Of Mice and Men!

Of Clock Skews and a Graduate Level Nap

My graduate level computer architecture class, the one defining class of my major, is held in a corner classroom of the Everitt Laboratory. The order in which students fill up the rows of seats is reminiscent of army formations in days of yore. The front-line of the army is armed with note-pads, calculators, pencils and self-raising right arms in case of a question. The ranks behind this have more sophisticated intelligence garnering devices such as laptops and PDAs which can efficiently switch from minesweeper and solitaire to chat messengers, online sportscasts, and in case of EXTREME danger, the lecture notes. The last few rows make up the army's dispensary. Some soldiers in these rows stare with sad hollow eyes at the screen. Poor victims of powerpoint poisoning. Their faces are tinged blue from the reflection of a thousand powerpoint slides. Others clutch their heads in death grips trying to protect their hung-over minds from exploding from all the noise being generated at the head of the army and by the professor's chalk on the board. They think of a happier time, being back at the bar-deen quad library, getting drunk on knowledge, while pretty sorority sisters flash their ids to check out books, and pot-bellied engineers smoke away the dubious distinction of being bad at business by cramming for Accounting 302.

It is in this melting pot of activity that I find myself at 1pm, twice a week waging a bloody, ghastly war against the need for an afternoon nap. Now normally, I wouldn't be such a wet blanket about giving in to the need for a nap, but the problem is starting to threaten my career. This classroom is a death-trap for anyone who has not taken five cups of coffee, with several shots of espresso each, within the last hour, intravenously.  I am located exactly at the line dividing the dispensary and the intelligence accumulation squadron. I have lost these battles against the nap quite regularly over the past several weeks. Last Thursday, I fell asleep before the professor walked in. Today will be different. I slept for 12 hours last night. From recommendations of friends, I have made my seating conditions as non-conducive to sleeping as possible. I have installed several useless expired credit cards and coupons in my wallet located in my back pocket so that my right rectal cheek is highly elevated and in extreme pain. I chew on some ridiculously weird flavored gum and brace myself as the professor starts discussing timing issues in logic circuits. I look for ancillary entertainment sources to keep awake.

 I notice an IITian with a very perturbed look on his face as if he has taken extreme offense to what the professor has just said. It is immediately obvious that he's concentrating. I decide to mimic him. I need to look mighty peeved. I try to remember something annoying that happened today to me to make my expression authentic. But I draw a blank...the day so far has been just peachy.  I furrow my eyebrows into a uni-brow and flare my nostrils. I scowl like I just smelled something bad. Overall, anyone watching me would be convinced that I am very annoyed with Fishburn's 1992 IEEE publication about Clock skew optimization for current reduction. The IITian drops his fierce expression after some time and smiles in agreement. He's at peace with the world again. I relax my masterpiece expression too. I relax my tense, angry muscles... no sense in bearing animosity in your heart for too long. It can kill you.

The professor's melodic voice rises and falls....in perfect harmony with the trees outside, the dying air-conditioner and my deepening breaths. They resonate together to form the drum beats of Warrior Nap's victory dance. My eyelids crash into each other and hold on to each other for dear life. I sink lower into the plush seat. I assume the fetal napping position and succumb to the greater warrior. At some point, I wake up, look at my watch and realize there are only fifteen minutes of lecture left. I cuss quietly at how soon my nap will end and curl back to sleep. As I doze off again, I realize I have swallowed my gum.

Captivated by Sci-fi?

