Of Suicide:And how Immortal Omniscient Omnipotent Humane Universal Anthropomorphic Beings make me sick

Disclaimer: This is a very long post.

Enthusiastic people are a genuine puzzlement for me. Especially the ones who are all fired up about all things trite and blunderful!

"Oh! It's a great morning, it's going to be a great day!"

Many a cheerful induhviduals have started out their days saying this and most have proceeded to get their asses fucked through the course of the entire day. However, such grave misfortune deters not the cheerfulness of true optimists, and they end their day with this little gem of self-motivation:

"I should still be positive and thank God! Things could have been worse!"

Oh really? Why thats a fucking revealation! Here's another revealation for you:
Things can always be worse!
Just think about the shittiest thing that has ever happened to you, and I can assure you you'll be able to think of something shittier that could have happened!

Here's a possible response to my beautifully articulated argument:
But that's what i'm saying. Since things can always be worse, you should be cheerful and thankful all the time for the fact that they're not!

I have just one thing to say in response to this. Just try imagining for a moment how stupid you look being thankful about all the crap that's happening to you!Oh, a bird shit on my face,thank God elephants don't fly!

The answer, according to me, is not in being paranoid about an uncertain and possibly shitty future, as hardcore pessimists would argue. It's about being aware of the fact that shit can and probably will happen, and passively resigning yourself to it. It's about being adequately mirthful or sullen about the current situation, as the case may be, and not expecting anything from the future.

There is a possible pitfall though, and I know this because it has occurred to me. You may become so passive about what life has to offer that you may actually start looking forward to death, or something equally drastic, just to break the monotony. Having observed the lives of a gazillion people around me, I'm now aware of a certain set of courses that life is bound to take.
The problem is, I'm not motivated one way or the other. I'm not looking forward to anything. Good job, good marriage, good children, death! Bad job, bad marriage, bad children, death! Just fill in a few details and replace good with bad here and there and you can broadly chalk out the stages in the life of most of the people you know. The outcome is always the same,and it's the only certainty. Also, what happens after death is probably the only genuine uncertainty in life. From what I've seen, heard and read, I'm inclined to believe that nothing happens. This life is all there is.

Possible Motivation: There's just one life, you should make the most of it. It's your only opportunity after all!

Brilliant Rebuttal: There's just one life, does it even matter if you make the most of it? Do you think Alexander's victories will matter when the Earth itself has been consumed by the Sun?

Well maybe you will be relieved of all miseries after death, but what about those who love you? How can you make them suffer? Umm...once I'm dead, I don't really need to care for my loved ones, do I?

I'm currently reading The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus, and this post if quite obviously an indirect result of the same. The essay starts with an amazing line.

There is but one truly serious philisophical problem , and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest—whether or not individual choice must be safeguarded, whether abortion can be legislated—comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer.

The author then proceeds to illustrate the absurdity of life through the example of Sisyphus, a character in Greek mythology who was punished by the Gods to engage in the meaningless task of rolling a boulder up a hill over and over again for eternity. It's a brilliant analogy in the sense that the majority,if not all, of the human race lives equally meaningless lives. However, in the last chapter, Camus abruptly concludes that it is not a meaningless task after all, in fact Sisyphus shouldn't be searching for meaning at all. He should try to find motivation in the task that has been assigned to him, howsoever monotonous it may be. After an exciting start, the end seems rather forced when Camus concludes, Sisyphus is happy! To put it very simply, you're not supposed to be worried about the meaning of your actions, you have to learn to be cheerfully dumb. This singular argument effectively attempts to render most of philosophical thought inappropriate. Or as my nanaji likes to put it, "Philosophy is useless".

Thankfully, I also read another amazing book recently, The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time and the Texture of Reality by Brian Greene, an eminent physicist and one of the most prominents string theorists. It justifies the search for meaning in life by making it clear that Physics, and most other significant sciences, have emanated from Philosophy. If we had restricted ourselves to mundane tasks without ever worrying about how the physical world functions and how can we control it, we wouldn't have achieved much as a species. It's a great book, but it still doesn't answer the question. In fact, it renders me all the more skeptical of the fact that anything is worth anything.
Then again, to actually get it over with and end your time in the Sun requires possibly an even greater motivation than to live through it. When you've achieved a state of passivity, when most things don't motivate you, you don't look forward to life any more than you look forward to death, and vice versa.

