Life or something like shit

I came into IIT expecting a lot. And I got more than a lot, more like acres. This place is like HUGE. There is no parking lot, but there’s a lot. The amount of trees in this place is unimaginable. Apart from the Gymnosperm and Angiosperm kinds, there are the trees with numbers on them, such as Tree No. 38, tree no. 138 and tree no. x with 130 < x < 140. I came in expecting professors with brainwaves coming out of their ears, and other professors measuring these using brainwave-o-meters. I came in expecting students to find unbelievable solutions such as turn on the switch to indecipherable problems such as why the computer wouldn’t start. I came in expecting to find brainiacs in ill-fitting shirts and with messed up hair because they had stayed up all night. Not thinking up solutions to Schrödinger’s equations, but watching the latest sitcom from NBC. I came in expecting all this. And I found them.

One of the things that I most admired in my seniors was their ability to sleep in class without the professor being able to discern the same. This was a very important skill to have as it ensured that the body got its required amount of sleep, which had been lost at night on the above-mentioned sitcom. Oh, apart from that, they also had something or the other to do with this thing called the Lit-Soc. The Lit-Soc is this thing, which happens in my college, which doesn’t amount to the tiniest bit of hair on a rodent’s posterior, except for one big cup at the end of it all. Which you can get in any elec course without much effort anyway. Without any effort, actually.

And so, since I’m an Indian, and no Indian has ever had an original idea, I decided to do something else, to make my wonderfully incomplete life even more incomplete. I read classics which I couldn’t make head or tail of just because they were classics. I watched Black and White movies which even their directors would’ve forgotten having made. I played football as a two-footed winger whenever I had the opportunity, and finally got two and half minutes at right-back in the only match we played. I went to quizzes and stared blankly at the paper - the Mass Transfer/Equilibrium Operations kind of quizzes. I was desperate to be recognized as he-who-does-something-else by the band of we-all-do-something-else people. I ran from here to there and back here again. Sometimes, I just ran.

And then I found the Hat.

The Hat. It’s very difficult to describe completely what the hat is about, and I can never do justice to it. But I can try. I’ve seen cricketers kiss their helmets when they score a century, and I’ve always wondered what made them kiss that smelly, plastic object when their lips would’ve done much better in contact with another pair of lips, attached to a fragrant, organic being of the opposite sex. I’ve wondered what made them feel so strongly about something. The hat helped me understand.

The hat is the epitome of the simplicity of genius. Its power lies in its non-existence, its secret lies in its openness. It’s the ultimate paradox. To wear the hat is to experience a feeling like never before. With the hat on, you get the feeling of having done something to stir the innermost rumblings of any heart. You’ve made them feel insignificant, unwanted, ignored for that small period of time. You’ve made them stop talking, and so By Douglas Adams’ hypothesis, their brain starts to slowly grind into motion. You’ve done something that would make them remember you forever.

You’ve made them think. For once.

The hat can be worn to anyone. Professors, seniors, juniors, friends, irritating cell-phone company callers, annoying Xerox machine characters… anyone. The beauty of the hat is in the universality of its use. And it’s not that the usage of the hat is limited to people. The hat can be worn to things too, such as Computational Techniques quizzes, or assignments, or classes. Or End sems. Whatever. The point is, once you’ve worn the hat, you’re liberated. From the mundane, from the boring, from the routine, from the inconsequential.

It is difficult to totally describe what the Hat can do. And the hat says that this is enough about itself for now, and it shall be so. For the hat is never wrong. It doesn't matter what kind you have on. It could be a sombrero, a felt-hat, a bowler or a top-hat. All that matters is that it's there, or actually not there. For as said before, it's the non-existence of the hat which really makes its presence felt. Like sometimes when you feel that silence is very loud.

This could go on and on, but that would be disrespecting the hat, and all that it stands for. It’s got nothing do with memories being butterflies and you shouldn’t stick em to papers and all that. It’s just that you don’t talk about the hat. That’s all.

Amen.

P.S: I put this post up, and by some weird machination of Google's Edit function, it got deleted. But I wore the hat and reproduced it. From memory. Thus the hat also doubles as a thinking cap. See?