Coding is an act of faith.

All of a sudden lights went off and the hot summer night seemed nearing him. The dark glued, the sweat enveloped; the trails of little past lost. Trickles of sweat, his own sweat, came out not after a heavy toil but…just came out, made their way from every ups and down, every curve, every possible bending of his body, going nowhere…still going, like the trails of his past. Going nowhere…still going!

He moved sideways. Their entire course changed. He could control the flow of his sweat. But his past? Nothing could move his past, unyielding past, a stubborn sap, his past. Even the Dark – the great egalitarian – now, when the electricity is gone, with his own sweat drowning him, with his eyes turned mute and deaf, this Dark, this indifferent Dark is hiding everything from every other thing – could not hide it.

But it pacified it. Helped him in deferring the real confrontation. So, he loved the Dark. He loved what it made out of him. Made out of her. She was more ‘mine’ while in dark, he thought. The other truths, the other men, lay cornered. He loved it enveloping him, his existence, his love, everything. It was his ally. It hid his enemies. It was his friend.

He asked her once, “Do you love dark?”

“Nahin,” she replied, “I love the sunrise, the sunset.”

“But, after the sunset, it’s all dark. Isn’t it?”

“May be…whatever, I don’t like it.”

She probably misunderstood the Dark, saw it as a cover to the light, to the future of her, to the possible paths of her, but not as a balance, not as a friend, not as a pacifier, not as an ally.

He tried to make her understand. “It’s pessimistic,” she said.

“Seeking peace is pessimism? After all the fighting, a desire to return home is pessimism? Returning to your loved one…is it pessimism?” His confusion – ah! the confusion. What does he think, that Dark is his home, his lover?

Silence!

The eternal silence. They say, words never get lost. Uttered once, uttered for all. But only words, not an utterance devoid of words. Not a gaze of her deep oneiric eyes. Not a tender movement of her svelte fingers against him. Not a light brush of her silky hairs on his face. They are not the words, they will be lost. But silence? It will remain. They are wrong, when they say, the beginning happened with a sound, ohm. It must have been the silence. The uncontaminated sound.

Between them, there was no contamination, no pollution. Between them, there was no sound, no word. Only little vibrations. Only little love.

She moved sideways. He listened to the ruffles, imagining the wrinkling crease of the bed sheet under her, cloths around her, hairs, falling on the pillow, layers in layers, like the stratum of river flow, violent, enraged, yet serene, calm.

She hissed, Ani, sounding dreaded.

Dread of what, he thought, of the Dark, of him, of their connection, of what? He couldn’t figure out except palpable quotient of fear.

She continued, “I like dark when I glimpse rays of hopes, serenity, calmness, when it supports me after a long tiring day. But it’s dubious, Janus-Faced, scissoring you from both sides, it takes away the sun light, I hate it then, it blanks my vision, I hate it then, it takes you away from me, I hate it then.”

“Dark is dubious, manipulating, like men. It is human.” He replied.

“I love holding your hands in dark, walking in a blind sea with you beside me, my head on your shoulder, my fingers holding yours, and you taking me away from…”

“…familiarity.” He finished.

She looked up at him, ensuring; now for the light had come she could see what his eyes held in themselves. Light brought back the reality. Fiction lay back. With familiarity returning back to them, they would now feel safer, at home. Unfamiliarity tempts you, but doesn’t retain you for long.

The tempting of unfamiliarity was not yet done. Some stones were still undone. Now perhaps was the time to tackle those unfamiliarities, to turn those stones upside down.

“Who did you write your poems for?” She asked, gasping on the first word, releasing on the last. In a kind of an ancient rhythm, poignant, concerned, ready for the answer, whatever.

“For myself perhaps…for none perhaps.”

“You mean that there is no girl behind them?”

“No”

“I thought…I…anyways…”

“No. nothing.” He replied curtly, smashing those stones back to conceal the real point.

“The past, future and the ‘present’ all can exist together.” Mr. Ashok Kaul, director of the movie Bhagmati, said to me.