Google prison was bad…worse in several ways than the brick and mortar prisonsstill used in the third world. He had stayed on the straight and narrowfor the last 10 years. His last offense on record was when his wife wasstill pregnant with nickie4313@gmail.com.G-prison meant that he had no access to any correspondence as his email account had been suspended. With no contact with the outside world, the walls seemed to close in on him. He felt caged and helpless.The Laundromat (a sister concern of google.com) where he used to work had removed him from the payroll after his paypal (a sister concern of Google.com) account  stopped accepting payments, a definite sign that one had fallen foul of the law. The lack of a gmail login denied him basic amenities such as email accessibility, RSS feeds and Google News. No access to classified ads meant there would be no way of getting hired and the paypal account suspension meant no employer could pay him even if they did hire him.He lay miserably in bed, the misery heightened by the ambient noise inthe room: The wife, snored loudly. Poor victim ofsubliminal advertising. Even her snores sounded like GOOOOOOOooooooo-GLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLE.She would need all the rest she could get before she headed out into the Amazon.com jungle (a sister concern of Google.com) for her day's shopping. Outside, oversized cars sped by on elevated magnetic field strips. Since magnetic cars are silent and hence don't make the requisite amounts of noise, American car manufacturers had taken to covering the whole SUV with high-intensity LEDs to guzzle electricity and bother pedestrians. From across the hall, sounds of robots attending Mrs. Singh's vocal training classes to smooth out their mechanical voices wafted into the room.

Hopefully, tomorrow would be better...tomorrow, he would be eligiblefor his monthly conjugal website visit, albeit only to dirt sites approved by Google. As the Google ads said, it *was* better than the real thing.

He crawled out from under the covers and got dressed and grabbed his laptop to go sit out on the streets. Begging passersby on the street to click on the google-ads on his blog was the only legitimate way for him to buy food for dinner. Still, he thought…it could be worse. In countries where the sharia law is practised, it is said that they cut off a big piece of your bandwidth in public….and abandon you to live alife of pain and buffering….

Ode to a Dead Walmart Bicycle

Prologue:

For the first two years of my college life, I was so thrilled by the concept of a three month return policy on Walmart’s 40 dollar bicycles. Every third month, I would make a sacred pilgrimage to Walmart and return my bicycle and get a new one in exchange. The Walmart customer assistance never asked any questions and every bike I bought dutifully died within its three month returnability period.  I even stopped getting attached to my bicycles because I knew that each bicycle was nothing more than a fling…in three months, I would have my legs wrapped around yet another Mt Fury Roadmaster. And then, one fateful sophomore year day, a Walmart bike forced its way into my life. I had washed the jeans in which the Walmart receipt for that bike lay, rendering it un-returnable. I screamed in horror as I peeled the wet remains of the receipt from my jeans pocket…it disintegrated in my hand leaving an ink smudge on my fingers that read…well, nothing. It was just an illegible splotch of ink. Never again would I know the joys of mounting a new bike I had picked up on a Friday night and riding her multiple times all weekend. The Casanova had settled down. I had ‘knocked up’ my bike.

The Day She Died:

It was one of those freak Chambana days on which the sun shines through your window and the birds chirrup at ur sill. You’re overcome by a sense of being one with nature until you open the window and get hit by a blast of icy cold wind, causing you to subsequently slam the window shut while mouthing ghastly expletives. I wheeled out my old jalopy and biked off in the general direction of campus. I was pedaling furiously because I needed to drop my homework off in class before the professor walked in so that I wouldn’t feel guilty about walking out in front of his nose. Two blocks from my class, I heard a snap. The bike stand had come loose. Ignoring it, I continued to pedal. The next couple of seconds all happened in slow motion…arguably because I can’t cycle very fast. The bike stand got caught in the back tire causing it to lock up. I flew off the bike, did a neat pirouette and landed squarely on top of the back wheel completely mangling it in the process. Nearby, a Chinese kid grimaced, a squirrel looked startled and an Indian kid grinned ear to ear.

I disentangled myself from the back wheel and started dragging the bike towards class. I couldn’t roll it because the back wheel was in no condition to rotate. Another block of dragging the bike and BLAM! Friction had eroded the back tire because I was dragging it and it exploded. Even more miserable, I trudged along reconciled to having to sit through the lecture. Just as I was pulling into the parking stand, my professor walks past me, looks at the bike and says quite sympathetically ‘Flat huh?’ I grin weakly at him and continue to drag the bike wishing I had had the quick-wittedness to say ‘NO 36DD, whadaya think????’

