Executive Summary
This is a semi-double post sorta, kinda. Part I is the Juvenile what-ddddid-I-do-last-night update nobody cares about and part Deux is a more "sheeriyash" thang that (also) nobody cares about. But that is what I do, I seek not to entertain. Go figure!
Part 1: Je Suis Malade
The other-side are coming on Monday. So I had to work all day Saturday to get things ready. In case anyone thinks that all I do is party and look after this blog (hmm.. why would you think that?), I do have a real job that I pay attention to once in a while:-)
The South African landed here from Dublin for the weekend. So the young and old, mostly led by the young from an American company that shall go unnamed, got dragged into Platinum Club. I needed that like I needed a hole in the head. After all the lining up and obligatory stares from the bouncers, the lively group descended in, got bored and split up, and a few of us ended up in another place called Unik in Carouge. Five thousand steps up, all black paint on the floor sort of thing, and with the hostess that looked like she had an eventful career entertaining men for money. Anyway, I ended up playing the spoiler babysitter preventing the yungunes from picking up a glow-boy or two (so referred for the white on white look that so GLOHS in the dark). I am sure they were none too pleased. Got home at four and slept, 400 SWF poorer and with a pounding headache.
South African went back to Dublin this morning. He is in worse shape.
The remorse has set in. I am not proud of it. Won't do it for another month at least. Those who are about to lecture me on responsibility (you know who you are), please take a ticket and get in line. Those preferring to write, I have left a waste basket outside for your convinience.
Part 2: Now for something completely different
It was a Midwestern college town. A faint resignation remained as the status quo between the townies and the gownies. You got off the exit and drive through cornfields and without much pomp of ceremony, the town gradually appeared in front of you. The main street was a collection of every chain fast-food joint that you can think of interspersed with a video store here and a bank there. There was an obligatory Chinese restaurant and a funeral home, side by side; I don’t like Chinese food that much but I don't think the funeral home’s business did not depend on the food at the restaurant.
It got bitterly cold in winter. The rumor was that if you took a piss outside, the stream will freeze as soon as it touched the ground. (Not true but good for repeating among generations of students.) Except for Cyrus, who belonged to the Polar Bears club and wore shorts and tees even in the dead of winter, everyone else actually looked like a polar bear with layers and layers of clothing. I still fondly remember my black winter coat that served me so faithfully through those years with pockets so large that they comfortably could handle the gloves and mittens, a scarf, one or two small-sized goats and a copy of the dictionary. Getting into a locked building was an acrobatic skill we had to practice with only a precious minute before your extremities would freeze and hurt after you remove the gloves. So the fluid motion of retrieving the key, removing the gloves, inserting the key into the cold metal keyhole and turning it before your hands broke off had to be perfectly practiced. Especially at two in the morning, after a long, solitary walk from the lab.
I had many roommates over the years, the tai-chi expert from rural China, the Turkish man with a voracious libido whose nocturnal proclivities next room made sleeping at night quite difficult, a very quiet American, a jealous-pervert from Hyderabad who resented the more successful perverts and the tortured Marwari with a Japanese girlfriend who went home to get engaged to a girl of his parents’ liking abandoning all contacts with his family and the fiancée upon his return are some I remember. The pervert also used to entertain two young pretty Jehovah’s witnesses week after week in “Bible study” in the hopes that someday he will at least get to hold their hands. That was a mutually lost cause for them, with neither side benefiting. (As an aside, this same gentleman once went to a girl and said thus: You sleep with your boyfriend. I think I am just as good if not better. so you should sleep with me also. Of course, he managed this conversation after tricking the girl to go on a long drive, so she had no choice to endure the really uncomfortable drive back with him to town.)
All this banality was important to our lives because there was no other way to connect to the worlds we have left behind. No cheap ways in any case, and considering we were poor students on a shoestring budget, our calls home were weekly and lasted not much beyond the obligatory 20 minutes. But connecting is not just knowing that nobody is sick or a cousin had a baby. Connecting is really staying in touch, being part of people’s lives, knowing what made them happy or sad. We did not have that opportunity, so the vacuum was occupied by the tortured banality of small-town existence.
This was Seventeen years ago, that is to say not so long ago. Before the “World Wide Web” changed all that. I say WWW and not Internet because Internet did exist. Internet was the jumbled black hole that carried email, facilitated ftp, enabled “talk”, “finger”, “ping”, “Archie”, “veronica” and was accessible only to a few. I remember being able to see most people who were connected to the Internet from India by fingering the few sites that supported Internet connectivity. There was in fact only one or two places in Calcutta that were directly on the Internet and I cannot for the life of me remember them. I missed India terribly and there was no way to get any news from India unless it came though those awful weekly Indian papers published from New York. When a fairly new company called Sprint introduced $1.40 a minute as a cheap deal to call India we were thrilled considering that the regular rate was over Three dollars. Needless to say, I spent those years completely cut off from India when India suddenly went from the sleepy socialist country to join the open economy.
The most interesting thing is that if you went to this sleepy town today, it is still recognizable. I am sure the local video store is now part of Blockbuster, there IS a Wal-Mart that has killed off more mom&pop stores, and may be somewhere a new chain restaurant has opened. A few new buildings perhaps, the boundaries of the city have extended farther into the cornfields. On the other hand, Internet (now used in the current sense) has transformed the connectivity and communication. I know what my cousins did this morning by just signing on to messenger or by calling them on their cell phones. Everyone is connected all the time. My family, with footprint in India, Singapore, USA, Switzerland, Turkey, Malawi, UAE, Canada and Thailand, is more or less closely-knit because nobody is too difficult to reach. And much of that reach is free of cost. I sometimes wonder how I got by through those years without any of this.
After the Physics revolution and Biology revolution came the information revolution. I am so glad I lived through that period of intense growth and change. I wonder what the future generations would write and think about that time when finally the whole world spontaneously came together and connected its knowledge through seemingly pointless connections and complex protocols.
Now if they could come up with a way of inserting a key into the keyhole in the dead of the winter without breaking off the fingers, we will have something.
