hard disk – Pertinent Observations

I first visited New York City in January 2010. It was a work trip, as I was working for a Wall Street firm back then. Blessed with a generous expense account, one of the aims of that trip was to sample all that New York had to offer in terms of culinary experience. One such experience took me to Hangawi, a Korean vegetarian restaurant. This was in midtown (32nd and 5th, if I’m not wrong). Amazing candle-lit ambiance. awesome food, exemplary service, nice soft music.. On my return to my hotel that night I’d called up my girlfriend (now my wife) promising to take her there sometime. I had also told her that “the next time I go to Hangawi will be with you”.

I must confess I tried to break that promise, the lure of the place was too hard to resist during my trip to New York City earlier this year. However, fate wouldn’t let me, as I was told that there were no tables available. The nice person at the front desk, however, said that there was room at another Korean vegetarian restaurant run by the same people who ran Hangawi. She gave me directions to Franchia, on 34th and Park.

It was easy to find a table there – the ambiance was nothing compared to that at Hangawi, and the food (which was as excellent) was much cheaper. There was a small group of young men seated at a table close by, and one of them looked exceedingly familiar. I tried hard not to stare, and trawled the depths of my “brain hard disk” while stealing glances between sips of my excellent soup. I have this amazing knack of identifying lookalikes (in fact, the name “pertinent observation” was first given to my propensity to find similarities in looks between people), so I didn’t know if it was actually Mark Zuckerberg who was sitting there, or just a lookalike. For the rest of this post, let’s assume it was Zuckerberg there.

Zuckerberg was dressed in a neatly tailored grey suit, complete with a waist-coat, while his associates were in casuals. The suit was what raised doubts about Zuckerberg’s identity. Why would a Silicon Valley CEO be dressed so formally, I had reasoned, when I had decided that it was someone else. Also, I had wondered, what had made such a “big person” come to a reasonably nondescript vegetarian place for dinner. If I had twitter or facebook enabled on my blackberry, I would’ve instantly broadcasted the likeness, and somehow tried to find out if it was actually Zuckerberg. Unfortunately, Wall Street firms are careful in blocking such frivolous apps when they hand over blackberries to their employees. I decided to focus on my dinner, which was fantastic.

I was to read later that Zuckerberg has these crazy New Year resolutions. For 2010, he had decided he’ll wear a suit every day. In 2011, he is mostly vegetarian, and eats meat only if he has killed the animal himself. Putting one and one together, could it be that in February 2011, he would turn up in a formal suit at a vegetarian restaurant in New York? The probability is not low.

So I’ll perhaps go on and claim that, on 15th February 2011 (not 100% sure of the date), at a Korean vegetarian restaurant in New York, I sat one table away from Mark Zuckerberg (and in New York, owing to real estate costs, restaurants place tables really close to each other).

When this blog was young, I used to crib a lot. Ok let me correct that. When my livejournal, which is the predecessor of this blog, was young, I used to crib a lot. At least half my posts were “crib posts”. They would go on the lines of “oh i’m feeling so crappy. everything’s awful with the world”. I’d occasionally get comments. They’d either be of the “yeah you’ve done wrong” variety or “ok i empathise” type. Most such comments didn’t get any posts at all. Sorry, I meant that most such posts didn’t get any comments at all.

I decided to obey the market and moved away from crib posts. i still do crib once in a while, and use this blog as a personal rant, i don’t crib here as much as I used to. This “adjustment to the needs of the market” has had its own problem. It sometimes makes yo ugo to the other extreme. Where you are just not able to crib at all. You feel guilty about cribbing. Everytime you crib, you think yo uare bothering someone and so you should stop. You stop.

Cribbing is an art. Not everyone is a master of cribbing. The biggest problem with the lack of ability to crib is what I call as the “two-person theory”. It is something like each of us is a superposition of several people. And at each point in time, we “collapse” to one of those people. All of us live in the form of a dynamic equilibrium as me. We share a hard disk, but we don’t share memory. And usually, there is no coexistence. Ok I suppose the name two-person theory is some kind of a misnomer. It is actually the trivial case where you are made of a superposition of just two people.

When you are low, you want to crib. You want to pour out all your woes to the world. You want to cry. You want to be cared for. You want to be cuddled. But you can’t speak. You don’t have the confidence to speak. You just don’t feel like speaking. Speaking is an effort. And you end up not cribbing, though you really wanted to crib.

You recover. And you are now not who you were when you were low. You are in a different state (no, this is not like going from Delhi to Haryana). You are able to communicate now. You remember that you needed to crib. That much has been coded into the hard disk. However, the details of that were left in the memory of the other you. You don’t know what to crib about. You don’t understand the other yourself. You trivialize your body-sharer. You decide you are better off not cribbing. And you are happy that you didn’t feel. Each time you think about it, you feel happeier that you didn’t crib; until you want to crib again, and are too low to communicate.

Now you blame the other you for not speaking out for you. Effectively you blame yourself. You feed in into the downward spiral. You want to crib even more now. And you can’t communicate. You wait till you get better. And then you wait till you get worse. You cycle. You oscillate.

One of you is dumb and cna’t communicate. The other of you can’t understand the other of you. This other doesn’t want to speak for the other other. One of the others is unable to communicate. And like the mythical Bherunda birds (also the state bird of Karnataka) one of the other consumes poison, taking the other other down with him.

Tag: hard disk

Encountering Mark Zuckerberg