Serious Men

by Manu Joseph

sometimes

Here sanity was never overrated, and insanity never confused with unsound mind.

‘What is the saddest sight in the world? A couple weeping together. At their failed love, or at the ruins of their home demolished by the municipality, or at the funeral of their child. There is something about a man and a woman weeping together. Nothing is more heart-breaking.

Oparna liked such men. They were obsolete in a world where something as low grade as practicality was increasingly mistaken for wisdom.

‘Do you remember the time when all of us thought robots would change the face of the Earth? Scientists said robots would do this, robots would do that. But they didn’t do much. Jana, do you know why robots failed? Robots failed because man built them in his own image. The first-generation robots were anthropomorphic. Because man was obsessed with man. Now the most successful robots, say on an auto assembly-line or in an operating theatre, do not look like humans.’ ‘What are you trying to say, Arvind?’ ‘The human search for aliens is now in the imbecilic stage that robotics once was,’ Acharya said, an ominous edge in his voice. ‘I will not support people who presume that somewhere, far away in space, there could be beings so human that they will build machines that will send us a radio signal. Man is not searching for aliens. Man is searching for man. It’s called loneliness. Not science. The universe is simply too vast, and we know too little about consciousness, to invest in a quest that rests on a narrow concept of life. Scientists want to search for alien signals because that’s what gets them publicity. They are like Jesus Christ.’ ‘Jesus Christ?’ ‘Yes. They are exactly like Jesus Christ. You know that he turned water into wine.’ ‘I’ve heard that story.’ ‘From the point of view of pure chemistry, it is more miraculous to make wine into water than water into wine. But he did not do that. Because if he had gone to someone’s house and converted their wine into water, they w...

That evening, as Ayyan went in the institute’s shuttle bus to the Churchgate station, he looked at the moronic city that was in the hysteria of going home. As though everyone here were going home for the first time. In the twilight that was now the colour of dust, in the fury of horns that was a national language because honking had telegraphic properties, cars stood stranded all around the bus like ants carrying the corpse of a caterpillar. Where a bumper ended and another began, in those crevices, people crossed the road and motorbikes wobbled through, honking. There was a caste system even on the roads. The cars, their faces frowning in a superior way through the bonnet grilles, were the Brahmins. They were higher than the motorcycles who were higher than the pedestrians. The cycles were lowest of the low. Even the pedestrians pretended that they didn’t see them. The bus had to be something in this structure, and Ayyan decided it was him. Lowly, but formidable and beyond torment. In any given situation in this country, Ayyan thought with a chuckle that did not surface, someone was the Brahmin and someone was the Untouchable. As the bus inched through the evening life, the traffic grew. There was no space on the road any more. A man on a bike was riding on the pavement. When he tried to plunge into the road, a car hit him. He fell down but managed to get up. He looked shocked. That, Ayyan loved. After riding like a moron all over the place, observe the face of an Indian ...