The Sequel

Woke up to find the plan gone wrong
The best-laid plans go oft awry
You thought of it as your swan-song
But you forgot
That there are two paths you can go by

Morning. That’s the word for the time of the day when you wake up. Although in this part of the world, that’s all it is – a word. He isn’t even sure if it is indeed morning or just some unearthly hour he has woken up at. The feeling is eerie, surreal, all that jazz, but not in a good way. He hasn’t seen bright sunshine for more than six months now. It’s obvious to him that time is a lie.

Why is it so cold? He tries to get out of bed and look outside but his legs seem to have gone numb. He can still feel the cold in his feet though. He can’t remember the time he went to sleep. His last distinct memory is of his friends playing the game of ‘telephone’ with two tin cans and a piece of wire. Not really his friends, actually just two people whom he can’t exactly recall right now, but whatever he can recall, it’s not very pleasant. Why were they playing the stupid game? They were right next to each other and could hear each other anyway. But he’s not worried about it, just curious. There are other things to be worried about. Like why is it so cold?

It’s been cold since that night. It just won’t end. No one is around. No one has been around for a long time. He tries to speak but he has this weird taste in his mouth and he’s afraid it will escape into the air if he opens his mouth. It’s not a good taste, but it’s the only ‘feeling’ he has right now, and he doesn’t want to lose it. Well, other than the cold of course. Also, there is no one around to speak to, so that’s there.

The ice, the loneliness. There’s so much of both.

It’s sad. It seems sad. He can’t remember much, but it’s still sad.
Seasonal affective disorder (SAD) is a type of depressive disorder that occurs in the winter when daylight hours are short. It is believed that the body's production of melatonin, which is produced at higher levels in the dark, plays a major part in the onset of SAD and that many sufferers respond well to bright light therapy, also known as phototherapy.
When life was around, it made him sad.

He was promised hell would be hot and fiery. What was that someone told him once? Oh yea, promises are meant to be broken. He knew it already obviously, just like he knew that cleanliness is next to godliness, love is blind, everything happens for a reason, life is a lemon (also a play, unfair, and many other things), shining sun is conducive to hay production and should be utilized for the same while it is still around, too many cooks spoil the broth, a friend with weed is a friend indeed (need, weed, what’s the difference?), a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.
Well, the difference he discovered was that this one applied to God too. The least he could expect from the giver of morals was to stick to a promise. That of a burning hell.

Why can’t he find his feet? Oh there they are, but why are they yellow and misshapen? Must be the cold, he thinks. And what’s wrong with his hands? He can’t feel his fingers. He tries hard to see. He has no fingers, just hands shaped like flaps. Flap, flap, he flaps them against his sides.
They seem like wings but he can’t fly.

Scuttling across the floors of silent seas, isn’t that what he asked for? Well, at least one part of one promise was kept.

Elementary penguin singing Hare Krishna
Man you’ve been a naughty boy; you let your face grow long

Epilogue
“Hey!”
“Wha…what?”
“What happened? Were you daydreaming again?”
“Uh…no I was just trying to work out the approach to this project. I guess I got a little lost. I’m sorry.”
He heaves a sigh, not exactly of relief, but maybe just because the dream was so overwhelming. He still can’t get over it, and he is still sure that he really had died and was reborn as a penguin somewhere in the Antarctic seas. It’s clear to him that time is a lie, that within each moment is another moment.
His manager is sitting next to him and talking over the phone to another manager, who is sitting in front of him. He can hear them both, and he is pretty sure, so can they. He is surrounded by people, but there’s no one around, and it has been this way for a long time.

Woke up to find the world turned blue
The stinging rain has made it blind
But that is not what bothers you
You just miss
Laying supine in the sunshine

Dear Mr. Adams,

I want to thank you. There are plenty of reasons. I'm going to list them below in a concise editorial style so that you may be able to gather the key takeaways with minimal effort and without expending too much of your mental faculty or bandwidth. Oh by the way, only recently I discovered that 'bandwidth' is the corporate buzzword for 'time'. It was by far the biggest shock of my corporate experience, because I don't remember reading it in any of the many Dilbert books I have wasted my bandwidth on.