If you can meet with Triumph and DisasterAnd treat those two impostors just the same;

- "If" by Rudyard Kipling

But the good thing is, death doesn't scare you anymore. That's probably one of the advantages of being an atheist. Not believing in a supreme-being-who-is-perfectly-conscious-that-he-is-a-supreme-being enables your actions to not be guided by an eternal fear of divine punishment. A lot of people have a lot of opinions about God, but maybe it's just due to my bias that I find the ones denying his existence a lot more logical and convincing than the ones advocating it.

I, for one, believe that God is no different from luck, and as a consequence, I also believe that you can only resign yourself to it and not influence it by praising it. There's no concept of justice in the divine order of rewards and punishment. It's all random. Just as there is good luck and bad luck, there can be good God and bad God. You can't do squat about it. so when you are cursing your luck, you are effectively cursing God. Guess that makes the believers mighty uncomfortable. I'm okay with it though,and I never miss an opportunity to actively curse God whenever something unfavourable happens to me. What may be even more perplexing for believers is that I'm considerably luckier than many of the people I know! Don't attempt to explain it, because there is no explanation. Some things that affect you are beyond your control, and praying doesn't help. There aren't many things I'm sure of, but one thing is for certain: If there is a God, He definitely doesn't understand the concept of justice. Either that or he's just plain malevolent. To quote Jim Carrey's character from Bruce Almighty,

God is a mean kid on an anthill with a magnifying glass.

Let me quote an excerpt from possibly the greatest book ever written, at least according to me. Millions have read the master piece, and they can feel a little smug about it because I'm not going to name it, at the risk of copyright infringement of course.

'I wonder what he did to deserve it', the warrant officer with a malaria and a mosquito bite on his ass lamented after Nurse Cramer had read her thermometer and discovered the soldier in white was dead.

'He went to war', the fighter pilot with the golden moustache surmised

'We all went to war', Dunbar countered

'That's what I mean', the warrant officer with the malaria continued, 'Why him? There just doesn't seem to be any logic to this system of rewards and punishment. Look at what happened to me. if I had gotten syphillis or a dose of clap for my 5 minutes of passion on the beach instead of this damned mosquito bite, I could see justice. But malaria? Malaria?Who can explain malaria as a consequence of fornication?' The warrant officer shook his head in numb astonishment.

'What about me?' Yossarian said, 'I stepped out of my tent in Marrakech one night to get a bar of candy and caught your dose of clap when that Wac I never even saw before kissed me into the bushes. All I really wanted was a bar of candy, but who could turn it down?'

'That sounds like my dose of clap all right', the warrant officer agreed. 'But I've still got somebody else's malaria. Just for once I'd like to see all these things sort of straightened out, with each person getting exactly what he deserves. It might give me some confidence in this universe.'

'I've got somebody else's 3,00,000 dollars', the dashing young fighter captain with the golden moustache admitted. 'I've been goofing off since the day I was born. I cheated my way through prep school and college, and just about all I've been doing ever since is shacking up with pretty girls who think I'd make a good husband. I've got no ambition at all. The only thing I want to do after the war is marry some girl who's got more money with I have and shack up with lots more pretty girls. The 3,00,000 bucks was left to me before I was born by a grandfather who made a fortune selling on an international scale. I know I don't deserve it, but I'll be damned if I give it back. I wonder who it really belongs to.'

'Maybe it belongs to my father', Dunbar conjectured. 'He spent a lifetime at hard work and never could make enough money to even send my sister and me through college. He's dead now, so you might as well keep it.'

'Now, if we can just find out who my malaria belongs to we'd be all set. It's not that I've got anything against malaria. I'd just as soon goldbrick with malaria as with anything else. It's only that I feel an injustice has been committed. Why should I have somebody else's malaria and you have my dose of clap?'

'I've got more than your dose of clap', Yossarian told him. 'I've got to keep flying combat missions because of that dose of yours until they kill me.'

