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)

2) Invariance of c:
The speed of light in a vacuum is a universal constant (c) which is independent of the motion of the light source. Just the assumption that there was a maximum velocity might not have been that profound. But add to that the insignificance of the light source, and you have got an Einstein in your hands.

However, to be more fair, the profundity lies in the mathematics behind special relativity, the credit for which goes also to Maxwell and Poincare.

3) Gravity:
There is nothing worthwhile that I can say about this, almost everything I might want to point out has been said already. I particularly liked the biography by James Gleick, where he tries to tell us how Newton was the least Newtonian entity in a world that was rapidly becoming Newtonian.

Not withstanding A(nir)bit’s qualms, the world we live in is still Newtonian.

However, I don’t count Newton’s invention of calculus as a fundamentally new idea. Calculus had been in making for a long time, and Newton happened to be one of the few first rate minds who simply stepped in and put it all together.

At the heart of Calculus lies Continuity and Differentiability. I have already mentioned Continuity, and Differentiability is an extension/generalisation of Continuity.

4) Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle:
My views of him (and his principle) are biased because of my intense admiration for the man. I rationalised my initial fascination later when I struggled to understand his principle of uncertainty in its mathematical rigour without getting lost in idle philosophical speculations.

For me, he was the coolest physicist, almost failing his practicals yet getting his degree by a brilliant thesis, he epitomised the arrogance of the theorists who look down upon the practical work (I am not saying it was his personal attitude, but one couldn’t find a better idol to imitate).

5) Godel’s incompleteness theorem:
I finally shook up the philosophical rants and looked through the theorem itself only recently. I had a misconception about the way Lobachevsky went about the fifth postulate of Euclid, which A(rule) corrected sometime back.

I forget who said this – “God exists because mathematics is consistent. The Devil exists because we can’t prove it.”

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 have always meant to write about him, ever after he commented on Sachin in the most cowardly manner. I did comment on that article in passing in one of my earlier posts (the last para), but Moin’s continued double standards merited a more elaborate treatment.

Then I stumbled across this article in cricinfo, and I felt it says almost everything I could have wanted to say on the Moin Khan. The post wanders a little in the beginning, but soon comes to the point and goes on detailing the history of Moin Khan’s deceptive double standards.

Moin Khan is too much of an idiot to be taken seriously, but we are not living in an ideal world either.

Hermione speaks …

“The Deathstick, the Wang of Destiny, they crop up under different names through the centuries, usually in the possession of some Dark wizard who’s boasting about them. Professor Binns mentioned some of them, but — oh it’s all nonsense. Wangs are only as powerful as the wizards who use them. Some wizards just like to boast that theirs are bigger and better than other people’s.”

Well, I finally finished the 7th book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The dream is over, and the journey has ended, with an empty space in my life that will never be filled again. I’ll never have to wait for another book, and I am already nostalgic thinking about it.

But that’s not how he shows it. What we see is a row of masturbating young men who are trying to keep up their illusion by touching each other selectively and by looking at pornographic images put at the back of the guy in front. They have pressed their ears to the wall, and we can hear in the background what appears to be the moaning of an orgasm. The camera keeps drifting, and we have some time to think about the scene at hand to allow us to detach ourselves with casual deprecation. Then we come to Ryu’s room to find him sitting on a chair with the kind of detachment that can come only from utter despair, and we find his ailing sister moaning in pain on the floor.

Now we have to judge those young men again in light of our previous impression.

Just another scene calculated to shock? Yes, but there is more that Park Chan-wook conveys here. Those masturbating young men, they are not perverts, they are common human beings just like you and me. Their lives are our lives, and that is all there is to life.

It is an undeniable fact that the shock-value is one of the main selling points of his movies, but patterns emerge when one puts everything together in order to understand them. The worlds he creates are an indirect critique on the one we live in, and corruption is the theme it is built on. I like his portrayals so much because they happen to coincide with my own discouraging view of the human kind. His characters are neither heroes nor villains, they are individuals driven by existential despair towards their uncertain and brutal ends. The brutality is both physical and mental. It is best expressed in his own words - In my films, I focus on pain and fear. The fear just before an act of violence and the pain after. This applies to the perpetrators as well as the victims.

His movies can be seen and interpreted literally, but I often find scenes which can be metaphorically interpreted, which, at the same time being graphic and stylistic enough to daze the audience, subtly bring out the existential theme of his world and blend it with the theme of his movie, often vengeance. The depth of his movies does not lie in the theme or the content; It lies in the outlook, the insight they offer.

If one were to evaluate him objectively, Old Boy should be his best work till date (I haven’t seen I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK), the one where he perfected his cinematic style finally, but somehow I find Sympathy for Mr Vengeance a bit closer to my heart.

While Mr Vengeance is far from Old Boy and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance in terms of the cinematic style and techniques he is famous for, he clearly anticipates himself stylistically in this grim and depressing tale.

Park Chan-wook has sometimes been criticised for the extremism in his movies, but in the end that is what sets him apart. There is an integrity to the way he creates his corrupt worlds. That is the key to understand his movies, to overcome the moral ambiguity of his characters and understand that being corrupt is not being evil.

It reminds me of what Damien had to say in The Final Conflict (Omen III) – Most people confuse evil with their own trivial lusts and perversions. Now, true evil is as pure as innocence. Chan-wook’s movies are not about what we in our illusion of grandeur consider evil, it’s about the trivial lusts and perversions that actually underline our lives.

But I couldn’t accuse myself of inartistry, simply because inartistic doesn’t have a noun form.

There is no entry for inartistry in the dictionary!

I don’t get it. Why not accept inartistry? There might be some pedantic grammatical reason for it after all, but my casual survey reveals nothing. It is only fair that the word should be accepted by the lexicographers, because there is no other word which expresses the idea with such precision and eloquence.

I have already used it in one of my earlier posts for the want of a better word (the first word of fifth paragraph), but nobody seemed to notice it.

It will be delightful if any of my readers could shed some more light on this matter.

I took a heavenly ride through silence
I knew the moment had arrived
For killing the past and coming back to life

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.

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.