He read my earlier posting on the same topic and was impressed so much so that he called me up to clarify some of my primitive doubts about the movie. And he did clarify it. What I didn’t understand earlier was ‘the fundamental premise of the movie’ that the past, future and the present all can exist together.

I know this is hard-to-grasp-concept. But, for a moment, shed your framework, your boundaries, your physical margins, and think: what is time? And how do you calculate it? If there were no ‘time’ would you have any past, or any present, or even any future?

This man, Director Ashok Kaul, had a real mature thought before he went further into making a movie out of it. The girl who seemed to be the reincarnation of queen Bhagmati wasn’t actually a reincarnation, because at the same time, the queen Bhagmati also lived, in some other time frame – in Stephen Hawkin’s word, a conflict between two time-frames – and both, the girl and the queen, meet each other, in the conflict zone. The queen is about to die, after living a happy life with the one she loved the most; and the girl is about to find the love of her life. The king, Quli Qutub Shah, sitting by the bed, staring at his dying love, talks to the girl and urges her to let go of her reluctance and live a life. Living is the most difficult thing.

This was a little confusing at first. Later, I took it somewhat abstract. Then, after talking to the Director, and after he elucidated the concept, and the basic premise, I understood it.

And today, I re-watched the movie and everything seemed to fall on places.

He was right. It’s all in our own brain; all the limitations are only in our brain.

This was not physics; this was metaphysics.

Yesterday, I watched ‘Banaras – a mystic love story’. Here was a babaji, played by Nasir, died a hundreds years ago, but the main protagonists of the movie could see him, and converse with him. The past and the present together lived in unison. And they created a future.

But both movies didn’t click. Why?

“May be, because the movie was made for a target audience and couldn’t reach them; may be, because the movie was vilified by the word of mouth, may be it was done intentionally; may be, the movie couldn’t explain itself properly…” the Director said.

My solutions:

1 >> If a book was written, I mean a melodramatic sort of book, before releasing the movie, making the target audience understand the basic premise, things would have improved. In a book, you can say things more easily – words are more puissant than anything under the sun.
2 >> If the movie was made in English, the untargeted audience could have been separated out, and with little marketing things would have improved.

I understand that, like a book, a movie – at least of such kind – is a very personal thing. Made for oneself, for similar souls, not like family drama for the masses! But still, if no one reads what you have written; your efforts are wasted, ignored. The worst thing to face in this universe is ignorance. Either love me, or hate me; never ignore me.

This movie has stood for the ‘past’ which we are ignoring for so long.

There is so much to write on it. But I am at a loss of words. Some ideas are better not be explained, since they need the first hand experience.

Not everything can be written down on a paper and read by others.
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It was very nice, and enlightening to talk to a man of such pure, mature and grave thoughts.

Thanks for calling Ashok.

Sometimes I wish I could…Turn back time
Impossible as it may seem…But I wish I could…So bad….
Quit playing games with my heart…With my heart.

- Backstreet Boys

Who plays with your heart isn’t always your adversary; but since your heart wants to be played upon, they play games with you, your heart.

Sometimes, in life, you confront a moment wherein you find yourself unable to stand your battle and you flee; the moment wherein you give up everything that you could ever have owned; the moment where nothing seems to be of importance. Your values, principles, ethics, morals, the pillars of your existence wilt away and suddenly you are left alone, fogged by a stark loneliness you realize that the battle you were fighting wasn’t meant for you.

How do you cope up with it? How do you rekindle your ‘soul’?

I have always said that you are not supposed to fight every battle, some you got to leave, some forget. But how to decide which one to pick, which to leave? I never knew the answer. Perhaps, that’s why I could never finish my own battles.

Every time, I find myself amid the fierceness, I tend to doubt my own reasons and succumb to sideways, and few moments later, the battle gets over, and then I repent that only, if only for a moment more, had I endured I could have won.

I, then, resign and wink at my life, nonchalantly, indifferently, and lay sideways, meanwhile people stroll ahead past me. I don’t curse them, I don’t blame them, I just lay there, on the sideways, indifferently, apathetically.

