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.
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