4

Author's note: I found this post buried amongst several drafts that I had left untouched, deteriorating in the drawers of my blog. It's more of a diary entry of the 4 years of life in IIT looked at in retrospect, but it's...slightly weirdly written.


Four years. Full circle.
Starting with studying following a long bout of even more studying and preparedness for God knows what. Before a blink and before your mouth can whisper the words "Physics" swept into the general mayhem of Computer Science oh my God Computer Science the El Nino of this day and age. Then induction and recursion and the world becoming clear to you no wait its gone again because here come AVL trees and that weird rotation and poof you're gone. Then back again through algorithms and languages and numerical computing and image processing till I close my ears and say no no no more trying to make the little numbers move faster and yet do that same thing looking at a computer screen full of numbers to make them behave they should behave. While I wait for the rest of my life to take off and let go.
Words on a black board, words on a white board. Words on a white board in Bangalore, sitting in Microsoft feeling all free and unreal and finding "Computationalism" a word that means nothing and yet so much because it is at the end of four years of that very word gnawing at your mind. And then a blur and a whiteboard again and matrices and classmates and photographs and thoughts amiss and heartbeats racing. Then back again through time and those thoughts you must not speak now because what's buried is buried but it wasn't at that time because everyone knew it except me and because it was me they were talking about behind closed doors into innocent ears. Then race ahead because memories have a habit of erasing everything just when you want those memories back because if memories weren't erased we would all be Turing machines with infinite tapes, not feeling anything because it hurts too much to feel. And memories that want to erase those parts too, the good ones that you want to hold on to because obviously good things can't survive without the bad. Errors go and so do mistakes, we converge to a solution we don't even care about because what we found has been erased. Little waves with soft white hands.

And down and down and further down where those hidden demons of guilt and self pity coil into each other like mating snakes. And the mistakes you did and the words you said because they were not spoken but typed and I couldn't look into your eyes when I said them and you were so far away you wouldn't have heard if I had shouted. So like words on a computer screen, commands that have no meaning but will go drive the little read write heads that will erase everything. rm -rf *. And then you can go on and put new stuff in there while I am left grapling with a connection gone bad which funnily is how everything else around is, the numbers dont add up, I'm not converging to a solution and the errors are not going down fast enough and what the heck am I doing the right thing?

Right thing, right thing, right thing, right thing and suddenly who are you kidding you've been a criminal all along. Tick tick tick tick then oh my god you've been Cross all your life.

Then four years later you realise we are all wrong, and the only task now to be done is to learn to forgive yourself.