'That makes it even worse. Where's the justice in that?'

'I had a friend named Clevinger two and a half weeks ago who used to see plenty of justice in it.'

'It's the highest kind of justice of all,' Clevinger had gloated, clapping his hands with a merry laugh. 'I can't help thinking of Hippolytus of Euripides, where the early licentiousness of Theseus is probably responsible for the asceticism of the son that helps bring about the tragedy that ruins them all. If nothing else, that episode with the Wac should teach you the evils of sexual immorality.'

'It teaches me the evil of candy.'

In my continuous search for a convincing argument regarding the existence of God, I've read and laughed at the Cosmological, Ontological, Teleological and Moral arguments among others. I recently came across one particularly amusing one. It's called Pascal's Wager. Yup, it is attributed to the same Blaise Pascal whom you may have read about while learning probability theory,or the mechanism of hydraulic presses. It is all the more disappointing coming from a supposed man of reason. Here's how it goes:

If there is a God, He is infinitely incomprehensible, since, having neither parts nor limits, He has no affinity to us. We are then incapable of knowing either what He is or if He is....
..."God is, or He is not." But to which side shall we incline? Reason can decide nothing here. There is an infinite chaos which separated us. A game is being played at the extremity of this infinite distance where heads or tails will turn up. What will you wager? According to reason, you can do neither the one thing nor the other; according to reason, you can defend neither of the propositions.
Do not, then, reprove for error those who have made a choice; for you know nothing about it. "No, but I blame them for having made, not this choice, but a choice; for again both he who chooses heads and he who chooses tails are equally at fault, they are both in the wrong. The true course is not to wager at all."
Yes; but you must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked. Which will you choose then? Let us see. Since you must choose, let us see which interests you least. You have two things to lose, the true and the good; and two things to stake, your reason and your will, your knowledge and your happiness; and your nature has two things to shun, error and misery. Your reason is no more shocked in choosing one rather than the other, since you must of necessity choose. This is one point settled. But your happiness? Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is. "That is very fine. Yes, I must wager; but I may perhaps wager too much." Let us see. Since there is an equal risk of gain and of loss, if you had only to gain two lives, instead of one, you might still wager. But if there were three lives to gain, you would have to play (since you are under the necessity of playing), and you would be imprudent, when you are forced to play, not to chance your life to gain three at a game where there is an equal risk of loss and gain. But there is an eternity of life and happiness. And this being so, if there were an infinity of chances, of which one only would be for you, you would still be right in wagering one to win two, and you would act stupidly, being obliged to play, by refusing to stake one life against three at a game in which out of an infinity of chances there is one for you, if there were an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain. But there is here an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain, a chance of gain against a finite number of chances of loss, and what you stake is finite.

Pascal decided to apply the logic of expected value to his beliefs about God. While the theory makes a lot of sense in probability and game theory, the man got a bit too carried away by it I guess. Many have offered plausible criticisms of the argument, and I especially like the one offered by Richard Dawkins. You can read about it on Wikipedia if you want, but I'm going to offer my own rebuttal here.

At first glance, the argument makes a lot of sense. What can you possibly lose by believing in God? Other than your sanity of course. Anyway, if the stakes are so high, and God truly is such a retarded egomaniac that he'll punish you for eternity if you don't praise him, surely he's also sensitive about what system of belief you follow. I mean if you're not a Christian, and the Christian belief is in fact right, you're screwed just as bad as an atheist. The same goes for all religions.

I believe in a supreme being but I didn't know that Islam was the true path. I'm sorry!

Too bad, motherfucker! You're toast!

It's especially confusing for a Hindu. There are millions of Gods and conflicting sects within Hinduism. What if Shiva punishes the Vaishnavas, or the other way round?

As is clear to me now after reading more about Pascal ol'fellow, he actually wanted to convince non-Christians to convert to Christianity when he came up with this little gem of his.

I guess I just miss my friends.
Alternatively, maybe I just need to get laid.

Corporate Lessons - Chapter 3: "Your input is very important to us! Koi shak?" "Oh fuck!"

