The Beautiful People (Third Installment)

For everyone who has just stumbled across my blog, this is the third installment of the Beautiful people series. In the previous installment, I had crusaded against the villians at Lux, manufacturers of the 'Collagen Soap'. Now, more than four months after I took up arms against the corporate machine, I am finally in a position to see just how much truth there is to their claims. We were planning to run a PAGE, basically a molecular biology technique to (apart from other things) visualise the protein content in a solution. One clumsy classmate of mine, managed to spill most of the cell lysate. Since we had little solution and spare wells (Scientific term: IGNORE), my roomate and I, scrambled to find wierd thing in the lab that could contain protein, to run them in the gel. I had the bright idea of running a solution of Lux (Uplifting Firm) to see if there really is any protein in it.

My roomate and I, hard at work, trying to save an ignorant world from the clutches of the Evil Western Capitalist Actually we're just goofing off in the lab, the tube was empty and temporarily appropriated for the photo

Anywho, this procedure will take till tomorrow before we know anything. Even though I don't expect to see any protein in the sample, even if there is any, don't be disheartened, the soap can't work and I've outlined why in the previous installement of this series.

Man On The Edge

You stand on a small bit of dry dusty earth, the only patch allowed to you. Thirty thousand pairs of feet stand like you on their allotted areas. A shove, displaces you from your territory, you in turn crash into one of your numerous neighbors and invade their area. This domino effect creates a minor ripple diffuses slowly through the throng, till it dies down. You crane your neck high, your nose, in vain seeks out a few milliliters of fresh air, air free of the humid stench of sweat, nicotine and grass. A damp arm presses against yours and someone rests their weight on your shoulders, you rest your weight on someones shoulders too. It's a dark night and the powerful spot-lights fail to penetrate the mass of the crowd. You struggle to raise your hand to your face, an inch from your nose, you inspect it to check if you still have all your fingers on, its been a while since you lost all feeling in that arm. The other arm is held above your head, a glowing red firefly periodically descends towards your mouth, only to be chased away by a stream of thick smoke.
But the crowds tire now. Someone somewhere propels an inflated condom your way, with screams of glee, you and dozens of others around you reach up to be able to direct it further along its erratic Brownian path.
Your throat is parched from hours in the sun, washed down with a dozen cigarettes, your body is soaking with perspiration and you wish it was the other way around.
A searing pain has begun shooting through one leg, forcing you to shift your weight. Around you, a slow, persistent trickle of people head back, towards the promise a drink and a chance to sit.
But then, a slight breeze flits across the field and all around you, people close their eyes and arch their necks further still, trying to expose as much of themselves as they can to it's healing touch.
Then as the breeze begins to die down, the lights dim to the accompaniments of a loud roar from the assembled hordes and a deep loud voice is echoes.

“Woe to thee o' earth and sea, for the devil sends the beast with wrath, for he knows the time is short.
Let him who hath understanding reckon the number of the beast,
For it is a human number,
Its number is six-hundred-and-sixty-six.”

And the crowd goes wild as simultaneously, six of the devil's own explode into action on stage, from the minute the opening chords are struck till the last dying note, thirty thousand odd throats shriek in unison in hellish glee.
The flickering lights rest momentarily on your neighbors face and you find the same ecstatic, trance-like expression that you bear reflected on her face too.
As the six, work their way through the set, your body forgets all the pain, the dehydration and discomfort. Your hands pound away above your head and your head, bangs in unison with the drums. When they jump, you jump, when they sing, you scream. For an hour, you respond to their every signal, their every whim, their every command.
And when its all over, you stand dumbfounded, surely not already? You wait expectantly for it to start all over again, just like the empty upended bottle of beer, you wait for the last few drops to come trickling down but they never do. People as shocked as you shove at you as they head away, but you remain rooted to your spot, the you waited your whole life to be in and the spot where you will remain for the rest of your short life.

On the 17th, for the first time ever in India, Iron Maiden played at the Palace Grounds and I was there. Even a few month if someone had told me I would be within a hundred feet of the beast, I'd have called them mad. But the day before, thats exactly where I was, I head-banged to 'Trooper', I screamed my way through 'Two Minutes To Midnight' and all of my other favourites. And of-course, after what seems like decades of envying the crowd while listening to live versions of 'Fear of the Dark' on CD's, I too, yes, me. I, Kartik Rajan, sang Fear of the Dark, live, with Iron bloody Maiden.