I have been so cruel to myself, all these years, how can I now ask for anything from my life…ask it to not to be cruel to me…how can I…ask it to bestow me with possibilities, with chances, with battles, with life, with love…oh…how can I?

Let my life go the way I have shaped it. Let it treat me the way I have treated it. Indifferently. Irresponsibly.

I would not ask for love, I would not ask for life.

I had left my life dreaded, lone, in the darkest of hours, now it has abandoned me of the lightest of pleasures of the moments.

Do I have any right to complain?

No. I guess, no.

Not sure! As always.

I don’t know what had tempted me to dig into the world of photography. As yesterday I was reading ‘A history of god’ by Karen Armstrong, I realized the importance of ‘displaying-art’ in the evolution of god, thus religion, thus faith, and thus society. The idea was important. ex nihilo nihil fit…! (Nothing comes out of nothing.)

So, they had a waste mess of water and mud in the beginning from which the Gods started to evolve, in pairs, each superior to their ancestor.

And they made the temples for themselves.

The masses perfectly knew that the temples were made by men – though in presumptuous belief that their temples were the divine replicas of those in the heaven – but associating them with the divine forces helped in endurance of their creative manoeuvre.

From there came the concept of divine association. And art became an endeavor closest to those divine forces.

Art…! What is an art?

In an article in The Hindu, 2nd April 06, titled ‘A vision for our arts’, the author Shakti Maira buys into the Korean view of art, and talks about how that can be incorporated in India and Indian definition of art. She herself is a contemporary artist. She compares a Korean bronze figure “The pensive Buddha” with “Mona Lisa” and accuses the lack of popularity of Asian arts in the world, for its lesser recognition. She endorsed Korean law that requires commercial buildings to spend a percent of their budget on the arts. She quotes from the their Minister of Culture:

“…the real art cannot be found in museums and galleries, but in the way we experience our daily life … the real nature of an artistic experience may lie in a process where a human being, as an organism, responds and adapts to the environmental and recognizes his surrounding into culture…”

She goes a little further and digs out even more of Korean history, and their legendary emphasis on art, when she cites Kim Koo – Korean equivalent of Mahatma Gandhi:

“… I do not want my nation to become the richest… most powerful…the only thing I desire in infinite quantity is the power of highly developed culture…”

Koreans are definitely doing a good job in the fields of art, but can we really learn from someone how to do arts? Can you really learn to write fiction, unless you have an imagination? Can you really paint something, unless you are at home with colors? Can you really make potteries, unless you have those adept, gifted fingers? I agree, they run schools and crash courses and everything to lure people, but do they really make someone an artist? They do shape, hone naïve people, but only those who have an inherent penchant for art.

This is something very, very deep in us. We can’t learn it, we can only ameliorate it.

Better to let Korea go its way, we shape our own.

However, as far as technicalities of art are concerned, it can be taught. Like they teach photography! And if it fails, you can always rename it to ‘aesthetic modern art’. Funny? But, not ‘funny ha-ha-ha’.

Anything you can dare to shoot, only make it a little contemporary, little fleshy, little dark, and people would love it. If not, then improvise some spiels to go with the snap. Sort of drools with the content! And you are through.

So, with all this yesterday, today I thought of doing a little research upon ‘the history of Photography’. And see, what I got. The first link ‘google uncle’ came up with was of ‘pure beauty magazine’ – a delusory porn site, camouflaged behind the modern art, cache lined: “where the body says what words cannot”. Interesting! I thought so and went in.

It had a list pf photographer, models, their vital stats, interviews of leading fashion designers, latest fads, clothing vogues, and then as if to cleanse the space with incense of intellect, they had a section: “history of photography”.

It went something like this:

A man named de la Roche (1729-1774), in his work entitled ‘Giphantie’, wrote a tale wherein it was possible to capture images from nature and imprint them permanently on a canvass. This was probably the first confrontation – though in imagination only – of humans with the science of photography. The term came from Greek words light and writing, first coined by Sir John Herschel in 1839. Since then billions of photographs have been taken, most of them are of women since they emblem the beauty that drives men behind the camera with a passion to capture something sensuous, something eternal. And nothing is more eternal than a nude woman, in all her pureness, sensuality, provocation, love, passion, creation, and the nature of primal existence. Greece had nude statues dating from 570 BC.