Disclaimer: The title is rather obviously inspired from His Holiness Himesh Reshammiya's chartbusting titty-shakin-ass-kickin track "I love you O Sayonee". Please don't sue me O Lord!

Somebody is spreading rumours about me in the office and I've gotta find out who it is before the company closes down! If your pea-sized excuse for a brain finds it hard to make the connection, let me make it easier for you by explaining the kind of rumours doing the rounds. Apparently I'm being projected as a hard and efficient worker who should be staffed on all important projects! At least this is what a very senior employee said in our first meeting for a very important project.

"I have been told that you guys are the best resources available for this project"

And almost instantaneously, I lost all respect for the project.

As if this wasn't enough, I was staffed along with another new joinee to compile one of the most important reports regarding the project. At least that is what they told us! But I kept noticing signs to the contrary. Most of the reports were to be sent to the country head for QC (That's Quality Check, you uninitiated assholes!)
Ours wasn't one of them.
Heck, nobody even bothered to ask us about the progress till the very last minute!

But of course, every other day we were routinely warned that the work is very important and we simply can't afford to screw it up! Then help us not to, for fuck's sake!

Then, after about a week of scrambling our apparently-very-capable-brains, we were informed in a group meeting that a lot of research has already been performed in the particular sector and all we have to really do is sift through the previous reports and look for the relevant material!

So much for 'best resources available'!

I believe the conversation went something like this during the staffing exercise:

"This is a very important project"

"You couldn't be more right, our asses are in danger!"

"I wouldn't want to put your sweet ass in danger!"

"Aww,come 'ere you..."

(half an hour later)

"Phew, nice fucking eh?"

"I'll say"

"Hey, what about the staffing?"

"Oh we've already done that, I just called this meeting to... y'know"

"Aww, come 'ere you...."

(another half hour later)

"Bascially there's just this one sector where we already have all the material but we just have to repackage it to fool our hapless client into giving us more money."

"Hmm...looks like the kind of work that some new joinees may find interesting."

"Hey that's a great idea! Ooh I love your ideas, come 'ere you..."

"Easy babe, it may be a while before I can get it up again!"

"Oh sorry dahling!"

"Anyway, have you noticed any particularly clueless ones in the recent lot?"

"Yea I think there are many of that kind. Anyone who joins this company is clueless anyway"

"Ok put them on this and don't forget to put undue pressure on their sorry asses by overemphasizing the importance of the project"

"Oh you're so naughty! Come 'ere you...."

"Gawd did you descend from rabbits? Bloody nymph!"

What was I talking about?

Corporate Lessons - Chapter 2: "English, Mothafucka! Do you speak it?"

Act 1

I got the spookiest phone call last night.

*Tring, tring* (actually, it was my cell phone and the ringtone was 'Money' by Pink Floyd, but *tring,tring* is so much more dramatic)

"Yeah?"

"Hi Avichal"

"Laloo?"

"Yea Hi this is Abhishek"

"Kya?? Laloo?"
(Translation: "What?? Laloo?")

"Yea did you talk to Anosh about the mail regarding change in shift timing?"

"Nahi be main 5 minute mein baat karke tujhe batata hun, waise tu bhi mail kar hi dena"
(Translation: "No man I'll talk to him and let you know in 5 minutes, but you send the mail anyway")

"Yea ok let me know"

If you're wondering what is so spooky about the call, I don't blame you. But consider this: I have never, NEVER once in the 4 years that I have known Abhishek aka Laloo, conversed with him in the Queen's language! Do you blame me for being scared out of my wits when Laloo suddenly calls up and unleashes howhaw Oxbridge on me??

Of course, being fellow corporate bitches, both he and I are expected to, and do speak English within our workspace. But still, I never thought he'd do this to me!

So I call back after 5 minutes and decide to lay it on him.

*Tring,tring* (This time it's the actual sound, since I'm making the call)

"Haan Laloo"
(Translation: "Yeah Laloo")

"Yeah Avichal" (He's still doing it!)

