Gods Apprentice (Or How A Superhero Was Not Born)

Late 1982 or early 1983 (Converting Earth years to the Celestial Calendar is not an exact science)

Being an apprentice doesn’t work out all that great for the ego but he was not complaining. He had a neat package waiting for him; a God given job, a Heavenly salary and a Hell of a stock option. He just had to get this one little thing right.

bip…bip…bip…bip…BLEEEP…damn busy signal…the multi-dimensional network thingy was starting to get on his nerves.

The rumour was out that he would be put in charge of the whole western spiral end of the Milkyway galaxy…the area he has worked on the most. A bit down market but it was a good start. It came with some troubles though.
The one populated planet in the area was so far down the drain that the Boss was thinking of burning it up and claiming insurance… the Apocalypse strategy. Boss had always been pissed with the place after His effort in the previous quarter to resurrect the place by sending in his best Man didn’t show the results he had hoped for.

“System ready… please load programme,” said the tinny voice out of nowhere…finally… he hit the buttons.

Oh well, he was also partly to blame for the fiasco. He had thought that the Pillar of cloud by day - Ball of fire by night was a neat thing to do, and that too on his first job. How was he to know that his final coordinates for the Chosen Ones were over the one place in the Middle East with no oil? There was a hell to pay. The whole balance of power thingy was affected and there was an immediate take over bid from the Devil. Then somebody had to sit up through the millennia and come up with the Renaissance plan with that brilliant Capitalism spin off. A whole new continent had to be put in place and a strategic relocation initiated but it was serious fun.

“Programme loaded… please specify deliver parameters,” he checked the calendar and typed in the date and time of delivery.

Things were going fine till the Finance Guys screwed up and went ahead with that George Bush Jr. project. They said it had something to do with the Accumulated Wisdom of the Ages having to be balanced with an equal amount of stupidity or something like that. It was very complicated. The Future Affairs cell immediately reported a failure in the system. They suggested Total Recall, but the Finance guys said it was too late for a Miracle. That was when God got serious about that Apocalypse strategy of His.

God…! He suddenly remembered that’s what he forgot… the Divine Intervention!! It was too late to use the Angel service… The only way out was the Emergency Prayer Hotline, but God just didn’t get along well with that after all those prank calls started coming over the direct line from Vatican…Damn!!

Oh, what the hell…this one was clean…after all this was not the first time he is handling the delivery of a Genius to Save Humanity package. He had handled Einstein… he even got an award for that. This was supposed to be bigger though, the first one in the newly created Pre-Apocalypse World Saviours series. It was pretty much the same as the old Knights series, but with a jacked-up Brain – Brawn configuration. “This is my last attempt on that miserable place,” God had said, “If this one doesn’t work I am withdrawing the budget and going in for Apocalypse.”

He rechecked the checklist; all seemed fine. “Alright, here goes nothing,” he pressed the delivery button. The green loading bar appeared on the screen. With the heavy configuration, this one was going to take some time, even over broadband. He leaned back and relaxed. The manual for the series was lying on the table; he glanced over it.

SHIT!! ABORT!! ABORT!!

“Package Delivered…System ready to reboot…” said the tinny voice.
DAMN… Those buggers in Design had changed the whole things around…!! The jacked-up Brain-Brawn configuration was a separate file. It had to be cut and paste to the original programme before sending. The only thing inbuilt in the programme was the Super Inflated Ego code…!! A whole lot of good that’s gonna do…!!
He had managed to bungle it up. He lifted the Hotline set and dialled extension 42.

“Heaven…We have a problem.”

