only one who suffered temporary brain damage. Sou(men)dra had starved himself for two whole days preparing for the free food, and the look on his face when he held the first bit of food in his hands (which he borrowed from (Argh)ya’s plate) was one of those priceless things that the Visa-Master Card keeps advertising about.

Looking at (Ramp)rasad in this photograph (left), the inattentive and unsuspecting reader might be led to believe that he is under deep pain, but he is actually singing hallelujah thanking the Lord for the excellent free food he is about to receive. However, he spent the rest of his time contemplating his food away, and the only explanation we can attach to this is, again, temporary brain damage.

These grim incidents were not sufficient to suppress our youthful spirits, however, and we had our share of joyful moments and sorrowful celebrations to be thankful for. If there was the bitter parting of hearts ((Argh)ya and (Pad)ma on left), there was also the joyful reunion of true love (A(rna)b and Ni(ved)ita on right).

Even the sundered hearts did not stay aloof for long (B(eli) and (Pad)ma in the foreground), and there was much rejoicing at these satisfactory turn of events (Sou(men)dra in the background). It was quite a pleasant outing.

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!”

2) Here is a conversation overheard in a Computer Science Seminar -

Unwary Stranger: So, what is your area of research?

Prakash: Pardon?

Unwary Stranger: What is your area of research?

Prakash: Oh, (shrugs) Siruseri.

(Siruseri is where C** is situated!)

1) SS‘s common quote before exams – Each man for himself and God against all.

2) SS: You guys have some ideological problems with mathematics or what?
(When (Jay)anth and Ar(pit)h, Physics students, failed to answer one of his questions)

3) Sourav: My father did his postdoctrol from BHU.
Vemuri: When did he do his postdoctrol… ?
Sourav: must be early 70′s…
Vemuri: Oh, I am sorry, I could not meet him because I was busy being born at that time.

Cohomosexual (co.ho.mo.sex.u.al)

n. plu. A Lesbian in a man’s body.