It was about 11:30 AM and I was hungry. A2B wasn't far, but it was a bad time to go there. It was too late for breakfast and too early for lunch. But wait, don't they serve hot food all day? But wait, don't they prepare it before and keep warming it al... It was too much thinking. I decided to step in to the fair.
It was just another Saturday - my roomies and I got drunk the previous night and slept late. If not for the phone call from home, I would not have woken up until lunch. I couldn't sleep after the call. I was hungry. I tried waking up people around for breakfast. Then I realised that they were having the best sleep of the week. Having no clue what else to do, I did the only sensible thing I do when I am clueless - opened Facebook.
Sharadh Raja was attending the event "Scientilla '10 - The Largest Computer and Science Fair in Bangalore". I'd usually skim past these event notifications and look at who's liking who's what, but the only thing that made me take note of the event was that it was happening at Gordandas Convention Center. It was on the way to A2B. And A2B was just 15 minutes from home by walk.
The event description said that it was a "computer products cum robotics cum science fair with stalls for 3D games and other fun events". The 'robotics' part got me curious. Our final semester project in college was called "A three-finger some-word-I-forgot operated fragile-object gripping mechanism for a robotic arm" or something like that - I forgot the exact title. It was probably longer. Nudged by the possibilies of college-nostalgia and backed by some technical curiosity (yes, it hadn't died yet!), I made a mental note to visit the fair when I had nothing to do. And then, I realised I had nothing to do.
One cold-shower and 10 minutes later, I left home with parcel orders for lunch (3 curd-rice(s?) and 3 nimbooz(es?)).
The hall was large and not very crowded when I entered. I could see two rows of 10 ft by 10 ft stalls on both sides of the pathway and as it turned left at the end, I guessed there were more rows of stalls beyond. I immediately realised that the sights and sounds of the place was a welcome-break from the usual Saturday afternoons. I could faintly hear some gun-fire and car-crashes mixed with the voice of Shankar Mahadevan singing "Deeesi Gurrrl" with some Justin Bieber as well (Baybee, baybee, baybee oh!). It was a perfect cacophony of non-sense and I loved it. Most of the stalls were branded with trade-marked colors of various computer-parts and video-game manufacturers. I could also see a few undecorated stalls - possibly start-ups, who had pooled in all their savings just to put up a stall in order to get that one lucky break.
There were a few professional- or corporate-looking people eagerly listening to the representatives at the stalls (possibly college-students on weekend employment reciting what they were taught the previous day). There were other curious singletons like me staring open-mouthed at the artifacts on display. The families were clearly missing. Probably, they were saving it for the evening. I ventured in, trying not to get myself involved in any sales or marketing pitches.
I crossed a few bigger-than-the-usual-10ftX10ft computer-manufacturer stalls - an HP store, an Acer store and a smaller, eye-brow raising Notion Ink store. A robotic firm's (RazorBots Pvt Ltd) stall followed - they were showcasing assembly-line transportation robots, sewage and septic tank cleaning robots. Then there were a few software firms marketing "economic and maintenance-free" hospital and hotel management solutions. Amidst a representative's shouts of "No! No! Not so flat!" and "Slower! slower!", I saw two people trying their hands at testing a "ball-catching" robotic arm showcased by another robotic firm.
A few computer-dealers' stalls later, I had reached the end of the pathway. By this time, I had collected enough pamphlets to fuel a camp-fire for a night. The pathway u-turned and the next row seemed to be full of stalls for amusement. One stall claimed to "Take your 3D photograph! Walk-in and walk-out with a 3D mesh file of your image. You can use it to animate yourself using popular 3D animation tools or to upload it to MMORP games". Then followed a few gaming stalls filled with teenagers wearing football T-shirts and further there were stalls claiming to make you an expert animation artist in a year.
Though I carefully avoided people in the stalls, I did look at every demo video at every stall and eventually lost track of time. Finally, I had come to the end of the pathway of the second row. I saw that it was almost 1 PM and hastened myself to leave.
If not for the long-haired, middle-aged man dressed in an extremely brightly colored shirt (pink and yellow things that resembled mandelbrot sets on violet background) who reminded me of Peter Norvig's affinity towards colorful shirts, I would have crossed his corner stall thinking it was another boring software firm's.