10 months later

The English professor looked down at the bundle that lay on the hospital bed in an unfashionable area on the doomed planet on the western spiral end of the Milkyway galaxy. “God… I could do without this one,” he said in an almost Hamletian soliloquy. “Alright,” he said, turning to his wife and the three kids hanging around her bed, “I know just what to call this one…”

THE END

The Idiots Guide to Travelling Postures On Trains

1. The Intelligent Type – This is a slightly expensive stance to adopt because it means purchasing at least a magazine (Frontline is overkill, Outlook is good enough) or at the bare-minimum level, a newspaper (The Hindu puts you in a ridiculous minority but the appearance is what we are going for). It also means funds for a regular flow of watery Railway coffee to keep you from nodding off over the magazine/paper and totally blowing your cover.
2. The Poetic Type – This is a very physically demanding position since it calls for maintaining a silly smile on your face and craning out of the window for the entire length of the journey. You should be passably good at acting to appear sufficiently moved by the cow shitting on the grass.
3. The Business Type – Must keep constantly fiddling with your mobile phone. Send random messages and make imaginary phone calls. Make agonised expressions while scanning through official looking papers. Wear leather shoes and stiff shirt even if it is 35° C outside.
4. Fast Asleep – This is unquestionably the safest and the most desirable position to adopt. Whether it be lavishly spread out on the top berth of a sleeper compartment, or in a semi-foetal position on a seat in a passenger, or the simple yet effective open mouthed-upright-ass based stance near the bathroom door in un-reserved, the Fast Asleep stance gives you immunity from all unwanted interferences from over-social elements and the Aunty-Uncle phenomena. It does — particularly the open-mouthed stance — put you in the lower strata of the intelligence quotient in the compartment, but the advantages definitely outweigh the temporary lowering of your Mensa status.
   

South Indian Idle and Sombre

The side-effects of an idle life..

1. Starts to believe that the answer to life the universe and everything is indeed 42
2. Is revered by the secret society of intelligent mobile phones for being the only human to be crowned grandmaster in their ritualistic cyber-world chess matches.
3. Is known as Taksjangka (‘The big evil squashing hand’ in insect speak) in the ant kingdom and has currently replaced Yavalkaqwa (‘Crushing black rubber boot’) as the greatest natural disaster to befall the ant community of Room No. 28.
4. Becomes reigning international champion in blindfolded television remote operation, which was subsequently banned by the IOC for being a blood sport.
5. Gets invited by the CIA for being the only known human immune to the smell of burnt mosquito coil concentrated with tobacco smoke, which precedes most of their WMDs on the toxic scale.

Chip of the old block

It came as quite a surprise when I found that I had to look seven years into my past to find someone who is of some influence in my life. In the event of such an exercise one expects to find some larger than life image from the past looming over your present with every intention of being there in your future. But the face I came up with was that of my father, a person to whom I hadn’t given much thought recently.
He was a hard man (I am letting the past tense deal with matters of life, death and timelines), with the remnants of a harder father ingrained in him. He drove a hard bargain with life by bringing up four children when he couldn’t afford one. He pushed his children in positively draconian ways which left deep scars in the form of ‘Dr’ tags and voracious reading habits.
He was born in a small village near kottayam in kerala called Aymanam (The life and times of which better minds than me have described). From there the family of eight migrated to the coastal town of Alappuzha where I believe the Conrad in him was born. His father was boiler engineer in a British coir factory who came home with the remaining steam and vented it on three teenage boys. One ran away and joined the navy, one joined the Naxal movement and one started reading T.S.Eliot.
Ironically he was also a professor of English. I say ironic because hardness doesn’t fit in with the traditional notions of an English Professor. But here was a man who was both, with either of these characters appearing at various times and in various shades with no sense of occasion. He literature was orthodox, that is to say he was a modern in a post-modern age. He used to read out to me poems he wrote which had me thinking of inconsequentialities before I learnt to spell that word. It was only after I read Wasteland that I began to see definite parallels.
I remember one instance when he took his youngest, a boy of thirteen, to see his first James Bond movie. The combination of Walther PPK’s and semi naked white women sent the first drops of testosterone coursing through the adolescent veins and on the late night walk back home anything was possible, all the villains of this world could be thrashed and all the beautiful women won. He said something to that effect to his father and the English professor with a very existential tone asked “so?.” I have been very critical of Mr. Bond ever since and went on to take an MA in English Literature.