Chapter 5: My first encounter with Shankar.........

By the time we shifted to Kothacheruvu or somewhere nearby, Shankar travelled into deep meditative state with occasional distorted versions of Omkars, not to mention it was 9 in the morning. Sometimes, I never know how to react to a situation. Let’s just take this situation itself. Should I be pissed off for him being so disinterested, or pity his situation because he is bearing all the torture I am putting him into or go beyond all these worldly thoughts and just reach a state of equanimity and feel nothing? In any case, I had mixed feelings and so picked up a book, stood in front of the mirror, adjusted my hairdo and was on my way to morning class.

The first hour was Physics. I was late by ten minutes. The growling look on the face of the lecturer never bothered me. I mean, that was normal to me. Just like people who feel normal when they are treated with a beautiful smile every time somebody meets them, I feel the growl normal. I think my physical construction comes with an inbuilt delay of around eight minutes to respond to any situation. Adding another two to four minutes of laziness, gives an agreeable solution and elucidates my unpunctuality. As I always say, I am generally perfect. There is an error with my fabrication bringing in certain default flaws. As I was listening to his class, I remembered Shankar. I felt sorry for letting him miss the lecture which he generally loved the most. I sat there reminiscing that first day I met him……or more precisely took notice of his existence. 

It was the first session with Prof Parthasarathy, faculty in-charge of Quantum Mechanics, a PhD from Georgia Tech University.  With a reputed journal on Quantum entanglements and an extreme dramatist known for his excellent pedagogical practices, Parthasarathy was more of a performer in Physics than a lecturer. “Good morning physicists. Sorry for running late today. I was caught wondering on how to convey this to you, but the truth needs to be shared. The whole of scientific community shall mourn this day, a major disaster on the intellectual front. With enormous pain, I bring this news to you. The greatest physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, and theologian of our previous generation, a man known for his diverse interest, the author of celebrated monograph Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, Sir Isaac Newton’s theories have failed to work at the atomic and the sub atomic level. Beginning with his laws of motion governing all macroscopic objects to the kind of forces that come into play, everything has hit a dead end. None of those laws are valid at the sub atomic level. Thus, we have to come up with something more fundamental, something more generic to account for mechanics of sub atomic particles. Having laid the foundation today, we will go on to discover or reinvent a whole new mechanics which would quench our thirst and answer our questions. We will also identify reasons for the failure of classical mechanical principles in the quantum context. Wishing you all the best in your search for knowledge in the coming days, I am Parthasarthy, your assistant for the next fifty two brainstorming sessions. I don’t believe in this mechanism of education, where we learn but not discover, where we memorize but not theorize. But the world cannot take too many intellectuals at the same time and so all this defence mechanisms (meaning engineers). I don’t have a course plan, since no scientist will ever know that he will hit a breakthrough in ten or twenty sessions. However, our line of attack will be somewhat close to the hand-outs that each one of you has. We will see what happens when two electrons collide; more precisely when two sub atomic particles collide, try and establish principles governing their motion and see how different they are from classical principles.  So before I proceed any further, let me know if there are any uncertainties. And I don’t expect this class to be silent at all. Either talk to me or to your friends and demonstrate the second law of thermodynamics. Disorder is the very nature of this universe. I simply don’t understand the reason behind the enormous effort the lesser mortals put in, to bring in order and lead a so called ‘disciplined’ life.  I am physicist by practice and not word.  Hoping the message is clear, I invite queries from your end.”  At the end of this small presentation, the entire class was filled with raptures and uproar. Everybody was more or less riveted by his charismatic approach.