Open Heart Surgery:

I promptly called DEO, my roommate from the summer on my cell-phone to see if she could be rescued. If anyone could fix her, it was DEO, the man who’s been to bike school. It would be tough to convince him to operate on a 40 dollar Walmart bike considering the fact that his clientele was comprised almost exclusively of Canondales, Bianchis and Huffies. The best doctors only work on clients with great insurance.

Surprisingly, he offered to take a look. At 4.01pm, I wheeled her to the operating theatre. Dr DEO looked at her and immediately declared that she would need to have a back wheel transplant. A few more frantic calls and we had located a suitable donor. My friend AK had a similar bike with a bad front wheel but a salvageable wheel. The donor bike was locked to a speed limit sign on the busiest intersection of campustown. The doctor crouched down near the backwheel and pulled up the collar of his jacket lest he be recognized. As the doctor worked, I and AK reassured passersby that it wasn’t as shady as it looked…hard to convince them since we were a motley crew of two Indians and a Mexican hunched over a cheap bike trying to jimmy out the back tire. After a couple of passersby, I started asking them whether they wanted to buy a bike for real cheap. That got some shocked looks. A couple more people, and AK started asking people wearing nice coats whether they HAD a bike, and proceeded to follow them.

The frustration was beginning to show on Dr DEO’s countenance. Finally, in a fit of exasperation with a tough bolt, he asked me ‘Did u ever grease this thing?’ ‘Oh yes’, I reassure him… ‘I douse it with cooking oil every week.’ DEO almost chokes in outrage. ‘COOKING OIL?????’ ‘Olive oil, actually’ I offer helpfully. The doctor has had enough. He gets up, throws the wrench to the floor, dusts of his jacket and says ‘I m sure you can buy another 40 dollar walmart bike and start your cycle of cosmic return karma again’ and walks off into the sunset.

Epilogue:

I knew I shouldn’t have told him about the olive oil. Heartbroken, I dragged my poor unloved 40 dollar bike back home and, as a last sign of good will to all bikers, I parked her in an unsecured bike stand with no lock so that some person who wanted to use her for parts could do so without having to struggle or look shady while procuring the parts. She was gone the next morning. Taken to that big bike stand in heaven where all good bicycles go….a place where even an old disfigured walmart bike can find love

"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me.
I lift my lamp beside the golden door."

Bombay from the Eyes of a Bloody Firang Guy

After 21 years of being an Indian, I finally made the sacred pilgrimage to Bombay the city that defines every existing stratum of society, defies every law of equilibrium population density and deifies every square inch of land available. And it was into this city that I announced myself in my New Balance shoes and electric orange U of I teeshirt assuming it would be useful to stand out in the crowd in case I got run over by a train catching mob and got separated from the family....scary things like this are known to happen in Bombay, and a bloody firang guy (BFG) must always be prepared.

My education of BOM101 began at the airport. Going to pick up our luggage at baggage claim immediately taught me two things. First of all, an orange teeshirt and sneakers with reflectors on them is exactly what you wear when you want to blend in, or are the last deer at a buffet for lions and are trying to go around incognito so long as you re in Bombay. Secondly, thinking up rambling analogies about teeshirts and reflective shoes means the whole airplane has beaten you to taking pole position around the baggage carrousel and you won't have a hope in hell of joining the 200 odd flourescent shirt wearing people who are milling around the carrousel gaping up its birthing canal waiting for their luggage to arrive. If you can't join em, appear disdainful of the petty crowding mentality. So, I reach into my pocket and fish out a piece of gum and proceed to chew on gum that definitely tastes like it had been in my jeans on laundry day. I watch sympathetically as a chunky father of three leaps over three luggage carts and flings himself at his newborn luggage on the carrousel lest it drift back into the orifice where unwanted luggage goes to die. He gently dusts off the suitcase and introduces it to his family. The kids grin broadly and have the 'U did it dad!!' look on their face and the mom has the 'I think we ll call her Delsey' look on hers. After several more luggage births, we finally pick off our stuff and head out the airport doors. My BFG danger sensors are on full alert. I look suspiciously at the sliding doors as they make way for me a little too willingly. I almost expect to be pitched a credit card offer from anything that smooth. I clench my butt to draw my wallet in closer in my backpocket to make sure I haven't been pickpocketed yet.