I took notice of his stall and the man himself who looked like a tourist in Miami. He was engrossed in solving a sudoku puzzle in The Hindu with no care about who was passing by. Nobody paid any attention to his stall partly because it was in the corner and partly because it was very dull. The only interesting part about the stall was its name, or part of its name -
"K.M.D Brain Processing Pvt Ltd".
I approached the stall, curious to know what "brain processing" was.
The stall looked very small and, as I mentioned before, lifeless. There seemed to be a partition in the middle of the 10 by 10 stall with a curtained entrance leading to a rear chamber. The portion exposed to the public had no artifacts for display except for a few charts and posters explaining the portions of the brain and some tree-graphs connecting what looked like random words. There was one poster in the middle with large and bold letters that read "Know your thought boundaries! Rs. 100 only!"
I went closer and cleared my throat hoping to gain the man's attention. I noticed that the figures on his shirt were in fact Mandelbrot sets. He seemed to be about my dad's age and his shirt did not make him look any younger or cooler.
"Aha!" said the man and looked up at me with a smile, "Got him at last!". He then elegantly filled a square with an air of a man writing the last line of the proof of the Collatz conjecture. He then started talking to the puzzle, simultaneously filling an avalanche of other numbers. "You were hard, I tell you! Real hard! For a moment, I thought I would have to get help!"
A man who talks to sudoku puzzles! Interesting! He had still not taken notice of me. I cleared my throat louder this time and said "Excuse me".
"Oh yes!" he said noticing me at last, "What can I do for you?"
"Ummm. I'm just looking around. Ummm... What's this stall about?" Introductions are always hard for me.
"Oh yes!" he said and looked around his own stall, "The stall! Umm..." He seemed to be a little restless and neurotic. He gathered his thoughts and answered animatedly, "We are here to demonstrate our brain scanning and processing capabilities. We, at K.M.D, are creating a suite of products that deal with brain analysis. And, as a marketing and brand-building exercise, we are showcasing our first full-fledged product - The Perimeter 1000 as a demonstration of our capabilities. It is a device that can extract a person's thought boundaries."
"Oh!" I said, shaking my head back and forth and absorbed what he said. It clearly needed some dejargonising. "What do you mean by brain analysis? And I don't really understand what thought boundaries are."
"Oh yes! Thought boundaries!" he said trying to recollect some definition which he seemed to have previously framed, "Well, you see, every person's thoughts are limited. By "limitations" I mean that there are topics or subjects to which a person's thoughts are limited to. And every new thought a person has will always fall within these boundaries. And people do not realise this. They lead happy lives within these boundaries. They don't know that they are caught within certain boundaries and they do not make a consious effort to extend these boundaries. And that's what we do - we help people identify their boundaries."
"Hmmm" I said, shaking my head back and forth again. It sounded interesting, but I couldn't believe there were limits to one's thoughts.
"I never thought a person's imagination was bounded! That is quite hard for me to believe. What about creative-thinkers? playwrights? philosophers? People at Pixar? I always thought they were out-of-this-world!"
He smiled and said "You see, their boundaries are just wider than yours. But there is no exception to the fact that everyone's imagination is bounded. Some keep pushing their limits while many are just content with it and make the best out of it."
He seemed to have a point.
"But why would people need to know all this when they are happy with what they know?"
"That" he said with an emphasis, "is a question I cannot answer definitively. It could just be curiousity. Don't you want to know what your thoughts are limited to? Don't you want to know where you are lacking or where you can improve? Don't you want to know what you constantly think about? At the worst case, you might just learn something more about yourself! At the best case, it might actually help you break your thought boundaries and explore more." He then took the voice of a spiritual guru and mimicked a sermon, "Think about it! A leap of faith! A paradigm shift! A path to betterment!"
"But..." There was something that I could not express. I hesitated and then blurted out what struck my mind first, "This sounds like some pseudo-spiritual stuff. You know, like something out of a self-development book. Like Paul Coelho. Stretching boundaries and all."