Let me introduce myself before getting into all the comically misleading remarks regarding your influence on my life, wherein I'll try to disguise my sycophancy as sarcasm, or maybe its the other way round. I'm an IIT graduate. Guess I'll give you some time to let that sink in. I know you're particularly fond of our species. I passed out of the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur in June 2007 and am currently employed with.....well that's not important. What that actually means is that the job isn't good enough for an IITian, going by your portrayal of our kind (you know what I mean, don't you? I'm not exactly the heating-teacups-through-mental-radiations kind). I started reading your comic strip sometime during my preparation for the IIT entrance exam. At that time it was on and off, mostly during the times when I flipped through newspapers pretending to be interested in the business section. It was however during my second or third year in IIT that I really got into it. I borrowed The Dilbert Principle from somebody and went through it like a diamond-edged blade goes through a cobweb.That is to say that I got through it really fast but got badly entangled in the process, and never really got through it.

• I'd like to thank you for inhibiting my ability to quote appropriate and socially acceptable analogies.

It wasn't really the right time to get introduced to the absurdities of the corporate world, and it would be safe to say that you played a major role in screwing up my career by making me aware of the fact that everyone is an idiot.

• I'd like to thank you for introducing me, alongwith an entire generation, to the stupidity of the world at a time when I actually should have been looking forward to the excitement of professional life.

I mean, by my final year in college I was already aware of all the corporate buzzwords which ideally I should have known by experience, the way you did. While we still share the occasional smug smile whenever we hear terms like 'team player', 'key takeaways', 'quality control' etc., it's hardly the same as being bombarded with those unexpectedly.

But then, a lot of my friends had read the book, and apparently weren't so drastically affected by it. Probably because I then made the mistake of also reading The Dilbert Future. Yes, I found the last chapter to be heavily self-indulgent, much like most of the other readers, but somehow it attracted me. So it would also be safe to say that you are the only one responsible for making me the self-indulgent prick that I have become now.

• I'd like to thank you for making me believe that my opinion actually matters and that one day people might pay to read it.

But my transition wasn't complete till I read God's Debris. I could never have imagined that such an ignorant piece of fiction could drive me towards serious philosophy. Well, I read it at the same time as I was doing a course on 'Philosophical problems'. In the middle of all the skeptic Western thought about the origins of Life, the Universe and Everything (at this moment, I'd also like to thank the 'other' Mr. Adams on the other side of the Atlantic), came your heavily Eastern-thought-influenced commentary on essentially the same stuff. The thing that continues to surprise me is that despite me being a science student and all, and a serious one at that (this would be a good time to remind you that I'm an IIT graduate), the first time I actually became genuinely interested in the general theory of relativity was after reading God's Debris. It was the only reason I picked up Brian Greene's Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time and the Texture of Reality, or Albert Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus, and finally, Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not a Christian.

Of course, certain other things followed logically. For one, I became an atheist. This is actually more surprising than you would imagine, because I'm a Hindu, and you have borrowed heavily from a certain Indian philosophical school called Advaita Vedanta in writing God's Debris. It would seem that your crusade against religion primarily stems from, and is targeted at, Semitic or Abrahamic religions. However, much as Eastern philosophy may fascinate you, it's not all that different. Yes, it gives you more space and freedom to believe what you want. There are even certain schools within Hinduism that do not believe in a supernatural being. The Carvaka school for instance, propounds materialism of the kind that even the Western world may find extreme.

But in the end, it all still boils down to believing in something, whether it is a Being or a scripture, just for the heck of it. I've read the Bhagvad Gita in parts and some portions are definitely soothing and uplifting. But then again, there's this whole theme of surrender-yourself-to-me-or-you-are-doomed-for-eternity that turns me off. Yes, it's there in Hinduism too. It is less forced and a lot more subtle. The chief difference is in the concept of eternal damnation. While semitic religions condemn a person to burn in hell for his/her sins, Hinduism broadly thinks of life itself as the eternal damnation. Only the all-powerful force - the Gita refers to it as Lord Krishna - can liberate you from the endless cycle of birth and death. Also, the whole concept of liberating others from ignorance is absent at the core of Indian philosophy and religion. Well, at least it used to be.