If we can go to the museums to see it, even the most stimulating, offensive piece of it, why can’t we accept the nude photography in our otherwise mundane lives? Because it’s the very basic in us, the very nature of our existence, that we deny it? Because we are ashamed of it, of ourselves? The site argues.

Well, this column certainly left me in a confused state. And all that I had thought of art was challenged.

Isn’t it itself an art then? Different, challenging, demanding, avant-garde!

Perhaps, what makes you feel at home is an art for you. Be is writing, painting, sculpting, orating or even coding, programming, engineering, everything is an art, since everything demands you to be different, aesthetic. Everything demands for your heart, and where your heart is, there your destiny is, your art is.

That’s the personal form of art. And art as a sellable commodity is nothing but a mélange of a confused brain.

A heavy flesh, garnished with little brain, does sell. And that’s what today’s art is.

“What is it that keeps you tickling all the time?”

“Prospect.”

A stare. A confusion. A blank.

‘Lust is only skin deep; love is profound.’ They say in holy books.

You lose your sight, your vision along the path, but only if you retain the burning flame, retain the fire in you; you will reach your end. But how to keep that flame flickering? How to keep it alive?

“With a belief in your future, in your prospect, you can segue from nadir to zenith like you do in a roller coaster, smoothly, easily. And this keeps me on.” I smiled.

She winked at me, confusion flailing in her eyes, fingers glued together, hairs brushing against the vortex wind by the fall, face straight, lower lip part between her teeth part dropping outside, and the ecstasy drove me awry. Isn’t it her black, kohl eyes, her svelte gesture, lost countenance, divine beauty that steers me all the time? Isn’t it she, who keeps me on?

But truth is not always a truth, at least not always eligible for acknowledgement.

“Why are you staring at me like this?”

Because I loved her. Because I lusted her.

Love? or lust?

What’s the difference?

‘Lust is only skin deep; love is profound.’ They say in holy books.

She moved to gape at water falling steeply from the hill, all the way down to meet earth, happily, wistfully, obediently – destined to demise.

Like I do. To meet her.

Do I fall? Do I rise?

Or do I just travel at level?

“ah…Animesh. You and your thoughts. Now what is it?” she shot suddenly finding me lost in her revere.

“Nothing… The body and the soul. Are they really apart?”

“Yes. Body is only skin deep; soul is profound.”

The circle is complete.

So body is lust; soul is love? Now, what drives me?

The body or the soul?

The lust or the love?

Paulo Coelho wrote:

The master says: “Write! Whether it’s a letter, a diary or just some notes as you speak on the telephone — but write!” In writing, we come closer to God and to others.

“If you want to understand your role in the world better, write. Try to put your soul in writing, even if no one reads your words — or worse, even if someone winds up reading what you did not want to be read. The simple fact of writing helps us to organize our thoughts and see more clearly what is in our surroundings. A paper and pen perform miracles — they alleviate pain, make dreams come true and summon lost hope. “The word has power.”

Enlightening..eh?

A sarkari (governmental) job secures you, protects you from asperities of life!

They said this. She believed this. Time passed by, I remained confused. She remained determined to get me a sarkari job, I to chuck off any such predicament.

She wanted security, I cherished insecurity, believing that “the best comes only at extremes”, and “extremes only when you have something to lose” and security stagnates you, leaves nothing to your fear, unless you go all the way round.

“DRDO! Amazing na…” She proclaimed – when we met after the long final semester – when I had told her about my campus placement scenario.

“…you didn’t take its test.” She turned red, gaping at me as if I were a thorough moron, incapable of understanding security, love, or life. Nothing! Capable of nothing, I was just a moron.

“No. I didn’t want to.” I said straight-forwarded, stole my face from her constant stare and fixated my mind over the Chinese noodles.

That one job, made me lose her. That one job, one sarkari naukri. And you say it protects.

