Mahabharata and a Grain of Rice

One more remarkably beautiful day was spent lethargically, sitting in my cube today with no window nearby. Even Rahul ‘High’ Mahajan wud be having more fun in jail then me. And after today's flashback, the last rocking month of running my blog like Agnibaan (a daily Hindi newspaper, if you ever read it. It will print anything and everything but news) sounds like Hawaii. Philosophically speaking, there are multiple reasons for it.

The first and most important one would be the relaxed feeling I had after my realization of the fact that people would remember me, as Chandler says, only by my ass print on the office chair. Phew!! All the pressure building upon me was gone. The only thing for which I was sad was the fact that the wildest thing I ever did, riding my bike on Indore streets, was recently pushed to second place by my riding a roller coaster. And precisely at that “moment of ecstasy”, I uncovered the fact that my top-priority-concept-defying project needed some final help from a person for a major ‘so-called’ breakthrough. I was all excited and was sitting on my chair admiring the beautiful day and the joined-recently girl I just saw outside when I was told the truth, “We will get every help we need only when we get all the funding, which we’ll get once we make a breakthrough”. “This just like one of the Dilbert jokes”, I chuckled, “What a catch 22 situation. Joseph Heller would be thrilled having his concept concreted once more.”

And then occurred the next realization, while I was busy creating niece and nephews of all the bugs there are. I had spent hours cracking those i, j, k type variable and I hadn’t had a clue what the hell they are. The questions like “Why am I? Who am I? What’s the purpose of my visit to mother earth??” seemed like two plus two in front of them. I was almost asleep when I became particularly confidant that even fitting a nut to a bolt is more accurate technology then software. Then I remembered an incident happened way back.

This was the time when I went to my lovely old village after my first US trip and was in state of trance for being treated no less then Amitabh Bacchan. The people in village have all the time in the world for their chit chat and gossip and relaxation. Everyone there, who was as much as related to me as David Beckham to Dhanraj Pillai, flocked around me like I was some new three-legged-gorilla at zoo. And then they were joined by more who were passing by for some reason. I had seen these many people last time only when Mahabharata was being telecast and the only television was at Sarpanchji’s place. I felt like I’m naked and everyone was watching me instead of that Mahabharat episode.

After all the usual “Amreeka kaisa hota hai?” “wahan ped paudhe janwar alag hote hain kya?” “whan aadmi ke teen haath hote hain kya?” types questions, public went to the state of America’s silent admiration and began some serious talking among themselves. I started feeling less important and more relaxed. One of the things they do in village is fruitfully utilize all their time on most useless topics of value as much as I would care about a stray dog in Siberia.

Somebody had recently heard about whole Mahabharata being written on a grain of rice and he told everybody else about it. This grain, as Agnibaan would say, was found recently somewhere by some archeologist, and was believed to be thousands of years old. Every pair of eye present turned to me to ask the prodigal question.

“Can this compooter of yours write the whole Mahabharata on a grain of rice??”. I was dumbfounded. Instead of “How the hell in world would I know about it?” came my natural response, “No way could a computer could ever do that!!!!”. I only said that because I knew the other one would make me sound stupid and I was being treated like I'm Einstein. This is like Arjun Singh answering “Yes, 30% quota for OBC would fix everything!!”, when asked a question about making our rockets better.

After all the computer thing being declared overrated and the phenomenon that “even a thousand years back we were more advanced then Amreeka” being established, everyone seemed so proud of India that even I felt patriotic. I even started thinking about quitting my job and joining some manufacturing plant and get the position of a person in charge of all the nuts and bolts.

Then I thought about this email being forwarded to me somewhere in past –
“We keep our back to the future, look to the past, and piss on our present”.

But they remained proud for such a long time that they didn’t even thought about leaving the compooters and amreeka alone. They must not be having anything better to do.

Now after these many manifold self-realizations, as you might be speculating, I didn’t go running off the streets questioning me and my car’s existence but decided to wake up and established that its time to leave. After full day of tough sleep in chair with dustbin used as a foot rest and pretend-to-be-intelligent if somebody comes over and always keeping a notepad in hand to make people think I’m going to a meeting, I was overjoyed that it was time to leave ;). May be someday I’ll write a software that can write the whole Mahabharata on a rice grain and there’ll be more then my ass-print to remember me with ;)).