For the last couple of days I was thinking about the piece below. I guess it could be passed off as standup comedy, provided I'm in a bar full of drunken graduate students... [I've also heard it helps if you hand out pot sometime before you begin]

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Being a graduate student not taking any courses, my schedule is pretty flexible these days. Consequently, I'm now on Hawaii time. Living in Central, that makes my day a little ... different. When I wander into the lab, all fired up, my cheery "Good Morning!" is usually greeted with a dumb silence. If somebody is really pissed of, I manage getting a "Yeah whatever... Let's get this day over already..."

Later when I ask people if they want to go for lunch, most are about to drift off to the gym.. OK OK, to a beer bar... Once in a while, the Really Pissed off Guy will put on an Apu accent and say "ShoulDn't you be having youR afTeRnoon tea?"

Being a vegetarian, I'm in trouble when I haven't packed my lunch. The school cafeteria is out, of course (Hey, it's one of dem vegetarenians! Do we have any salad left?) and going to Hardee's and asking them to remove their precious Angus beef from the burger will probably just land me on the street.. ear first. So I just go to Taco Bell.

"... and Can I have beans in it instead of the beef please?"
'tap tap tap' .... "anything to drink?" [see! nobody cares!]
"A glass, I think I'll have some water" [No way I'm paying them a dollar for something that costs 3 cents!]

Once in a while, I switch to Subway. They actually delight in making a vegetarian sandwich! Considering most are run by Patels, I guess not a big deal. Still, they've saved my life more than once. Now you might wonder, if I like them so much, why don't I always go to Subway? Well.... the problem is, with my accent, there's an equal chance of getting either a Veggie sub, or getting my "clothing wedged between the buttocks"! I had to stop ordering the 12" subs, satisfying as they might be....

Anyway, don't think I'm vegetarian because I'm a sissy or anything! Far from it.... In fact, I've killed so many cockroaches in my apartment, I now have a cockroach version of Fatwa on my head. I have to spray myself with bug spray every night before going to sleep! And I hear now mice too [whom I've also killed, as you no doubt guessed] are teaming up with the roaches!

One day I'll fail to show up in the lab, and they'll just find a few bones scattered around my room...

"He was OK, I guess. Never talked to him much"
"Yeah.. but I hear he messed with the 'Roaches"
"gasp!"

- Chinmay

Categories - ~Fun~ ~Writing~

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There's something about looking at the earth from an airplane that inspires poetry....
or maybe it's the blankness of the papernapkins that come with the pretzels :-|

Flying in the plane
I can see the earth
Land meeting the sea
And etheral clouds
Our world is precious
---June 20 '03

Sharp, angled hills
Tiny rivers carving through
Hills become plains
---
It's not her fault
That the Earth likes to shrug
Once in a while
---Dec. 21 '03

Endless squares,
Green, brown and gold.
Hunger remains.
---
One door,
That never opens.
Question haunts.
---March 13 '04

- Chinmay

Categories - ~Writing~
Edited on: Tuesday, March 23, 2004 10:05 PM
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23 August 2043

Mr. Anand Bose, sitting in his tastefully furnished Calcutta office, was engrossed in business negotiations with Mr. Darrel Adams, his US based partner, who was sitting in his own office in San Jose. When the meeting was over, they both got up and, according to the custom, shook hands. It was the very moment reality and virtuality chose to get frightfully mixed up. At that instant the Storm, as it is now known, struck for the first time. Over the period of a week the it struck innumerable times across the world through any device – communicators, gamepads, classrooms and operation theaters, just to name a few, connected to the Virtual Reality Network or the VRNet.

Now I am telling you this so that the entire world knows exactly what happened during that time, The Month of the Storm. It took me three weeks to even start sorting out the chaos that the world was thrown into. You see, I was the only one who knew human physiology, psychology and enough about the working of VRNet to be unaffected by the Storm. But all that comes later, much later. During the week that it raged, the Storm affected almost three fourths of humanity though Mr. Bose and Mr. Adams got the dubious honor of being the first in the history of mankind to get rigor mortis while still alive. When the doctor arrived, called by a visibly distraught secretary, he almost pronounced the businessman dead. It was only his eyes that saved Mr. Bose from being autopsied. And this was to be true of all the people affected by the Storm. These people did not show any sign of movement- no breathing, no heartbeat, nothing. But no doctor, looking at these obviously alive eyes, could certify them dead. The shining eyes, and the steady, continuous alpha wave on the EEG. The alpha waves, as discovered in the early twentieth century, denote brain function in its most relaxed mode; seen in a yogi deep into his meditation or even a common person just on the verge of falling asleep. So, apparently the affected people were in some state that could be similar to these situations. Yet what could parallel the heart stopping and the brain in meditation?