I didn’t opt for it, meant I didn’t understand it – and didn’t at all value it: security. Everyone out here is on a constant hunt for security, for safety, protection, defense, guard, shield. Except me. I abandoned it and weeks later, was abandoned by her.

She made it to a sarkari daftar (Government office) today. Must be happy!

I am happy for her. I want to share it with her, the way I could have, only if things weren’t changed in the following years.

She is secure. She got what she had envisioned to get, of course via me then, vicariously, and now on first hand. I was useless then. I am useless still.

What I want…I don’t know. Do I want her?

No. I can’t want her.

“Do you know what you want from your life?”

“Yes…I do.”

“Money. Fame. Name. This. That…eh?”

“No, I can live without money; what’s more important is ‘name’, the identity.”

“And how do you define an identity?”

She is mute.

I continue. “I guess it’s a kind of recognition, something that people identify you with.”

Silence.

“A frame across the real you. Isn’t that an identity?”

“yeah…may be.” She stuttered after a long. Thinking takes the better of you. And renders you abstract in no time.

“So, which frame you want?”

“Look, it doesn’t matter which frame I am caged into, as long as I love doing what I am doing, and I do it in the best possible way.”

A stare. She makes me cold all through, with just one stare, just one. And I go numb, voiceless, motionless, clueless.

Questioning life. That’s what appeals me most these days. Different. That’s what I want to be. Iconoclast. That’s what I want to be called.

And I want her to understand how hard I am trying, how focused I am. I want her to see how am I writhing inside – how am I controlling my energies that threaten to rip open me every time I try concentrating them upon something – how I am living in truce with myself, the dangerous war just a moment ahead. I want her to know that I am not weak.

Life’s plans, its expectations never meet the expense life demands.

And you die meeting ends.

And you just harp over the identity, all your life, the recognition you want to earn.

Dreams never meet lives.

“What do you want from your life, Animesh?” The barrel is now towards me.

“Nothing…” I choke, grope for definitions that she had denied, for words lost in dictionaries, in brains of men, and with a little effort, and a poignant stoke, “…I only want to kill the anonymity that has fogged me.”

Once upon a time, when I was still a kid, life was easy to me. Little did I ask of life, little did it charge me.

Now, things are different.

I want a hell lot of things. And I have nothing for mortgage. How will I do it? What would I put for security? Luck or toil?

I don’t understand. She doesn’t understand. And life goes on, time passes through.

“I want to become a writer. Few months back, I had started writing a novel, I worked upon the synopsis, prepared the blue print, wrote some hundred pages. Few publishers were interested too…but I couldn’t finish. I abandoned it in middle.”

She gaped at me; perhaps, thinking how weak I was, and that’s not true, in letting go of things, of my own decisions, own convictions and…my own future.

Doesn’t life do same to you? You never call life weak. Life simply loses the belief in you. I lost my belief in my book. And I quit.

‘Girls want men who are focused, passionate.’ DP‘s famous sermon, ‘so, if you are not, pretend to be one.’

Pretensions…ah! To pretend, you need to know the difference between the ‘original’ and the ‘fake’. You need to know yourself. Do I know myself?

…yes…perhaps no.

I steer the topic into a totally different territory. “You are very normal. Everyone I see is abnormal these days, trying to pretend to be someone different than oneself. Totally different! They would ride a roller coaster just to prove that they are not scared. They would commit their love only to prove…something, I don’t know what, why, but they do it…Tell me, can you really prove that you are in love? That you understand someone?”

Silence. It is now perpetual between us. I think she is immersed into my words; she thinks…I am not sure…perhaps…how abstract, or stupid I am. Either way things are set and done. And no words are needed.

“…and I appreciate the fact that you are normal. The best thing anyone can have.”

And I look at her, chuckling.

No answer.