"Paul Coelho is not self-help!" he retorted immediately with a smile, "But this isn't any of it. Well..." He got into a trance of contemplation and spoke to himself "How can I explain it to him better?" and said "Aha!". He pulled out a sheet of paper from a bag near his chair and gave it to me.
"This is our demo output. Take a look at it."
The paper contained a list of words that looked unfamiliar and random to me.
Poorni
Dhamu's wedding
Directorate of Public Health
Dr Rajkumar
Ranganayaki
Death
Narayana
K. M. Nivas
"These are the thoughts," he said quite seriously, "that define the thought boundaries of an old man who passed away two months after he took this test. If you notice, he knew he was going to die and he was constantly bothered about his property, his wife and daughter, his death-bed wish of his 53-year old son getting married and thoughts about the place where he worked all his life. I showed this to him and pointed out to him that he could read more instead of wasting precious time worrying about things beyond his control, but he said he was too old for anything new. Supposing you took the test, wouldn't you realise that you could have thought about a lot of other things beyond what you get in such a list?"
"Hmmm." It made me think.
"So, you want to give it a try?"
"No! I'm okay". I wasn't sure.
"Why not?"
"I am not sure. Perhaps, I don't believe in these stuff. I don't think technology has advanced to such levels to... ummm... enable all this."
"So you think this is all hogwash?" A fifty-odd year old man wearing a funny shirt saying he could read minds. Was it hogwash?
"Yeah, you could just be printing some random words that are common to all people based on some algorithm. Canned outputs! Like those horoscopes."
"I do agree agree about the horoscopes, but this is not such a thing. This is neuroscience. My team and I have... Before I even get into proving it is neuroscience, let me ask you something - what do you know about advancements in medical sciences? Have you studied neurology or neuroscience?"
"No. But..."
"Then how can you judge?"
I wasn't eligible to judge. But even then, it was hard to believe. The man was talking about some technology that would probably exist in the 22nd century. Surely not now!
"C'mon, young man! What are you waiting for?"
"No. I'm just..."
Aaargh! It was too much thinking. I took out my wallet and gave him the 100 bucks.
I was seated in the partitioned rear chamber on what looked like a dentist's chair with a salon hair-setting machine fitted above the head rest. It looked as if it would slide down and cover my head. As the man put on a pair of rubber gloves, I looked around the cramped room. There was a mess of multi-colored wires that rose out of the machine above my head and spiralled away and connected to a washing-machine sized main control panel which in turn connected to two LCD screens placed on a table nearby. There were two chairs placed near the table for people to monitor the screens.
"My assistant has gone out for a break," the man said, taking a pen and a pad with a form on it, "We had a hard day yesterday. We could be doing this quicker, if he was here."
"Oh!" I said, feeling a little nervous now.
He then gave me the pad and said "Write your name here and fill up the other details. Mention your medical history if any and sign at the marked places. It's just a formality".
As I was filling the form, he applied a weird-smelling gel on my temples and placed two electrodes. He then went towards the control panel and started talking to it. "Let me see, the fMRI scanner's up and running. The neural activation detector's on. Memory mapper's okay. Language adapter's fine. What else? Oh yeah! The OPC is alive. Great. I think we are good..."
"Wait! What's this?" I asked in shock, looking at the 'Declaration' section of the form.
"I understand the complexity of the medical procedure I am undertaking and should any injury occur to me due to unforeseen conditions during the process, I accept that it was beyond the control of K. M. D. Brain Processing Pvt Ltd and I declare that I will not hold them responsible for the same."
"Relax, Mr... Raghavan!" he said with a smile, "I told you it's just a formality. I assure you it's safe. You'd be more than happy that you've done this. Now lie down, while I set you up." He then attached a pulse-meter pod to my finger-tips, "You will not lose consciousness during the process, so keep your ears open and listen to my instructions. And just breathe easy." I really didn't like the increasing authority in his voice.
I leaned on the head-rest and he slid the bucket-like thing over my face. There was a bright white light inside the device and I closed my eyes immediately. I was suddenly reminded of Jim Carrey in "An eternal sunshine of a spotless mind" and it made me even more nervous.