"Haan be mail kar dena pakke se, Anosh shayad ghar chala gaya hai"
(Translation: "Yeah dude send the mail for sure, Anosh seems to have left for home")

"Ok"

"Aur saale angrezi mein baat karne se pehle warning de diya karo"
(Translation:"And do warn me before you start talking to me in English asshole")

And I put the phone down immediately, thus conveying my reaction appropriately.

Act 2

Laloo returns from office, and I don't even wait to give him a breather.

"Behen ke laude angrezi mein kahe batiya rahe the phone par?"
(Translation: "Why the fuck were you talking in English over the phone you sister's dick?")

"Abe mera Boss paas mein hi tha, aur usne humko thodi hi der pehle lecture sunaya tha ki office mein Hindi nahi bolni hai kyunki foreign employees ko bura lagta hai"
(Translation: "Dude my Boss was nearby, and he had recently instructed us about not speaking in Hindi as it makes the foreign employees uncomfortable")

"Maa ki chut uski"
(Translation: "Fuck him!")

"Haan saala"
(Translation: "Sure!")

Yea yea I know I'm being unreasonably whiny and hypocritical about the whole thing, considering I'm actually writing this post in English and providing translations for all Hindi sentences. But it's still bewildering when your closest friends - with the possible exception of Mandu who was born out of America's pussy and plans to return there asap, and Dube who is just an incorrigible Delhi dood - talk to you in English. What's next? Mudit? Nishant? Barsaiyan? Dassa?? Tau??????

I'm too scared to write anything else!

Corporate Lessons - Chapter 1: People are sensitive

First things first: People - sexual harassment is NOT a joke!
If you think the above statement is also a joke, I actually love you, but I'm bound by professional ethics to remind you that it is not!
If you're still not serious enough, let Mr. Scott Adams(PBUH) explain it to you himself:
As expected, the start to my professional life has been shaky, to say the least! Every day I learn something about life,the universe and everything that I had unlearned with great effort during the last 4 years of my stay at the greatest place in the whole wide world - IIT Kanpur!

Yup that's right; whoever said that IIT's are institutions of learning was probably a wannabe IITian stuck in some crappy NIT.

Oops! I seem to have already forgotten my first lesson in professional life:People are sensitive!

Of course,this is a horizontal division that runs across the vertical one defined by Scott Adams (PBUH): People are idiots!

Anyway, the bunch of assholes from our dear alma mater learnt this lesson the hard way during one of our orientation sessions in the company. It was the Anti-sexual harassment session(as has been established earlier, sexual harassment is not a joke. Does that make anti-sexual harassment a joke?) and a smart female, who later turned out to be our group manager (God is a funny guy!), was instructing us about what constitutes sexual harassment in a corporate environment. Tariq(whom we had nicknamed tharki owing to his controversial activities over the last couple of days) wanted to clarify if guys could be sexually harassed by other guys. Why he didn't already know this despite being an IITK alumnus is beyond me, but that's beside the point for now.

Now as is our wont, we find anything and everything extremely funny, at times even stuff that may qualify as extremely tragic for sensitive people! We laughed like second-grade students who had just gained carnal knowledge and the female decided to let us know that college is over for good and our kind of behaviour is not acceptable outside the safe haven that our campus is.

Oh well, as they say, all good things are murdered in cold blood by sensitive people!

P.S. For the record, my heartfelt apologies to NITians. You rock dudes!

P.P.S. Off the record, NITians are so lame man!

P.P.P.S. Quite obviously, the record is just another joke to us.

No sanity,please!we are humans

It's scary.The world is running out of sane people,though I am inclined to think its not exactly a novel phenomenon,but I'm realizing it these days more than ever.Probably I'm insane in my own way(Oh thats a terribly diplomatic statement.I hate it,but I'm using it more and more these days.Respecting others' points of view is a tough job,and this is a handy tool).
It would be a valid question to ask,what in Jesus-fuckin-Christ's name is sanity anyway?Oh I just made an offensive statement,didn't I? Now even as the christian fundamentalists will be baying for my blood for using their prophet's name in a derogatory manner,the preservers of hindu culture will be offended by the fact that I used a christian deity's name in the first place.Well,while I'm at it,let me go ahead and seal my fate completely.I think it is plain stupid for all the muslims of the world to raise in protest against some cartoons published in a newspaper with miniscule readership and no standing at all.Did they ever stop to think that if they had spared us the protests,probably nobody would have noticed the cartoons anyway? I am also sick and tired of Hindus raising in protest whenever anything remotely resembling their 50 million deities is portrayed in an insulting manner.And anyway,I have hated christian guts as long as I can remember.It is the most blatantly hypocritical religion there can ever be.
Other followers,don't start feeling too smug about yourself,I hate all religions.I hate the very concept.I hate anything that is a reason to hate anyone else.yea that sounds contradictory,I know.But I can't help it.If hating extremist points of view is an extremist point of view in itself,so be it.