Amidst all this celebration, there seemed a distinct hand raised above the rest signalling a conventional doubt asking mechanism. Professor immediately acknowledged and asked the person to proceed. Silence invaded the class for a moment to see what was happening around. Everyone looked at the student who stood up, threw confused looks at each other. “Sir, this is something that’s bothering me for a year now and I haven’t found a convincing answer yet. Hope you throw light on it. When we talk about bodies, we distinguish between two such entities by the physical boundaries they exhibit.  As we go into the building elements of each of these bodies, we encounter different organs again distinguished by their physical boundaries. Further down, we have tissues, then cells and then sub cellular entities. Beyond this we enter into the domain of molecules and then atoms and then into electrons, protons and neutrons, quarks and bosons and so on. When we talk of atoms, we say atoms have several electrons revolving around the nucleus in several shells. Similarly, within the nucleus, same is the situation with the protons but a little more vague and complex. Now, it is very clearly known fact that atoms have no physical boundaries but they are distinguished by the range of influence the nucleus has on the electrons revolving around. The nucleus also has no physical boundary and it’s an imaginary surface close to spherical (strictly not) in nature. When the fact that no physical boundaries exist for electrons, protons , atoms etc, what we do mean when we say when atoms collide or electrons collide? I mean atoms cannot collide since there are no physical boundaries. Neither can electrons, or the nucleus or the protons or neutrons collide for the same reason. If it’s the field we are discussing about then why don’t we stick to the terminology ‘interaction of fields’? In essence, we have theories built upon such collisions resulting in heat dissipations, and energy losses and a whole variety of efficiency improving programs. If it’s the field of influence of nucleus, the observing point, where is the nucleus? Can we actually localize a particle’s existence or not? And my problem magnifies when people claim to have seen or observed atomic collisions on microscopes. What did they actually see? Atoms colliding? “

I certainly didn’t know what was happening. I found comfort in the fact that a lot of students shared the same mind fucked expression on their faces. I mean what was he trying to establish? The whole world on a fucked up journey? Should I be ashamed, because of my mindless pursuit in these subjects for years now, without asking this question or simply dismiss it as something overly dramatized but very silly or grow above all this and believe in the ancient saying, “The mind cannot simply comprehend the universe in its entirety. Science is a journey to identify this very fact, the ability to understand that we cannot understand.”  All this reached a climax when the bell rang and the Professor walked out of the class without a word into the corridor of chaos thinking all the while. A true physicist!!!! The guy who created all this furore was Shankar.

Confused I was, amidst the frenzy,

To distinguish between truth and falsehood,

The right and the wrong,

As the wise say, you are born to realize to never be born again,

Learn to unlearn, struggle to survive,

                    Comprehend the incomprehensible……..

Chapter 4: My Father: Entrepreneur, an Incessant Lover...

It was the fag end of February. While my 2^nd STD end exams were fast approaching, my father went hunting for his next business venture. I genuinely believe that my father is one of those Bill Gates or Buffet or the Ambani type. The only difference is he didn’t make so much money. To quote a few similarities, he didn’t do his schooling (heard Dhirubhai Ambani is just 3^rd STD pass (pass or fail who cares)), didn’t do his engineering (while Bill Gates was thrown out in between for low grades from Harvard, Buffet’s application was rejected). I am pretty much sure that I would have probably been in one of those biggest mansions shaking hands with Gates, Buffet, Tata or Ambani every other day, signing deals worth thousands of crores, making speeches to the board of directors to just do the things I wanted, (and probably politics also in the long term??. Ok lets just stop fantasy here), had I known some of these stories before my 2^nd STD final exams. But God had other plans (or was it my father?). Also my father lacked a few qualities these people had, which some might argue as the edge they had over my father (The ‘scholars’ just want a chicken’s hatched egg’s leftover(s) to prove that we are wrong and their theory is a treatise).

