Death of a Man

Let's call him Paris. Paris is a thin, insignificant looking fellow whose speech is without inflection or any particular emotion. Any emotion displayed seems but forced. With a little stretch of imagination, one can imagine him being dissatisfied with his lot in life, one can imagine his disappointing childhood and his unfulfilled dreams. Paris smiles a thin tentative smile when he sees you, and mumbles a hello in a low enough tone, so that your possible lack of response could be attributed to your not hearing him. Paris is the person everyone describes as 'steady' and 'dependable', and cannot think of anything else nice to say. Everyone knows a Paris, or can at least identify with him, for Paris is very human, the accumulation of one's worst fears and insecurities.

The objective is merely to present some sort of background for Paris, so what comes next would actually seem as a logical continuation of thought, rather than simply the output of a morbid sense of humour. How would you expect Paris to meet his (untimely) end?

Before outlining the possibilities, one may safely cross out certain possibilities. For instance, one would not expect Paris to go down fighting defending all that is precious to him. Neither would one expect him to get into a drunken brawl and get stabbed. For this is simply not his style.

For retaining the entertainment value of the blog, we will also eliminate mundane ways of kicking the bucket. So, Paris will not be killed in an air-crash or of heart failure (unless it is caused by shock). However, there could be a way he would die in a car accident...

One would imagine Paris to be a law abiding fellow, who lives by the rules. He would carefully drive his car, staying well below the speed limit, earning the curses of his fellow drivers who want him to get out of their way. He would pay his insurance on time, and never dream of running a red light. So, imagine Paris's consternation when he waits patiently for the light to turn green before he starts his engine (Paris is environmentally conscious and switches off his engine at traffic signals) and crosses the road, only to see a truck speeding towards him from the cross-road.

Paris has just a split-second to act. Only if he brakes immediately, or floors the accelerator can he hope to live! What does Paris do? He uses the split second to glance up at the traffic light ahead to ensure that it is green, and that he is not the driver at fault. The truck crashes into Paris' car (a second hand Maruti 800, lovingly cared for) and sends Paris to a better place, and the car to a junk-yard. Still, Paris dies happy, knowing that he lived by the rules, and died by them.

Paris is also the kind of person who would kill himself if he were to get into debt, not because he's afraid of going to jail, but because he's terrified of his wife and what she would say. While Paris' wife (a shrewd and cunning woman, who's older than him, wears a lot of make-up and is slightly chubby) would probably take out a life insurance policy on him, making herself the sole beneficiary, she would not get the spoils as Paris would be conscientious enough to wait for the policy to lapse before killing himself. His creditors wouldn't get any of their money either, and his death would be a disappointment to everyone concerned.

I believe that the scenarios outlined above are the expectations people have of Paris. It is quite possible that in his death, Paris would do what he would have dearly liked to do when he lived, surprise everyone by his actions. When people learn of how Paris throttled his nagging wife and was shot when attempting to escape to Nepal, they would ask themselves, 'Did we really know Paris?'

No one would have known. No one could have known. It's also quite possible that Paris' death would make people wonder and ponder if they really know anyone at all, and send them down a downward spiral, and at rock bottom, with not an ounce of self-confidence left in them, they would become the Paris they once knew.

Therefore, in his death, Paris spawns new Parises, and the vicious cycle continues until all of humanity is destroyed when a disgruntled Paris nukes everyone and everything.

Insights on Human Behaviour

Any person worth their salt has a quest in life. King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, and the Monty Python troupe quested for the Holy Grail. Keen-eyed detectives of yore and the Powerpuff girls fight crime and the forces of evil. Most business school students have the slightly less high-minded, but nonetheless time-honoured quest of achieving footage while in college through means fair and foul, and making a lot of money after they graduate, again through means fair and foul.

After much consideration, I’ve decided that my immediate quest shall be that of finding out why humans behave the way they do. I will attempt to do this in a thoroughly rational manner, taking three situations that have occurred in my life recently and analyzing people’s responses to them. From this, I shall unreasonably draw conclusions about human behaviour and impose them upon the entire world population. I shall then achieve fame and fortune as a Master of Psychology, and my picture shall appear in the last but one page of Bangalore Times for a week, along with Deepika Padukone’s, as a part of a series of articles celebrating the achievements of Kannadigas everywhere.

Let us begin.

I study in IIM Bangalore. The academic commitments are rigorous and the competition gruelling. If you are a questioning sort of person, if there is a strong spirit of scientific enquiry within you, you will have no doubt questioned the relationship between the two. Are academic commitments rigorous on account of tough taskmasters that the barbed-wire chewing professors are? As a result of which there is intense competition? Or is it the other way round, the urge to go one-up on one’s fellow batchmates extreme enough to cause the entire hard-working spree management students tend to go on in the first place?

This question can be answered very simply. Are the professors at IIMB hard-faced, barbed-wire chewing, grim scholars renowned in their areas of expertise? Not really, atleast not all of them. This obviously leads to the conclusion that, to use a colloquial term popular amongst students everywhere, RG is the source of the rigorous academic commitments.

Drawing conclusions from this brilliant piece of analysis, we come to Lesson 1. The deep-seated desire in all humans to emerge triumphant, to rise above the morass we live in, is really why we live in the morass in the first place.

Allow that startling revelation to sink into your mind. We will move on to Experience number 2.