Viral Memetic

In 1876, a young girl named Jenn was walking down a river, an insane man killed her by stabbing her in the back, raping her, and then hanging her in his closet. While he hanged her he said Bukakke Bukkake.
Now that you have read this message, she will find you and her dead body will haunt your house for 5 years. Every night you go to sleep she will appear in your closet, hanging their with her glowing red eyes.
repost 3 times to be saved
(Flicked off a comment to a youtube video.)

Unlike what the title of the post suggests, it won't require you to repost it on your own blog, identifying for the further propagation of the post.
In his book 'The Selfish Gene', Richard Dawkins, describes memes as any idea, capable of propagating itself, rather any idea is a meme, its ability to propagate is merely a measure of its fitness. The fittest memes are those capable of spreading without undergoing too much change. Just like the catchy tune that you hear someone humming and then feel compelled to hum, inspiring someone else to pick up the tune and so on ad infinitum.
Unfortunately not all memes are that simple, the most commonly circulating ones like the one above, actively promote their proliferation actively, either through threats or by promising you some crap or the other.
Some of the first chain E-mails I came across were in the days when I still used Hotmail, they were allegedly from Bill Gates no less, informing me that due tho the fact that Hotmail was running out of space, their staff were axing unused accounts. Only by forwarding that particular E-mail would I be able to save my account from the same fate. Apparently Hotmail was unable to detect account usage, unless that mail in particular was forwarded. The same thing happens, much to my irritation on Orkut and I've had to drop some rather nasty scraps to those responsible for forwarding those messages to me.
The possibilities for using this power of memes for commercial means has not been lost on people either, viral marketing, uses strong memes to spread the word and create 'buzz' around a particular product.
For the last few days I've been receiving E-mails from my friends, via a site, tagged.com. It invites me to join their social network, reminding me that if I ignore the mail, it may send the wrong message to my friends who have invited me. The line in their mail “Please respond or ****** may think you said no :(“ made me see visions of the friend sitting expectantly at the computer, waiting expectantly for E-mail confirmation that I had indeed joined and I was truly their friend.
I resisted joining for two reasons, the first being that their style of trying to entice me to join rubbed me the wrong way and secondly since I'm already on Orkut, why would I need another networking site on which to ignore my friends.
(Digression – Seriously, there are waay too many of these social networking sites around. I started out on Hi5 then switched to Orkut, in the middle I experimented with Shuzak (networking for geeks) and after that stubbornly refused the temptations of anything else like Zorpia and a whole host of other wierdly named sites. I can't understand WHY there have to be so many of them and why do people need to use so many of them at the same time?)
(Coming back now...) So after I got a bunch of mails from friends, begging, nay, pleading with me to join them at tagged.com. So I gave in and tried it out. Like the damned fool that I am, I allowed it to import my Gmail inbox and then like a jackass, while I was trying to uncheck the two-hundred odd addresses that the site threatened to send mails to, I accidentally hit enter. Bugger! Now a whole bunch of people including some very uptight senior professors (who I've never even met, but mailed at some time or the other) have been requested to sign up.
Now, I'm going to have to write a whole bunch of mails apologising to various people for it.
Now I realise it was entirely my fault, but I can't help feeling pissed with the site for having put me in the position in the first place. Orkut on the other hand, very unobtrusively invites you to invite a select few individuals to join you on Orkut.
And that's why I'm all worked up about memes at the moment, unlike the more interesting ones I come across from time to time, this shite is more like a virus spreading through inboxes, two hundred addresses at a time.
So heres my humble (hardly) request to every one out there;
“This is not like the ring, if you don't forward to a gazillion other people, you aren't going to die, fall on bad luck and conversely if you DO succumb, you are NOT going to get the cute chick around the corner, your acne won't clear up, you won't suddenly get cleverer. The only thing that's going to happen is that you are going to waste a few minutes of your time, multiply that by the time you waste of everyone you forward it to and all the people they forward it to and so on. Now think if all that time were utilized for something productive, maybe we could re-plant the rain-forests or something like that.

Now that you have read this post, comment on it or your your arse will catch fire and you will be unlucky in love.

If you post one comment, your biggest wish will come true
If you comment twice, your biggest wish will come true and you will become immensely rich. Unless that was your original, biggest wish, in that case, both your biggest and second biggest wish will come true.
If you comment thrice, I will reply.

Cheers!