"Check. Check. Check. Check." I could hear him tick items off some list. His voice sounded faint and distant. A new whirring hum began when he said "Alright, it's on. Now, all I need is a seed to send you on your journey."
"What?" I thought to myself. Did he say "seed"?
"Tell me something you like doing the most? And hurry up! It's on!"
"Ummm... I don't know! Watching movies, may be!" The bright white light dimmed and I opened my eyes. I was able to see some sort of a 3D video. Or may be a hologram. I couldn't say which. It was as if I was travelling through space.
"What's your favourite movie?"
What the hell! Was it an interview?
"I don't have any favourites. I like all..."
"C'mon, hurry up! Name any movie you like! Or something you watched recently. You're entering the stargate."
Flashes of randomly colored bright light began to appear on the screen as I remembered my recently-watched movie.
"Shakespeare in Love."
Movie Torrents
T-Shirts
Python
Sujatha
Bharathi Vidyalaya
Pornography
Goa
Wikipedia
SNMEC
Chowdaiah Hall
Divya Mahalakshmi
The Hindu
Home Loan
RomComs
The Invincibles
Amazon
TED
Arsenal
Akshaya Lending Library
Trichy
.
.
.
I was stunned by the two-page output I had in my hands. It had slid out of the main panel a few mintues after the machine has finished scanning my brain. It had brought out a few personal things I was trying hard to forget. Nevertheless, I tried testing the result. I could not think of a thought that was not related to the items on the list. By this time, I had got a faint head-ache looking at colorful disco-lights for what seemed to be five full minutes. I was starving too.
"I'm impressed", the man said removing the electrodes off my forehead.
"With?" Exercise brevity when you are hungry.
"With your boundaries, of course!" he said applying some soothing liquid on my forehead. He then got into his mode of explaining animatedly - "There is this concept of divergent thinking I believe in. And divergent thinkers are people who are able to come up with wild and uncanny solutions or ideas. They pull ideas from unrelated fields and mix and match them to produce amazing things. For that to happen, one needs to know and experience a wide variety of things. And what we have here is a result of someone who is doing that."
I smiled. That was quite a compliment! "So you mean I am a divergent thinker?"
"You might be. All I'm saying is that your boundaries are broad, proably on par with those of some of the best quizzers I have tested on and I suspect you to be one too. Don't think I'm foretelling, but I'm just speaking out of experience. If you are not doing it already, you might even get away writing some pulp-fiction."
He was partly correct.
"I used to be interested in screen-writing. But I lost interest."
"Hmmm. That's the flip-side of the coin, I guess. Such people tend to lose interest easily. Knowing too much too broad without exercising any sort of discipline rarely produces anything of value. And when you attain a state of such knowledge, paranoia is not far. But don't you worry, young man!" He said patting my back and letting me get up, "you'll be just okay." He offered a hand-shake.
"Thanks," I said and shook hands with him.
"Thank you! You were a really good customer!"
I had the test results in my hands. The only thing left to do was to bid good-bye.
"Can I ask you one more thing?" I was curious about the man.
"Go ahead."
"Would you show me your test results? I want to know what you think about."
"Ah! You know - The usual stuff! You don't have to test me for that. I can tell it to you myself - my company, my team and then the neuro-imag..."
"No!", I cut him short, "I insist. I want to know your thought-boundaries. I just want to know how smart you are."
"The result is never a case to judge smartness. But if you insist," he said with a sheepish grin on his face, "I will take the test. But be warned, the machine behaves in mysterious ways at times."
I was in no mood to extend the conversation. "Enough talking! Please start your test!"
I cursed myself for asking him to test himself. I was extremely hungry by then and the man took a long time to set it on auto-pilot. The machine took about ten minutes to scan (Pretty wide boundaries! I thought) and once the scan was over, it was processing for about five minutes now. The man removed the electrodes from his forehead and drank some water as we waited for it to spit the results.
"Water?" he offered the bottle.
I grabbed it and was gulping the water down, when a paper slid out of the main panel. I reached out for it before he could and looked at it.
I coughed, looking at it and the water sprayed all over the room. There was just one word - no, just one number written on it.
42.
~~~ The End ~~~
