Given the state that I am in now, since the Friday night binge at Jupiter's despite all the work that’s piled up on me, I am all but compelled to write and comment on my humble friend Greram's self-claimed juvenile attempt at penning "short stories". While he says that many a life can be made out of simply stating the obvious and has shown that his writing is consistent with that argument, I hope to clarify this at the end of mine and show that "it is ONLY the statement of the obvious which makes the career!" Ironically, I am going to say a lot on the grand occasion of "International Women's Day"!Anyway, that wasn't the primary motive of this post. I just wanted to get into my destructive mode, put on an MCP^ garb and creatively destroy a budding writer-blogger's first steps into this new world. But no here's my disclaimer, for I am nowhere near taking my first steps either. I very much doubt if I ever will.While this fine piece of art has been centred around the social evils of "Adam-teasing" and "Android harassment" which have left the world battered and bruised many times over, the story itself is rich in content and context. Come to think of our safety from the perils of venturing out alone, I can only look back at the sunny days of undergrad when we always did things together. All of the twelve precious stones (Agate through Beryl, Jade and Garnet) were so perfectly set up miles away to shield us from the imminent dangers of Opal. We went to class in groups, to the mess, juicy, canteen, gate, BHEL, Sangeetha's, Wild-West, Akash, Sippy, practically everywhere together... so much so, a strict vigil was in force with the 9pm curfew every night at Opal. Very occasionally, there were these mavericks who'd break the shackles and brave all dangers to go out their way, but as I say so I am reminded of a few golden words of wisdom from a distant second cousin- "men are mostly suppressed by their fear of solitude and, it will only be the beginning of your achievements once you get to conquer this fear". And so they were, these rare mavericks in exception of "the system". But it is still, by and large, a woman's world out there.As life progresses, supposedly, Greram makes a beautiful case out of the mid-life crisis- what was earlier construed as only the conflict between the all mighty man and his workplace; SHE has found the weakest link in the chain, the chinks in her knight's shining armour and, by God, hasn't she made life ever so miserable?! Benzene deaths, male infanticide, android cycle, andropause, XX, XY, househusbandry, blah blah... the laws of the world real (or imaginary in the context) are so cruel you see. I'm crying out aloud... these MCPs are here... we've been pushed, bent, suppressed to the point of snapping... Newton's third law shall not stay aloof of all this!Over to the icing on the cake- had to include relativity, matter, anti-matter etc right? The one significant thing this reminded me of the discourse I had once watched on Discovery Channel so many years back in which a wise old theoretical physicist and astronomer goes on to state how teleportation can be accomplished by travelling "faster than a speeding light ray" (I shall now replace this with the jargon FTASL for convenience :) ) from one starting point, through a loop, and back to the same. This way we can accomplish the impossible task of travelling backwards in time and by doing so, we can undo (just like MS Word) all of the miserable things that happened in the past. Just imagine if we could do something to stop the harassment of androids, the benzene deaths, the male infanticide and bring the female-male sex ratio in the society to a 50-50 equilibrium... wouldn't that be a moment cherished? Coming back to the "how-to" aspect of accomplishing time travel, that wise man gave a mouth watery example of how we could make things happen, as follows:Take a pizza and remove a quarter slice from it; eat it if you'd like for there's little guarantee that you shall come out of this adventure alive. With the remaining three-quarter, join the radial edges so that you get a perfect three-quarter circular cone. Now, your mission would be to start travelling from a point A on the circumference to point B diametrically opposite and do so along the circumference, while your dear snail-paced friend light gets to take a shorter path by flashing straight down to the apex of the three-quarter circular cone at the centre from A and reflect off at an equal and opposite angle in a straight path to B. So the mission is straight-forward: "beat the time light takes, in your smart and only just slightly roundabout path". The analogy here is to the structure of black holes which are very similar to these three-quarter circular cones, and while there is no escape for anything (including light) when it goes down to the apex, the smart android can simply amble along the circumference FTASL to make history! The only other thing he mentions, in a miscellaneous disclaimer of course, is his surmise that in doing so we are most likely to enter a diametrically opposite parallel universe (of antimatter maybe) where things have been ordained to be the way androids would've liked and MEN have had their say. How I wish the android and his nemesis could take the best of both these worlds?!I would put a full stop to my rambling at this point as I realize that by having sputtered`` out so many unqualified statements, I am very likely drawing the wrath of many a genius physicist whose sole purpose in life is to impose and immerse himself into the sub-atomic scales which have been hailed as bubbling with so much activity and promise nobody has ever seen or even fathomed, and in doing so, he battles day in and day out and with grants of billions to figure out Quantum Physics' key to teleportation, matter-antimatter, FTASL, time travel, and hence the magic potion that will purge all of the world's greatest social evil. That for me is the cul-de-sac!Footnotes and References ^MCP - Male Chauvinistic #$% (see also 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
``sputtering - Marc Madou, IC308-NITT (see also)
