Impropriety

The Beti* and the Babe
(Adapted from ye olde fairy tale, The Beauty and the Beast)

Once upon a time, since well before there were GTalk and Facebook, Orkut, MySpace, Flickr, Hi5, WAYN, LinkedIn (let’s call them Snow White and the Seven Fads), people got together in much more social ways than any of the current social networking sites promise to. It was pure and simple and quite efficient as it were. Since it necessitated that there be personal, face-to-face interactions, and that awareness of proximity and hence comfort be developed over a specific period of time, it ensured that all people involved in the social gatherings which eventually led to relationships of some sort being developed, knew beforehand what the score was. To cut a long story short, if both Adam and Eve hadn’t been hot, we would not be here.

But, with the advent of Snow White and the Seven Fads, it is now no longer paramount that the above conditions be met. This is markedly noticeable in the kind of interaction between opposite sexes, especially among the age group of 16-24, the period when all of the human species undergoes what is commonly known as Coupling. This background having been provided, we are now able to introduce the protagonists of our tale- the Beti* and even more importantly, the Babe.

The Beti, by very nature of his being, shouldn’t be able to occupy too much space by means of a description. And yet, in the classic manner of scientific paradoxes, where emptiness usually gets the most attention (Black Holes, Large Hadron Colliders, pretty girls’ heads**), so too shall we devote considerable time and effort into describing the Beti. Basically, every sentence begins with a Basically. But, basically, the Beti is that boy-next-door-but-you-wish-were-million-doors-away type you meet (or just encounter) who makes you realize why the world is so screwed up. Ideally, he wouldn’t be there, wasting the resources that would feed other poor families. But he very much is there, with his short shirt, faded jeans, decidedly tawdry sunglasses and pink sneakers. Sometimes the sneakers are brown, but that’s usually because it’s been raining heavily for the past week and the Beti has to ride through puddles at 60kmph, on his silencer-removed Pulsar. Or Gladiator or Karizma or Apache.

The Beti is someone you’d normally associate with the “Hiiii h r u?????” scraps on one of the seven fads mentioned above. These, it turns out, are not random shots thrown at the world but actually enquiries of well-being. Most of the times, the Betis have prodigiously long contact lists, developed carefully from school, college, classes at Alliance Francais (due apologies to those who actually went there to learn French) and general friends-of-friends and all such other six degrees of separation meetings. While most others with other things to pursue in life, wouldn’t be able to keep track of all the 473 friends gained from such experiences, the Beti, to his credit, does. (This is all the credit I’m going to give him, so there!). Eventually, all other conditions remaining favourable, one of the 473 friends (preferably one from the opposite sex) becomes interested enough in the Beti that they consent to find time to share a cup of a suitable beverage, depending on the average ages involved. This one interested being, is what has been referred to in the title, as The Babe.

The Babe is... well... a babe. All else is irrelevant.

And thus it is, while sharing this suitable beverage in a suitably public spot in the glare of so many other on-lookers, that the title of the fable becomes self-evident. As all passersby notice the distinct lack of a match of any kind between the two people sitting together, as the disharmony of the whole arrangement jars in one’s ear even in the quietest of places, there is only one constant though running through all their heads- “How did a Beti like him get something like that!”**

Well you know what they say, the World, isn’t fair.

*Beti – Short for Beti Ch*** (appropriate Hindi word that rhymes with clothe)
**Women’s Groups needn’t bother suing me. This girl, she took my heart and she took my money. So in a sense, you’ve already won.

Life

Anticipation. Balls. Crocin. Down. Esoteric. Fever. Ganga. Headache. iGoogle. Jabber. Klingon. Late. Mukka. Naaka. Oomph. Pretension. Quiz. Randomness. Strikeout. Trouble. Undie. Vamos. Washout. Xone. Yorker. Zyzzyva.

Youngboy

(Note: Bonus Points for cracking the funda of the title ;) )

As he looked around the bar, he felt a glow of satisfaction was over him. This moment alone, was worth all of the hardships, the nights of frustration and the scores and scores of wasted test‐tubes and DNA samples. This moment, where social gatherings were once again populated by the young and the restless. Just like it had always been, till around 200 years ago, when suddenly the population pyramid began to completely invert itself. He thought about the weird chain of events that his life had been.

Birth control and increased life expectancy had come together with wholly unexpected consequences, and now there were just not enough young people in the world, and too many old ones. And the world was worried. The response was swift, and quite unnatural. The world’s governments got together and started a research station where they brought together ‘representative specimens’ of all the ‘diverse’ people from the world, to use all the politically correct terms. He had been one such chosen specimen, taken from his home when he had been 2. Or so the records he had been shown claimed, he had no memory of anything of course. Millennia of human evolution still hadn’t figured out a way to make the brain remember things from its first 2 years of existence. The important‐looking people at the research station had then proceeded to conduct a battery of tests on them, in an effort to separate the elusive ‘youth’ gene. The idea therefore was simple. Make all the old people younger.

All the nights of frustration, the scores of wasted test‐tubes and DNA samples later, the important-looking people proclaimed importantly, that they had it. People could now retain their youth forever, eternally, indefinitely. The pill would not mess with their aging process itself, but their vitality and appearance would be restored to that of a 25‐year old. Everyone agreed that this was the age that could be best described as the ‘prime of the youth’. And he had finally been released from the research station, along with the rest of the ‘representative specimens’. They were thanked profusely for their role in saving the world, in their selfless submission to all sorts of invasive procedures and characterization techniques. For having gone through the program to the end, with courage, even as they watched half the people they had grown up with in the station die around them from various effects of radiation, gene mutation and psychoanalyses. They were given a new start to life, set up in the biggest cities from their respective parts of the world, large house, high‐paying job, the works. And then, just as they were about to leave their home of the past 25 years, the most important-looking person had come up to them gravely and said ‘And remember, this research station never existed’.

