The Electric Chair

Well, I'm true to my word! Heres it before Oct end. For the uninitiated, read Russian Salad: the very first post on my blog
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This being prelude enough, we now cut to the chase. Only problem being with that is that there is no chase to cut to. Not because the circumstances arent right, but because the people arent right. The attentive reader would recall that Vladimir was very fat, and therefore it wouldnt be a very long logical leap for him/her to make that Vladimir's perambulatory skills would not be of a very high order. If Vladimir was the chaser, so to say, the chase would never start, Vladimir being fully aware of his limitations. And if Vladimir was the chasee, so to say, the chase would end almost immediately. Vladimir therefore had removed all fear of getting caught from his heart. It was a certainty. If someone wanted to catch him, he would be caught. He owed his freedom to the pathetic quality of his rivals. Sergi was so airy fairy that cockroaches in his house moved around with the air of a newly crowned king who had ascended the throne by killing his brother.

Sergi had shifted his academic leanings considerably after his graduation. He realised the futility of thought and rationality and found questions such as "If a tree fell in forest and no one was there to hear it, does it make a sound?" extremely childish and therefore irritating. "I think therefore I am" seemed to make as much sense as "I doubt therefore I might be". He realised that any philosophy that emnnated from thought was destined to be bound by the limitations of thought, and wasnt it a fact that human intellect was not the most powerful force on this planet? Coz if it was, then all mysteries would be solved. Therefore, philosophy, which was the ultimate quest for unsolved mysteries could not run on the fuel of intellect alone. Philosophy needed something more than intellect, that is what his intellect told Sergi. But could he believe the word of his intellect that told him that intellect should not be believed? If he did believe, then he would have to not believe, and if he did not believe, he would continue believing. Understandably, Sergi was thoroughly confused.

Sergi was dying a slow spiritual death. His own brain was killing him. And his brain was giving him this information that his brain was killing him. He begged his brain to stop killing. His brain told his brain to stop killing him. His brain at this point got very irriatated with itself for telling it what it was doing and telling it not to do it also. If it was telling it not to do it, why couldnt it just stop doing it?! Then it realised that if it could stop doing it, how would it come to know about that? As soon as it came to know it had stopped doing it, by definition it meant that it had not stopped doing it. Sergi was going mad. His brain was all pervasive. Whatever he thought, his brain had something to do with it. No person should brook such constant interference, even from his own brain, thought Sergi. Maybe I should just cut off my brain, he thought. And he let out a frustrated cry when he realised that it was his brain which was suggesting this course of action!

By the by, he realised the root of his problem. His conditioning. He had graduated in western philosophy, and the mother of western philosophy was logic. The problem was the way he was conditioned to think. Leniarly. Logically. Sensibly. This method of thought is the culprit, said Sergi to himself. From now on I shall let myself loose. My intellect will not monitor my thoughts. My intellect will take the backseat. Other forces will prevail. Sergi was sure (how was he sure? well he just had a hunch) that there were other forces in the making of human thought apart from intellect. No one knew what these forces were, because of environmental conditioning, they were never given enough chance to manifest themselves. I shall provide a conducive environment for these forces to flourish and make themselves known, Sergi decided. And hence Sergi never thought about what he thought. Thoughts entered his mind freely and left freely. At firstly it was very difficult not to interfere at all. AT ALL were the catch words. Thoughts about incest with his daughter entered his mind, and he caught himself monitoring them, purging them. No - I shall allow them to roam free. It was very difficult, but practice makes perfect.

Wierd thoughts would enter his mind. He thought about mountains of ice-cream melting and huge cows with gigantic tongues lapping it up and saying 'come to mama baby'. He thought about coffee powder being small organisms with telepathy ruling and controlling the world. He thought about having wood for lunch. He thought of substituting onion rings he had along with his vodka by penis rings made from his own penis. He thought of walking up to the Alps on his hands, reaching the top and doing a two and a half summersalt back-flip dive into Switzerland. He thought about sticking bullets of his AK - 47 up his nose. He thought about using cars as toilet paper. He thought about going and using the slide in the playground as a prosthesis for his horse's leg. By the by, he was able to free his thoughts from the influence of his intellect to a great extent.

Then one day, he had this thought. He had a stirring in his soul. He could feel the other forces manifesting themselves. The thought was persistent. Insistent. Like other thoughts this one would not come and go. It came and went and came again and went and came again. For all practical purposes it stayed. Sergi waited. One month. Two months. Three months. Six months. The thought did not relent. There was no denying it. It demanded action. Sergi acted. He bought houses, he bought bunglows, he bought flats. He bought godowns, he bought warehouses, he bought junkyards. He bought office complexes, he bought shopping complexes, he bought villas. He bought whole buildings. He bought factories, he bought garages, he bought tea estates. He tried to buy the Pentagon, but the US government wanted more money. He bought half of the Sahara desert. He bought chawls, he bought slums, he even bought railway platforms. In short, he bought space. Thats what the persistent, insistent thought was about. Buy space, Sergi, buy space.

Sergi did not know what all this meant. He did not dare analyse. He had left analysis long ago. He would give the other forces time to manifest themselves fully. Till then, he was not going to think about it and put years of reverse conditioning to waste. However, a small portion of his brain, where intellect still functioned, registerd some electrical activity. Of course, years of reverse conditioning ensured that this activity did not touch the thoughts or the awareness of Sergi Putin, but as author of this story (and thats the advantage of writing in the third person - I know facts that none of the characters in the story would know) it would be my pleasure to share with my audience the nature of this electrical activity. It was like this:

Space held all the physical dimensions of that existed in the universe. Let the scientists disagree how many dimensions were actually there in the universe (he had heard numbers ranging from 4 to 26) but he somehow felt that without the dimensions of length breadth and height, nothing else could make much sense. He also did not believe in this concept of parallel universes. 'Parallel' of course in this concept only mean 'that which does not meet or intersect'. Going back to high school geometry, he knew that 2 lines need not be parallel not to intersect. They can be non-parallel and lie in different planes and still not intersect. However, if the object was two dimensional, i.e. a plane, then they needed to be parallel not to intersect. But if the object was 3 dimensional geometric (extending till infinity in 3 dimensions) then non-intersection was an impossibility. Why? Because there could be only one such object. The universe. And therefore the concept of a parallel universe seemed unrealistic to him. But what about time - the 4th dimension. He was not forgetting this. But time went either backwards or forwards. Time didnt go sideways. And therefore a parallel universe in which the 4th dimension was different was no different from saying that this room is different from this room tomorrow. True, but well, so what? Similar arguments held for the 5th, 6th and 26th dimensions. He was therefore convinced that much of the mysteries of the universe are locked in 'space'. And the person who lords over space would be so much closer to the answer of these mysteries.

And therefore Sergei Putin was livid. Because his space was stolen.

# posted by A Chrysanthemum by any other name... : 6:20 AM