What's a train journey to you,David?

Yea I know it's obscure,the title I mean.But this is what comes of being confined to the insides of a train for the better part of the last 10 days and then having watched "Vanilla Sky" recently for the umpteenth time.Anyway,for me it is quite a pain-in-the-ass thing,a train journey I mean.I find it hard to fall asleep,even in an a/c comptt,and I hardly talk to anyone at all.I get bored on my usual 3 hour sojourn from college to home aboard one of Indian Railways' monsters,most often the Rewa Express,so when I had to make a 24-hour journey from Kanpur to Surat to visit my bro,I knew I was in for a hard time.
Firstly,the train in question:Awadh Express.If ever I've hated a giant piece of steel,this has got to be the one.Ever since my days in Agra when I had to board it to reach Kota,it has been tormenting me.It is almost never on time,especially when it starts from our beloved Railway minister's home state,which leads me to wonder why don't they actually change its time to a couple of hours later.For now this is added to the many unsolved mysteries of my short life.So this time too,I was pretty sure I'd have to figure out a way to spend a couple of hours on the platform.And it was only an hour and a half late to begin with,but then,they kept adding 30 minutes after every 30 minutes,until it finally arrived 4 hours late,at 3 in the night.That it was a rainy night on a dirty Kanpur Platform and I was accompanied by one particularly irritating junior of mine did not help matters,obviously.Finally when I got aboard,however,I quickly forgot my troubles,for I was terribly sleepy and soon got lost in the dreamy world of dreams.
As it turned out,the morning that awaited me wasn't going to change my views about train journeys one bit.As I slowly gathered,still sleepy eyed and gulping down tea and coffee like those were going out of fashion,I was surrounded on all sides by IIT JEE aspirants on their way to the coaching hub,Kota accompanied by their parents.I was presumed to be one of the lot,too,until one of them actually asked me,"Where do you study?".This was probably one of the very few times I rued reveling my professional identity to anyone.No sooner did I say IIT Kanpur,they were all upon me,literally.The usual,"Bhaiya,kitne ghante padhna chahiye?" is still okay,but to be the target of such redundant queries as "Bhaiya,assignments regularly karne chahiye kya?" is particularly painful.WTF,man!!even an ass would know you ought to do assignments regularly.However,if they had gone on to ask whether I used to do that or not,they would have caught me in an embarrassing position.Poor souls,actually....they had to find me of all IITians to advise them about preparation techniques!!
Anyway,after the crowd alighted at Kota,I discovered to my great pleasure,that I had the entire compartment to myself.Also,my dear cuz Shalabh had brought me enif food to last upto Surat and back,so I organized myself one sumptuous banquet.Having enjoyed my lunch,dinner and snacks combined,I proceeded to read the many comics(5 Dhruvs,1 Batman,1 Spiderman) I had purchased on Kanpur station.I discovered yet again that I prefer travelling absolutely alone.I hate trying to start conversations with strangers.Obviously I'm not a people's person.
But the comics didn't last half as long as I'd expected them to.So I had to pick up another novel.Now I admit P.G.Wodehouse is hilarious.His brand of humour is exactly what I dig.But you can't read too much of him at one go,if you know what I mean.So soon I got bored of it too.The journey had turned out to be never-ending,exactly as I had feared.How do you spend 24 hours in a train if you can't sleep well.If somebody figures this one out,please please tell me!!

Up next,my eventful but painfully short stay in Surat....