Sure, it never existed, he thought to himself. He really had no complaints about the one year of his life after that. They really had taken care of him as they had promised. He didn’t especially feel for lost childhoods and missing the joy of growing up and all such. He lived for the moment, and this current moment was looking very promising indeed, with the girl smiling at him from across the bar. He finished his drink and started towards her, preparing the smile of his that just always worked.

As they were putting their dresses back on in his room, he had an uneasy feeling in his stomach about the past hour. It was not that the girl was familiar, he got that feeling with almost every girl, and he put it down to his growing up in a secluded environment. It was something else, something more involved than her, it was more about them. It was as if their intimacy was strained, was held up by something else that had happened before. And yet, nothing had happened before, he was sure of it. If there was one thing he was good at, it was remembering the faces of the ladies who had been in his room. And she most definitely hadn’t.

“Hey”, he called out to her, just as she was preparing to leave, “I didn’t quite catch your name.”

“Anna”, she smiled back, “Anna Chrystoweilen, and yours?”

He felt like he had been kicked in the gut. His head swam, as she faded in and out of his vision alternately. His stomach went for a toss, and he clutched at it involuntarily. He held on to the side of the bed to steady himself. He looked up at her; she was still smiling, looking enquiringly at him, with a hint of concern on her face. Maybe she’d noticed the marked change in him, the colour draining from his face. He hurriedly tried to regain composure, or as much of it as he could. He managed a weak smile and whispered “Philip”.

“That’s a nice name”, she said as she walked towards the door. She stopped at the door and looked back, a wistful look on her face, and for a moment the wonder pill or the youth pill or whatever it was they were calling it, lost all its effect, and she looked all of the 50 years she was. “That was the name of my son before...”, she shook her head, closing the door behind her.

He collapsed on to the floor, retching, a mixture of tears and saliva flowing down his face. No air would go in, as hard as he tried, and his heart was hammering away like it was putting in one last mighty effort before giving away. He punched the floor in front of him till his knuckles bled, and one of them showed the white of the bones. Blinding flashes of memory seared his brain, from his time at the station. He remembered the record, the same record where he’d seen he’d been admitted when he’d been two years old‐

Admitted: 20 December, 2235; Age: 2 Years; Name: Philip Chrystoweilen

Fooled by Randomness

While the plagiarism of the title from this could have been avoided, it's the discussion about this book that lead to this post in the first place, and so it's only fair that there's a reference to it. The book itself is a take on how chance plays a role in almost all aspects around us, or to put in Douglas Adamsian terms how chance has a big part in The Life, Universe and Everything. And that's quite true, if you think about it.

Life, by its very structure, can never be in equilibrium. By Life, I mean,the whole bloody large piece of jigsaw puzzle that the roughly 6.3 billion people in this world are attempting to solve(from here on, Life, with a capital L shall refer to this macro-state, while life shall refer to the thing that an IITian doesn't have). In purely Engineering terms, when there's equilibrium achieved, all the components are in their most 'satisfied' state and are not going to (or even want to) move to any other position. Now, in Life, if there was a force that pushed everyone towards this ideal point, and it was doing its job perfectly then at some point of time t in the Universe's existence, Life would have equilibrated. This raises the question, what next. What happens at all times t+, if at t, everyone has achieved what they wanted to achieve. This is where Chance comes in. Or to stick to engineering, Chaos. Or Randomness.

Since Life itself is made up of each of the single lives, each of these lives has the potential to disrupt entirely, the overall design that is Life. Even if each person's life is tending towards its own micro-ideality, the ideality may not be what that person set out to achieve in the first place. This might be a bit of a ramble, but imagine you could break down each of your achievements into its smallest logical unit. For every pragmatist out there who believes in 'My life is what I make of it 'or 'There's no such thing as Lady Luck, I've never been good with ladies anyway', it's fairly simple to show that there was at least one point in their path of life where whatever happened was not a planned act of the person in question. Anywhere there is a question of choice, there's a bit of chance involved, as no amount of logical rationalizing can ever pick a 'better' choice, at least between two near-similar options. And every life always has its moments of picking between choices. And every life then follows the path that such a choice leads to. And thus every life, at its smallest opening step, is adulterated by chance.

Which then leads to the question of whether, once this initial disturbance from equilibrium has been set in motion, there is only one place it can lead to, and whether if the other choice had been made at that point, there is another path which will lead somewhere else, a sort of a parallel universe. Like in the whole concept of movies like The Butterfly Effect and Sliding Doors and, closer to home, 12B. Three months with an Equity Research firm has also only strengthened my belief that overall, it's just one big gamble. There can be reams and reams of reports from the classiest analysts in the business, and pages of code written by Math Ph.Ds from the Princetons and Dartmouths of the world, but eventually, it's the call of the man on the floor on whether to put in or pull out the billions of Dollars. And that's, basically, a chance. A chance backed up by thirty pages of reports and innumerable Partial Differential Equation simulations, but a chance nevertheless. And if the decision is to pull out, and made by 5 or 6 such people together, each taking a chance on the other being right in pulling out, we end up with something like this.

Eventually, somebody has to get lucky, of course. In an overall 10:1 ratio of misses:hits, there have to be enough lucky people in the world to convince the other 9 that if you try hard enough, you can too. Something like Colbert's claim, if you may. And so the world goes around, with everyone in the 9 trying to become the 1, in spite of the obviously futile exercise that the 1 in 10 is a fixed number, and that Chance is a zero-sum game. But oh well, something has to make the world go around, and love simply doesn't work anymore. So, cool.

Update: And then, this happens.