My father is a businessman and the business I am talking about is a Baker’s shop. Yes, the famous Iyengar’s Bakery. This was his second attempt, since he had given up the same due to a spinal cord surgery four years earlier. Nevertheless, we were the masters in the art of baking and so not really too much risk was involved. Since huge competition already existed in Bangalore, he went searching for a new place to take-off. Having gone round the state and a few other states, he finally chose a place called Kothacheruvu, a small village in Andhra Pradesh (I think this is what people call business trips today or at least go for a trip in the name of business). This is probably called identifying the market in managerial terms, which my father had just like the bigwigs I mentioned earlier. Once he started his business, he also started selling beverages, chats and snacks (expansion of business??). Though his Telugu was bad, started learning by conversing with people (he in fact sent me to a Telugu medium school too). And I heard it is called adaptability to the necessary environment culturally, economically (he sold all his products at a price we Bangaloreans would have envied). But there are quite a few things that he didn’t possess, which probably made him what he is today. We didn’t patent the products, say the cakes, pastries, buns etc (unlike Bill Gates did for (‘his?’) Microsoft). We neither copyright protected our methods, when we came up with the best products. And finally, we didn’t apply for a trademark registration; say for the Iyengar’s brand. Seriously, just as Nike or Puma is the name you go after if its apparels, Iyengar's is the name for baked products. For more details, please visit any of our outlets in Bangalore or outside, by just searching on Google. So, in totality my father didn’t know how to monopolize on his business venture and hence he probably failed in reaching greater levels of success and money making abilities.

But, after seeing him for long and having developed the ability to think, I have come to believe that my father’s principles were way beyond these worldly aspirations. Interestingly, not just my father but the entire community of bakers, probably are ‘the Ubuntu’ type. They believe in a free world, just like the Linux guys. They provide joy by giving great quality food and don’t even claim the accolade that comes along. They are all humanitarian giants. Jokes apart, the only problem is that charity is still not visualized as a plausible business model (Seriously, the way the world is going, I start thinking that some day even charity will turn itself into some form of business with all these Harvard and IIM guys out there to suck money even from empty thrash bins).

Coming back to the main stream, I was pretty much happy that my exams would be skipped due to this shifting. But, my mother was very much convinced that education is the only precious jewel, bereft of theft, while my father wanted his son to be provided with the best of facilities and environment to achieve the goals (whether his son had a goal or not is altogether a different issue).  It is quite normal that a married woman thinks in terms of money (precious), gold (jewelry) and safety (theft) about education while a philosopher has different perspective to it altogether. So I had to sit through addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, poems, rhymes, computers, kaccha and pucca houses, etc before the day arrived. With all this preparation mentally, my mother was actually protecting me physically by way of cough syrups, sweaters (its amazing that students get fever and lose health during summer, actually considered to be the healthiest season), monkey caps etc. (My mother would have scored a hundred even in her sleep had she given my exams.) And so, I finally wrote my exams well (lets not get into a argument over the definition of well. Also I am playing safe by saying wrote well, not scored well!!!).  And on the day I finished my exams, I saw a huge truck in front of our house, being loaded with all the furniture, utensils, television sets, clothes, cupboards and much more.

Finally, we were moving out of our place, our very own state. Probably a warm welcome awaited us in the new place. Just before closing this chapter, I have little thought. My father was a contented rickshaw driver before this new journey began. The only reason he changed his profession was to facilitate better support for my education. The love that every father showers on his child is but natural. But to see them struggle to make way for our dreams, sacrifice their interests for our upbringing, reminds me of beautiful little story:

My father used to play with my brother and me in the yard.  Mother would come out and say, "You're tearing up the grass."  "We're not raising grass," Dad would reply.  "We're raising boys."

Chapter X: A random piece from the middle

“Please be seated”, he said. “So, tell me how is everything going?” 

“Quite normal si…………” Just then a phone rang in the hall. “Yeah Stella, tell me………… Ok, I’ll look into it……… fine…… and make sure I don’t get any calls for the next half an hour… yeah…… Thanks.”  And then looking at me, “Sorry, now go on. Is it………… still……… there………?”

“I am afraid it’s a yes sir.”

“How often?”

“Twice or thrice may be sir, I am not sure. But more when I need it the most……”

“And your response?”

“Genuinely speaking I feel better sir. My problems are solved instantly.”

“Have you tried to hold back?”

“I try a lot of times. But the problems grow complex and I am stuck in it. But, the moment I allow it, they seem to disappear”

“Still on the course?”