My brother's wife (she's new) has brought a shiny black Scorpio (Indian 4WD) for our BFG travelling convenience. I settle into the front seat of the Scorpio and almost lose my breath when I see the driver. He's a tall dark handsome male adonis with copper bangs, tight levis and leather boots. He casually flings our overweight baggage into the trunk in a single fluid motion and I realize its rude to stare. He jumps into the seat next to me and guns up the Scorpio. I suck my gut in lest I block his peripheral vision. Stupid hunky Scorpio drivers.

We begin the drive home and I get my first glimpses of Bombay. Its amazing how while driving around at 60 odd kmph, u can see abject poverty and fabulous luxury, stunningly hot girls and incredibly scary eunuchs, garish pink and green hotels and pretty marble houses in alternating bands every few seconds. Cruising around the city at an altitude of 3 feet afforded by the Scorpio, Bombay seems hardly polluted. The tinted windows seem to make the hovels and the street-crapping urchins seem almost endearing. I guess most of the pollution in this city is under the three feet mark. Above three feet, everything is chic. The skyline is breathtaking and the beaches seem oblivious to the pace the rest of the city is keeping.

Midway through the ride, I decide to remind everyone about my BFGness and announce that I m thirsty. Adonis promptly pulls into the right lane and slows down in front of a fresh juice stand, the best in the city, he promises. Adonis rolls down my window for me to place the order and I realize only too late, that my hindi will have to be on show. To make things more challenging, my family decides to order every possible permutation of the words mango, orange, lemon, ice, no ice, sugar, no sugar, chaat and no chaat. The guy taking our order seems mighty irritated at the lack of efficiency in my ordering process as I labor over the right word for each thing. He shifts from one foot to another as though his bladder is ready to explode and his bladderly health depends on my coughing up the order really really fast. Words of encouragement for my hindi come from the back of the car....'sugar is sakkar' and ....'chaat is chaat itself, like msn.' Surprisingly, the order guy gets every last request right and serves up some spectacular juice. After we re quenched, I wave a 100 rupee note at the order-guy with a benevolent 'keep-the-change' wave of my hand. Now the order-guy seems mad enough to strangle me. I slowly realize that I need to slap another nine of those hundred rupee notes to placate him after all the juice we downed. This is my third BOM101 lesson of the day. Bombay is expensive as hell and illusions of powerful foreign exchange rates just won't fly. The rupee may be weak, but in bombay, everyone has a lot of it.

We finally pull up in front of the apartment that has been rented for us. It is extremely fancy with fresh paint, flower-potted driveway and a perky security guard. As he helps us unload the Scorpio, Perky the security guard advises us to stock up on water as soon as we get in because they will stop pumping water in a half hour. I look around in horror, wondering whether anyone else is as perturbed about having to take a mug and bucket bath as opposed to a high-speed jet sprayed shower. My dad looks very nonchalant about the news...but I feel he's just trying to look non foreign-bratty. We get into the very comfortably furnished apartment and I pass out on the king sized bed. Somewhere nearby, construction workers are pounding away at a wall with gusto. I wonder what they could be building by beating on it so much. I hear my dad running from bathroom to bathroom hoarding water. He is in his 'Back in 'Nam' survival element. My minds a blur with all the information and color. My heart rate gradually settles into resonance frequency with the construction workers' thumps. I close my mouth as I drift off to sleep just in case my dad runs out of places to store water....