A programmer is a playwright – he writes to create, to define and to shape the course of the play to be staged upon the lousy computer. Like Shakespeare’s protagonist, who cavorts over the confusion of ‘to be or not to be!’ he bobs, up and down, for his variables ‘to exist or to perish’. He never stops, never falls prey to namby-pamby attraction, never ceased to venture further, and never ceased to tackle another. He embodies the ONE – the only one rather. He creates variables, bestows them with power, defines logic and curtails their behaviour, collects the garbage and recycles the harbour. He stands by the lost, renews their stint and hence behaves like a father. He allows a nature-like existence of the tiny electronic memory, shaping it to pasture at one moment while translating it into woods at the next.

Variables beget variables; processes generate processes as the journey commenced. Wrangle crept in, peace ceased out. Brouhaha of the rat-race capturing all available aural frequencies; un-comfort growing up; the stage sweating high, BUT he is refrained out. Out the game! Out of the action!

He sits amid the cacophony, indifferent, unattached and unmoved, like a quiet spectator – silently observing the course, mapping it bit-by-bit with the pre-decided one, comparing it minute-by-minute with the pre-formatted one; jotting down mis-behaviours of the stage, mal-functions of the variables and faults committed by himself.

Welcome to the matrix!

This is his world. Call it a program, call it a collection of bits, call it a hierarchy of electronical relation, call it a kind of camaraderie emotion, OR call it a matrix; assume it – either real or virtual, deny it – neither amateur nor practical. Do whatever you feel, feel whatever, to you, is of appeal. He would hardly be affected. Such a person he is!

But why is he so indifferent, so stringent, so haggard, and so callous? Is this his own lineament, or has he imbibed it from someone? OR, has he developed it on his own as consequences of poignant experiences? Does he, really, not care emotions? Does he, really, not live relations?

Relations are cohesive forces that work partly upon understanding and largely upon commerce. It is a bond that ideals upon completion, but practices upon extortion.

He lives in the world – supposedly perfect, with all his imperfection. He confronts emotions, he combats relations. He understands the trap, the predicament. And above all, he realizes his own inability to brave the cage. He, being the variable of universe, has seen, has monitored, all through his life, his own course, his own itinerary, his own actions, his own responses – often set against his consent. He has witnessed tough runs, difficult turns, rough lawns that would not have been so gruesome, only if, he had denied the force. But, how could he? He was not ordered such! He was not supposed to behave such!

He, like any other entity around, followed his ordeal, uttered his dialogues, lived his act, and behaved like another puppet. He fell into love, and felt bliss. He fell into relations, and felt delight. He fell into denial, and felt distrait. He harboured grievances, felt jealous and behaved sordid; he carried love, felt sublime and behaved concerned. His entire act, I mean entire, was pre-written. There was nothing for him to consent upon, nothing to dissent upon. This, the TRUTH has been understood by him in every possible way. Shakespeare had explained this truth as; “All the world is a stage, And all the men and women merely players!”

A programmer, or say Software engineer – a professional tag he carries, is a result of human evolution, backed by technology, abandoned by vociferation, that bestowed him with a critical ability to criticize, to analyze and to appreciate everything laid in and around him.

The world we live in is programmed and weaved so logically and so intricately that it appears evasive to most. This vagueness encrypts the message and the purpose of the finality. Very similar to it, a computer program is designed to entail a logical decisiveness. The two accord in architecture and hierarchy, but differ in power and reality. The soul of the world is the ONE, while the soul of the program is the programmer.

He, with his critical and probing vision, has succeeded in deciphering the purpose, the message – steganographed into the worldly bounds. And, hence understood the truth! Lot many people – before him – had tried to dissent their understanding over the same through oral and verbal means. They wrote text that became holy book; they spoke phones that became holy speech; they prescribed conduct that entailed into religion. Though, they might have known the fact, they might have learnt the truth, but it was only theory that they conveyed, it was only fantasy that they preached. The theory of unattached living; the fantasy of unmoved acting!

Be on the stage, act on the script
Cherish your being, relish your acting
Never high of possession, never low of succession,
For no cremation can cremate you further,
No begetting can reincarnate you another.
You are a mortal part of the immortal soul.
Your being is the proof of his being!
Your acting is an alibi of his writing!