For the uninitiated, one reason why so many exchange students from numerous colleges, which no one in their right minds would have ever heard of, from France, Italy, Spain and other countries, come to IIM Bangalore, is to cop a feel of Indian Culture. While, most people are hazy about the whole culture thing, they may waver between yoga and kabaddi as true symbols of Indian culture, those at IIM Bangalore are a sight cleverer. They (the unnamed powers who run the institution), know that while the foreigners who come for a dose of India, don’t want too much of it. Just enough to tell their friends back home how wonderful it all is, and secretly vow never to come to India again. So, to relieve the monotony of traditional Indian life, L^2 (read L square) parties are organized at IIM Bangalore.

While this could be a Lesson in itself, my point is a different thing altogether. After long observations of the goings-on at the L^2 parties, one curious phenomenon that occurs is the ring system. Guys and girls form a ring and, to use the term loosely, dance. The life-span of a ring is proportional to the number of girls in the ring. If there are lots of girls, life is good. Once they start slipping away, what’s left is a bunch of guys jumping about together. Not cool at all. So, all that’s left to do is slink away shamefacedly, under the pretext of getting another drink. The ring thus breaks rapidly.

The important takeaway from the ring observations, which is in fact our Lesson number 2, is that humans are a gregarious species. They seek companionship rather desperately. Yet there is something within us, a sense of shyness perhaps, that prevents us from going after what we really want.

And the last, and most important (in my humble opinion) lesson.

Our placement season has just ended. Congratulations, you might say with a puzzled air, but isn’t it rather early for that? Yes, that is true, these are summer placements, for a two month internship next year.

I am not joking when I say that I’ve (had to, Lesson 1) put in more effort for the placements than for most courses. A significant amount of this effort has gone into eliminating white spaces on my resume. White spaces are those annoying things that are located after the end of a sentence. We were repeatedly taught that white spaces are a creation of the Devil, and good, respectable resumes had no place for Creatures of Evil. And hence the cry of war was heard resounding from block to block, and apart from a few exceptions, people took up the fight against white spaces with vigour.

Imagine our collective dismay, when we found that companies could not really care less about white spaces! There was very little one could do, can you imagine one going up to the company representatives and expressing his/her grievances about the company’s policy of indifference towards white spaces?

We had been spoon-fed what was, if not a lie, wasn’t really the truth either. And why did we believe it? Because it was something we wanted to hear, that we could actually do something to an unspectacular resume to make it look attractive. This brings us to Lesson number 3, humans are generally a gullible lot. We may laugh at the village simpleton, but most of us aren’t really much better.

And now my job is finished, the pearls have been scattered before the swine. All I have to wait for is recognition for the ground-breaking theories I have come up with, and my contribution to civilization is done. I shall then retire, happy, and hopefully rich, with a cut-out from a newspaper containing a picture of myself and Deepika as fond souvenir of my brief moment of fame.

An expert opinion on Modern Art…

Some ten years ago, I once saw a cartoon, called Top Cat, I think… where this particularly enterprising cat decides to make a lot of dough by selling modern art. Not much of an artist himself, he nevertheless manages to create a few masterpieces by tying a paintbrush to the tails of a few tortoises and letting them roam around on the canvas.

Now, for a very long time, (remember that I was young then…) I thought that this was how these paintings were painted. The better the paintings were, (the closer they resembled what they were supposed to resemble!) the better trained were the tortoises used, or so I thought…

It seems that I was incorrect. It turned out that people painted those… things… themselves. I’ve often wondered why modern art became popular all of a sudden. Perhaps art connoisseurs grew tired of paintings which appeared extremely realistic, and began encouraging deviations from reality. Slight distortions at first, I suppose, and slowly things began to get out of hand. Picasso and the Cubists were born… Eventually, artists became so bad… that they were considered to be good! And thus, modern art was born…

Well… it’s an interesting theory in any case, and I was leaning towards it when something else struck me… something that seemed more plausible…

There was this exhibition I went to in Bangalore the other day, where I was leafing through the catalogue, when I came across Exhibit 31: Lady in a Bathtub. Being the red-blooded teenager that I am, I hurried forth to inspect the work of art. However, modern art reared it’s ugly head…

I saw streaks of red and green, and hints of yellow in between… but there wasn’t a trace of a lady anywhere in that bizarre mix of colours. Neither was a bathtub for that matter… Deeply disappointed, I turned away. Nearby, there was this old geezer spouting his theories on art, so I joined the audience…

Modern Art, he informed us, was not a true representation of the object being portrayed. You bet it isn’t, I thought gloomily, my thoughts still on the unaccounted-for lady. One had to see underneath, he explained, to find what inspired the artist to draw… I was pretty sure of what inspired the artist, the tiny sticker at the top of the painting, proclaiming that (in the artist’s view at least) the painting was worth ten thousand rupees…

The tiny audience nodded along, though I did catch a look of bewilderment on a few of the faces… But evidently, this guy was an expert, and one just didn’t disagree with them.

Which brings us to this very interesting thought. What if the whole thing was a scam? What if some people started the whole thing as a joke, and gradually pulled the whole of the public in? Some big-shot proclaims Modern Art as a new genre of painting, and the whole herd follows. No one wants to look stupid, disagreeing with everyone else… And the thing ends up like the Emperor’s new clothes… on a much larger scale!

That’s it for now, I got a painting to finish and millions to make :)