Anyway, I agree with a lot of stuff in God's Debris. But it starts getting murky with your denial of evolution. Oh yea, I forgot, I can't derive your beliefes from your fiction. Those are not really your opinions, right? That was a good one. Then towards the later chapters, I think around Fighting God, it starts more and more to feel like a religious scripture. And expectedly, I start getting turned off. I guess the first few chapters influenced me so much that by the middle of the book I had already become convinced about the pointlessness of existence.

• I'd like to thank you for making me an unmotivated loser who is totally convinced that nothing really matters, but still has to go around pretending as if it does, lest his parents feel guilty for his shortcomings.

Coming back from pseudo-philosphical musings to the normal, humorously absurd professional experiences, I am currently reading a book called Something Happened by Joseph Heller (better known 'that Catch-22 guy'). Have you read it? In case you haven't, I strongly suggest that you do. The style is more or less the same as Catch-22, and the content is essentially the same as most Dilbert books. But its not humourous anymore. It's kind of scary.

• I'd like to thank you for permanently ruining my taste in books. I would have been reading The Alchemist and other such motivational stuff if it wasn't for you.

Best Regards,

Avichal Chaturvedi

P.S. You may notice the writing style whereby I apparently curse myself for being a loser and generally indulge in self-pity, while actually I try to show off my wit and limited knowledge of pseudo-intellectual topics like religion and philosophy (not to mention general relativity). Even this postscript is part of that same strategy. Yup, Thanks for this too.

Virtual Insanity

"Hey, I'm in pain."
"You wanna see pain, swing by First Methodists Tuesday night. See the guys with testicular cancer. That's pain."

He switches off the movie, or puts the book down, or maybe just opens his eyes. At this point, all that matters is the thought and not the medium that brought it to him. He thinks, thinks, thinks, is he really in pain? Or is he just too self-obsessed to notice anything else but his own problems, which can be described as insignificant at best and downright stupid at better than best. Does he have testicular cancer? Does he even know a loved one who has cancer? Has he ever lost a limb? Does he have any idea what it means to be physically inadequate?

But fuck all that. Does everyone have to live the exact same life to feel genuine pain?

"Well, I mean isn't everything autobiographical? We all see the world through our own tiny keyhole, right? I mean, I always think of Thomas Wolfe, you know, if you've ever seen that little one page note to the reader in the front of Look Homeward, Angel. You know what I'm talking about? Anyway, he says that we are the sum of the moments of our lives, and that anyone who sits down to write, is gonna use the clay of their own lives. You can't avoid that.

So when I look at my own life, you know, I have to admit, right....that I've....I've never been around a bunch of guns, or violence. You know, not really. No political intrigue....or helicopter crash, right? But my life, from my own point of view, has been full of drama, right?

And so, I thought that if I could write a book that...that could capture what it's like to really meet somebody. I mean the most exciting thing that has happened to me, is to really meet somebody, you know, make that connection. And if I could....make that valuable, you know, to capture that, that would be the attempt or....

Did I answer your question?"

He destroys the TV screen (what's a better word for "destroying" a TV screen? He can't remember. Lately, he's not been so good at remembering stuff, the one thing he used to be proud of. It would be safe to say he's a total loser now. Not safe for him, though. If he can't be his own, he'd feel better dead). Or maybe he just opens his eyes again.

"There's no chance for us, it's all decided for us
This world has only one sweet moment set aside for us
Who wants to live forever?"

He burns the speakers and bangs his head against the music player. Or maybe, much to the chagrine of the readers, he just opens his fucking eyes again.

"When I grow up I want to be a little boy"

He bites into the book and tears off the pages with his teeth. He really does do it this time. He chews and feels his saliva making the paper into a lump. He gets a weird feeling, as if he is chewing the insides of his own mouth. The soft, red insides of his cheeks. He is reluctant to admit that he likes the feeling. Then another weird feeling, deja vu. He has felt this before. How weird is it exactly to have a weird feeling about a weird feeling?

Was he dreaming in his sleep or sleeping in his dream? Not that it matters. He wants to be Schroedinger's cat, make life and death a question of probabilistic equations.
He killed himself yesterday, but he is still awake.

He is standing in the shadows, his soul is hanging loose
He wants to shake it off, what he has long abused

It's okay, he just had a bad day....