“Mostly yes sir, though I miss out on some days inevitably”

“For god’s sake please complete the course without discrepancy. You don’t seem to understand the consequences of your actions. And exercise restraint. I know it’s difficult initially, but never impossible. Slowly avoid the dependency.”

“I’ll sincerely try sir………”

“And is it really true that you don’t have anyone who can come and talk on your behalf………………… It becomes greatly difficult when I have to talk everything to you.”

 “Sh…………Sorry sir, I’ll see what I can do about it. I think I can get someone the next time.”

“Well then, keep in touch. Let me know if there is anything unusual. And call me for help at any time. And you better get someone the next time you are here”

“Thank you sir……” and rose from the seat.

                                                ***********

Chapter 2: My First Memories…….

Disclaimer:

Given the fact that you have chosen to pick this book from the Novel section of some book stall makes you all the more entitled to the rubbish in the rest of the book. Any consequences, whatsoever and howsoever related to this book is definitely purely coincidental and has got nothing to do with me or the book directly or indirectly. I seriously pity you………… Hope you live to read the last page of this book and many others.

Hello everyone, I am Srinivas Iyengar. I am a Hindu Brahmin coming from a moderately orthodox family. I can go on about myself for pages together, but right now, I‘ll restrict that to a few lines for the simple reason that I have rest of the book for that boring stuff. To characterize myself, I would say I belong to a herbivorous, god-fearing (more so when its human beings), middle class family. Of late, though the critics are seriously pondering over the issue that ‘is it really ethical to address Brahmins as herbivorous any longer?’ I can stand out as an exception. To the older generation of disappointed Brahmins, I would say “Relax grand and great grand dads. Change is the law of the universe. Evolution is the way ahead. Who knows we might have someone who is courageous, fearless finally in the Brahmin community too…………”  

When I sit back today and think about everything in the past, I seriously don’t remember much. But, there are a few patches all over the place, which have been etched so deep into my memory; it looks fresh even after 20 years of my humanly existence. This particular incident goes back to a time when I was in my 2^nd Std. There were three sections A, B and C and I belonged to the C section. Though there were rumors that the students were put to different sections based on their intellectual capability starting from A with the best to C with the obvious, I will neither accept nor deny it. I loved going to theatres to watch movies and didn’t miss an opportunity when a new movie arrived. My parents took me to almost every movie that came to the near by theatre. I was always mesmerized by the antiques of the hero in the movie and on our way back, I would try out a lot of stuff that he did seamlessly on the screen. A lot of his actions, reactions and many more attributes would be visible in me for the next few days because of my sub conscious fascination for it. There was one particular girl called Shilpa (a lot of S’s?) in the class. I watched a love story probably on the previous day and he was on me the following day. May be Shilpa resembled the actress. May be not; may be I thought so. I wanted to tell the same ‘three word line’ to her just like the way it was told in every other Karan Johar’s movie. But my genetic configuration made me fundamentally fearful for any such daring acts. Seriously, I don’t fear a situation because I want to, but because it is built into my ‘Brahmin DNA’. And so, I picked a book of mine and wrote ‘I love you Shilpa’ on the hard bind and covered the wrapper back.

Weeks passed by, or probably months; I don’t remember. The effect had died down, the act forgotten, and the girl nowhere to be seen. My mother was seriously involved in bringing out lice from my hair while was busy flipping through some colorful book. The wrapper was torn a little here and there. She started scolding me about how I maintain my books. She started peeling the wrappers away from all my books. This actually irritated me and I was asking her to stop doing that. Unmindful of this entirely, she was on with her work. At one point, I angrily asked her to stop. This was exactly at the same time when she picked a new book and that book was ‘the one with golden line’ (Divine intervention is it?). And when she peeled it out, her jaws dropped……………She was lost in the starlit evening sky.That reaction on my mother’s face is still embossed in my mind.
Now, when I reflect on my act, I wonder what it was towards Shilpa.  Pure transitory fascination or sublime intoxication …………? I prefer to go with the former.