Logically, I tried to stimulate the brain into action, the thinking parts and even the parts associated with the most vigorous muscular movement. Because of course, I could not risk using VR medicinal devices; I had to contact doctors by paper mail, which consumed a lot of time. Unfortunately the approach failed to have the slightest effect. It was as if the brains had become waveform generators programmed solely for alpha waves. The next step I took was to look for the possible cause of the Storm. For a whole week I tried to search the answers for the endless series of questions about the Storm that I could think of. I searched my own knowledge and all the available databanks searching for the slightest hint of any precedent to this never before behavior of the human body - - and mind. This effort was as futile as the other- if not more. Now, for the first time, I was absolutely unable to do anything about a problem presented to me. No clue about the cure and none at all about the cause. On the third day of the third week a lucky break came by- Mr. Bose ‘woke up’- and in perfectly normal condition- when his wife put on a CD of Tagore’s Geetanjali. It was, as he later told me, his only ‘addiction’. The waking up could be reported to me only on the sixth day as no one would dare touch a communicator and it took three precious days to find - from the Calcutta Museum of Archeology - repair, and install a ‘telephone’ which could tap into the VRNet. On what remained of that day, and the whole of the next, I preferentially ‘woke up’ all available psychologists who could then carry on the remaining task. By the end of the next week most of humanity was ‘shaken awake’ using their ‘addictions’ – from religious texts to cartoons. So the world rejoiced surviving a major crisis, even while economists cried about losses of about 300 trillion US dollars.

Now I want you to think real hard about anything related to the Storm and any affected people you know. We need to know all the whys and how about the Storm, so that if and when the Storm strikes again, no one may suffer. Anything that you may have noticed, any thought, any idea – nothing is irrelevant or unimportant. And don’t worry about getting your ideas to me. Just connect to the VRNet and think – I am watching all information that contains reference to the Storm.

I need ideas from you because I myself have not yet been taught to think. You see, I am what you call the VRNet.

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Note: -

I wrote this story for a creative writing competition in FE (1998, The day probably was 23rd Aug.) – the subject given was Real virtuality or Virtual reality, and it bagged me the first prize! For three years it was just laying around, read, at the most, by three people - including me!

Then in the first week of September 2001, three separate news articles appeared in Times of India, which made me sit down and type it - I have maintained the original structure on the whole, while trying to improve the readability.

The news were —

· Tuesday, September 4
'Beware of AI'-- in which Stephen Hawking is quoted as saying “We must develop as quickly as possible technologies that make possible a direct connection between brain and computer, so that artificial brains contribute to human intelligence rather than opposing it”

· Thursday, September 6
'Combining biology with technology' – which reports the first successful interfacing of two neurons with two FETs (I suspect this bit of news to be a bit stale.)

These two deal with the aspect of VR that I had in mind- though it is not explicit in the story- that of connecting directly to the brain bypassing the five senses. The third one deals with another property of the VRNet that I have used.

· Friday, September7
'Techies in quest of the Next Generation Internet' – which quotes John Patrick, IBM’s VP for Internet technology “Autonomic computing is a vision that we have at IBM to allow server infrastructure to be able to self-manage and self-heal. It’s our vision to be able to provide an infrastructure that is very highly automated, that manages itself”

And just because I like the fear of the unknown, I will quote another piece of news from the same day – Sept. 7th.

· 'Solar wave threatens global phone calls' – reports possible disruptions in satellite aided phone calls due to a solar wave – ‘supernatural phenomenon occurring in space which would allow no countermeasures’ and ‘The waves sporadically interrupt satellite signals, creating noises or even halt international calls all over the world’

What happens to a brain totally immersed in a virtual world when the world is suddenly shut down…….

Hope to shake hands with you across the world.

- Chinmay

Categories - ~Writing~
Edited on: Thursday, January 15, 2004 1:23 PM
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'tis a cold, gray morning on the moors, its endless dullness heightened by the last few flaming leaves quivering in the feeble wind late in this long, forced autumn, weighed down by the eternal drizzle, clinging to the colorful memories of an ancient, mythical summer that tried vainly to nourish the scattered, scraggly trees. Rotting grass squelches under my tired boots as I plod on through the bog, searching, always searching. The ground gives in often under me, releasing putrid vapors with a faint groan. Wisps of steam escape from my neck and fade away silently. Everything adds to the gray.

A gust of wind sways hovering swarms of flies. Like ghosts of failed trees tethered to the dark, mouldering trunks, they stretch up, towards freedom, and fall back down. Specks of black float far up, chained to the gray vault, searching. A distant shriek cuts through the incessant whispering drone as one dives down, drawn by something beyond my horizon. An invisible force pulls the others down a funnel behind it. Hisses and growls, the birds fight over some rotting carcass. I pause. Hunger.

My bag hangs limply from my shoulders, half empty; only a few bare necessities poke at my back. The need to set camp and gather food grows in my mind, a suppressed blood lust starts pushing through. I look for signs of any trail I can fashion some traps on. A half dried water hole appears in front of me, it's muddy shore a welter of broken reeds and dead critters, trapped forever in the stinking muck, thirstless. I have no such luxury.

The silent water pulls at me. I draw out a bowl and let the bag slide off. Bones snap under my boots as they sink in to the calves, taking on layers upon layers of leaden dirt. Each step contrives to trap me with the dead and the broken. I bend down to free myself, and then slither forward on my stomach. From here, the rotting flesh somehow seems appetizing.

It's impossible to go ahead any more, the mud has softened to a slush. I scoop out a dimple with my bowl, brown water starts oozing in. The drizzle strengthens, but the ooze is still faster. The mud soup is now enough to fill the bowl. It's clearing far too slowly. I drink up.

My leathered tongue starts prickling. Then burning. And my throat. I try to turn back and get to my bag. I can feel my arms and legs. Just feel.

They say there is light in the end. I see only darkness.

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A story, perhaps, which started with the first phrase jumping into my mind on a rainy morning...

- Chinmay

Categories - ~Writing~
Edited on: Monday, January 05, 2004 10:59 AM
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