Mysterious Goings-On

Some minor but nagging questions; some possible answers.

There are several questions that float up into ones consciousness every now and then, but they’re usually relegated to the back-burner, because finding answers to them is not a priority. They aren’t pressing questions. They don’t involve soul-searching. The answers to them, if found, will not make you go ‘ahaa’; nor will the questions haunt you beyond the grave. There is no metaphysical angle to them and they do not challenge the frontiers of human thought. But yes, they do tend to skulk around at the back of your mind, and come up to trouble you every now and then, like that tiny stem of coriander (or ‘cilantro’, if you’re one of those fancy cookbook writers) stuck stubbornly between your last two teeth, way back in your mouth. Till one day, when you have a brief break from the pressing questions of life, you turn your mind to contemplating and possibly resolving these not-so-pressing but niggling, nagging ones. You follow through your urge to figure them out, and all kinds of intriguing explanations emerge.

Question 1: When you go to your ATM, the person in front of you at the machine takes so long that those waiting outside grow day-old beards. What is this person doing? How long does it take to withdraw a maximum of Rs 10,000? And what is a decent interval after which one can rap on the glass partition and check if the person is alive/awake?

Answer: Exit polls taken at these ATM booths provided some rather illuminating explanations: some people read out every transaction of the previous 10 months to their CA over their cell phone. Some get side-tracked while taking their ATM card out of their wallet, and undertake a long overdue spring cleaning of their wallet. They throw out to-do lists from 1995, photographs from a previous marriage, visiting cards of long-dead associates, etc. One retired teacher told us that she punched in all the wrong answers at every query from the machine ‘to see if it was paying attention’. So there – one mystery resolved. These people are not trying to rob the bank or figure how to withdraw money from your account or anything. They're just using the privacy to catch up on life.

As for what you can do to kind of hurry these people along, a word (or several) of caution: don't ever rap on the glass partition. It only causes the compulsive counters to begin to re-count from the beginning for the fifth time. If you’re really in a bad mood and have been watching too much of Cops or Incredible Police Videos, you could convince the security guard to riddle any person who takes more than 5 minutes with bullets, but you'll find that most of these guards are lazy fellows with no sense of urgency in such matters. So, whenever possible, use non-violent means. Passive aggression is the name of the game. Carry a whining child (your own or borrowed) along. Once it starts whining with: "Lets gooo, how long more, I want to do susu, Has that uncle inside died?" etc, it will be only be a matter of a few second before the dawdler inside ejects him/herself and flees - possibly without even collecting his/her money.

Question 2: Why does one regularly get junk emails whose body copy consists of pure, pure gobbledygook? Simply strings of words that have absolutely no relation to one another.

Only two example will suffice (I haven’t made this up. Seriously. I couldn’t even if I wanted to.):

1) “percy stevedore party petition fledgling cavalier adrift cometary bindle transylvania dew boeotia gagging cubic exculpate suffix ripe nasty caterpillar fermat dispelling appearance conflagration touch breakfast carmela wardrobe abort goldfish philanthropic attrition incessant laymen hellgrammite tribal ornery biracial”

2) “skimpy insouciant quicksilver evident gaff stephenson frilly concourse swathe absorption catatonia bedridden cabana pravda quid wad craggy discernible declamatory digitate lawful nymphomania afresh eben rawlinson pont mist rhodium theresa coddington kimberly obscene perceptive simulcast briny barricade grossman methodology rocky caliper thundershower ortega buzzer koch elevate fumble lay precocious catchy seraglio inhalation freeing sinful ely jackboot”

And who sits and writes these? What is he/she/it trying to tell me?

Answer: Maybe these are arbitrary strings of words meant to dodge your spam filter (don’t ask how and why). It is equally possible that this is not spam/junk at all, but desperate attempts by Aliens to contact us. Here we are, efficiently blocking and deleting these outpourings, when actually they need to be patiently decoded. Possibly these Aliens are trying to urgently alert us, that from where they sit, Pune looks engulfed in vehicular pollution, and on a quiet day they can even hear our traffic. And that it’s time we visited them and checked out their housing/schooling/governance/water management and built an Expressway to their galaxy. (Poor wretches, they don’t know what they’re asking for.)

Question 3: Who generated the news that NASA said that precisely between 9.45-10 pm on 30 September, we would see some wonderous happening on the moon – red sparks and fireworks due to some ‘mineral activity’, or words to that effect?

Answer: Since nothing of the kind happened, though we hung around in our balconies, our eyes propped open with matchsticks, so that we don’t even blink, there could be only several explanations. One, since this was not reported in any paper or on any news channel, and was only breaking news on SMS, the person generating it could well be a phone company. Noticing that people of the serious kind are not SMSing enough, the phone company possibly decided to float ‘news’ that was bound to catch the fancy of us earnest popular-astronomy types. They really mooned us on that one. There we were, excitedly forwarding the message (which also said that this phenomenon occurred once in 657 years, or some such precise figure) to our near and dear ones, spreading the bunkum all around. And someone must have gone sniggering all the way to the bank. Then again, it may be NASA’s way of making the rest of the world look the other way while it does Something Else.

Now it’s time to get back to the more real problems of the Universe, like who one should vote for in the forthcoming elections, and more importantly, whatever for?