Their less attained veracity succeeded upon people, time after time, generations after generation. The belief, that everything is understood, sustained – if not consolidated, but actions, that might have lead theory into practical, remained denied, inert and inactive. Words, only words, flew over time, seeking active intervention, scouring divine sanctification, until a programmer came and set a real – not virtual, and a practical – not theoretical, epitome of the essence that those words were trying to diffuse since long. Theorist may take consolation of being the maiden decipherer; BUT it is a programmer who not only decoded but enacted too and hence set an example to his fellow-beings.

His life, at the core is very simple. So simple that at first hardly would anyone find him interesting! There is a cycle, a continuous cycle, in the life of his. His day, commenced with a Boolean, ends up on a Boolean. Either true or false! Either if or else! It’s the program of his itinerary that shapes his codes, and sometimes the other way round. It’s the structure of his hierarchy that shapes his response, and sometimes the other way round. The metaphor predates upon both, the man and the machine! Man running the machine, Machine feeding the man. They have intrigued into each-other, learnt to exist together, and now harbouring the soul of survivor.

The lower is size of codes; the lower is the number of layers in it. Similarly, the poorer is the man; the lesser is his hierarchy, the lesser is his intricacy. His day starts with a command, ends up with a command. He works hard; using maximum resources of him, getting every bit of him fully exhausted; and finally gets terminated with a command. This is the cycle he follows – well defined, well argued, well patterned, and well established, like a small program.

Amid of his hectic and tightly scheduled life, how does he get time enough to contemplate over the philosophy, adequate to deliberate over the cogency? And If he is so great, then, why is he lost in the canopy? If he is so quirky, why is he still trapped?

He is a man of action. What he believes is what he does. He exemplifies the flawless world – that could not be realized; the perfect human behaviour – that is still veiled behind dark. But, beneath all prophecy, does he really exist? I mean, the person, a kind of a programmer we are talking about, really roams earth?

Well…, I am among those who belong to that, once rare ilk – because today every next person calls himself a programmer. Yes! I satisfy every characteristic, every aspect of his. I am vague, abstract and un-crafted; yet sometimes simple, straight and candid like learners’ “Hello World!” program. Both facets of mine cohabit together to sum up my life, each fighting for its share, each trying to dominate the other.

I am a social animal, not because I live in a society or I enjoy my routine life, but because I appreciate the flaws in and around me. “Ignorance may be bliss, but information is knowledge.” I don’t believe such! Everything has bliss! All it depends upon is the onlookers’ eyes. The ideology of being a programmer, however, has never touched me; I feel bliss in all my activity – when I muster things or when I shun things. Though, less often, I feel like identifying myself with my work, I do feel that what I am doing is something of greater concern. For example; I am challenging the imperfection of God’s world by writing programs, and hence creating a world within the world, that would be free from any mal-functionalities. Isn’t it a novel cause to live for? I am re-programming the age-old philosophy to launch its updated version. Isn’t it a novel cause to live for?

Today, with the advent of internet and other technologies that has its reach deep into people’s life, has there any novelty left in his life OR has he become a puppet of another puppet? World of internet is vague and virtual according to all possible definitions of reality. It has neither time nor space boundary! You own a space that doesn’t exist at all. You travel at a speed that exceeds all the limits set by classical or quantum physics. Wondering…! Well, this is a world within the world. But, the perfection – a commodity, once the most sought after thing in the programming world – is lost. This has come closer to the real world, it has left all its pristine traits, and it has shunned the hard-work and toil somewhere on its way.

Today’s programmer is no more the old one. He has become a social insect like everyone around. He works hard, very hard – but doesn’t know the purpose; he fights the opposition – but doesn’t know its finality; he exists – but doesn’t know what for? He is, now, just a next door commoner – aimless and senseless. All Sundays are now weekdays; all people are now variables; all events are now interrupts. Sermons are hypocritical now. Variables have started imbibing human traits; compilers have started behaving non-sense.

His world would rout… soon! His world would merge the soil… soon!
But, he has no ear to it. It’s nothing but an unwanted interrupt to him. Knock! Knock! Is any programmer alive there!