Chapter 1

“Sam, past it left”, Ravi was at the top of his voice. Samarth had decided to go for it and took the ball all the way to the goal post. They had a stiff defense, despite which Samarth made it almost there. And just when he was about to seal it, the goalie moved violently in his direction. With the kind of reputation he had, he could have gone for it on his own. But, just before the goalie slid his legs to push the ball away from him, he passed it on to his left. Ravi, who was all waiting, just shoved it in at the right time. The match ended in a draw and the team had a big sigh of relief.

On the sidelines, Shankar got up from the seat and shared wireless high fives (transmitted along the thin air) with the players on the ground. “Srini, they saved our faces… we drew it for the first time with Comp Sci guys……” Oblivious to everything that was happening, I just said,”Shankar, I am planning to write a novel. What do you think?” He sure didn’t see this coming, though quite recently he was irritated with my long silence breaks and total ignorance of the things happening around. “What?!!!” his instantaneous reply. I got up from the seat and started walking. Shankar came towards me and then corrected “Sorry Srini, I was just not really expecting this. Why don’t we talk about it over the dinner?” “Over the dinner, Ruchi Parota Corner, the bill is on me.” I said walking away, since he wanted to spend some time with the team and was not ready to come along.

With half the parota over even before the sabji arrived, Shankar was in no mood to listen. But, the obligation of me paying the bill left him with no choice. “I am planning to write a novel. What do you think?” straight on the point. “Why?”, with his finger then working its magic on the tongue to salivate on the remnants of the stuffed aloo stuck on the edges. Then on seeing my face and sensing the seriousness of the situation, he immediately made eye contact and said, “I mean what is it about? And why do you want to write?” Fundamental, I thought. He sensed my itchiness and then finally modified it to “Ok, chuck that. Just tell me what is it that you are going to write?” “My experiences, may be more precisely my afterthoughts on everything that has happened in my life” I replied quite confidently. “?” was the reaction on his face. His face blurted, ‘what is so b*@%#$ interesting in your life?’ while his mouth cluttered “Ok …. Ok I get it……, Nice… nice…”

      I paid 84 bucks for this ‘nice… nice…’ from him. We left the parota corner at around 12 midnight. “Why?” I was still thinking. The ‘?” look still incomprehensible. I began wondering if his 'nice... nice...' actually referred to my idea or the stuffed aloo parota………

Preface Of My Novel : Well, I Think..........

Until the year 2011, I have always been any other guy who was interested in reading a lot of novels. With the Famous Fives and Secret Sevens in the beginning, Hardy Boys and The Harry Potters at the secondary level and Dan Brown’s at the senior secondary level, I should say I loved every author at that age. I fell in love with RK Narayan’s classical literature in the mean time. They had an additional quality of being an all time, all age readability. The English Teacher and The Guide were two exceptionally good books among others that inspired me. All that I would do was, just sit back and appreciate their work.

          I happened to come across the Chetan Bhagat’s ‘Five Point Someone’ and Tushar Raheja’s ‘Anything for You Ma’am’. And I read it in my prime youth and was just taken aback by the beauty of simple writing yet being extremely interesting. This inspired me to actually think of writing a novel someday, or at least dream of it. I have made my earnest attempt in writing something that would probably connect with a lot of us. By the end of the process of writing such a book, we develop a sense of detachment towards its success. (Or at least that’s what Sharukh Khan says before his movie release….) The reasons for this has got nothing do with spirituality but everything to do with the inability to predict the audience. So, I leave it to you to either keep me in the business or go on with something else in life. My publisher has already given me my first check though…..

Note to all publishers and copyright owners:  I have taken the liberty of using a lot of names and the novels in my introductory page. I really don’t know how many of them are copyright protected or anything close to that. Since I have not much clue on what could be protected and what not, please spare me for this page. I was just trying to be modest. Despite all this, for people who are obsessed with suing me, please file your application in the High court of Karnataka. Genuinely, I can’t travel thousands of miles to be screwed by some lawyer for copyright law enforcement.