0001 AG

From the dawn of time man has had infinite quantities of it at hand.

And as is our temperament, we have used it recklessly much like every other free gift from Mrs. Nature. We sat back on our asses for a couple of million years before twiddling the bloody thumb, a large number of years were used in thousands before we realised that the dog was our best friend and lets not begin to lament the centuries lost before we finally had the ipod.

As I sit here, writing this – I am ashamed of the astonishing laziness of my ancestors. Of course, I have benefitted from their research, but it doesn’t hide the fact that if they had been slightly more industrious in their effort and ambitious in their thinking I would have been able to sustain myself and afford necessary luxuries of life (electric toothbrush etc.) without having to go to work. We had a million years and still the fools couldn’t come up with the All-O-Gratis.

Anyway, here I am - the product of generations of lethargy. Luckily so much time has gone by that even with the miserable amount of effort I am fully clothed, and it’s not deer skin, I don’t hunt my lunch or send smoke signals. I don't make a God out of everything under the sun, snakes, planets, Rajnikanth, small things, rodents, water in every form from ocean and rivers to puddles and vapour, the sun itself and so on. Also, I write a blog instead of painting caves with stupid mango pulp.

Of course some things have changed for the worse, I will not have a hundred wives, and here I make the modest assumption of being an emperor if I was in the Mughal era. Also it will not be polite to fart in public in my lifetime.

While some things remain the same; I am about as likely to be killed in the name of religion as I would have been during the 1600s.

What is also constant is the abundant amount of time I have with precious little to do. Over the years, as a race, we humans have cleverly distributed responsibilities between ourselves. So the All-O-Gratis (AGO) is what the people at CERN are working on, I don’t know why they insist on calling it The Large Hadron Collider (LHC). These scientist types need to be as creative as they are intelligent. Also the point of the AGO is that all of us have one of it, so that we can all get everything we want without having to put in any effort for it. But the AGO they have built and call by that atrociously violent name; as you’d have seen on TV, is the size of Belgium.

That’s the thing with these scientist types; they make the first version really gigantic, stodgy and un-mass-marketable. Then they begin to make it stylish and accessible, and lean and quicker. I think it’s an elaborate ploy, if we had Pentium IV and Windows XP to begin with, what would our dear Diltons do in the ensuing years?

So after the fellows at CERN took the headache of leading mankind to the pinnacle of all knowledge and truth the rest of us were left with very little to do, both in terms of quantity and quality. So minute were our collective responsibilities that we even divided them up with no clear plan. I became someone who sells detergent and blogs, you became someone who does something that involves varying proportions of using MS Excel and Powerpoint, uses the detergent and reads blogs. That’s a good way to explain your job –

Job = a*hrs. spent at work + b*hrs. spent at work

a is the MS Excel Multiplier and b is the Power Point multiplier. a and b oscillate between zero and one and must add up to at most one.

At the extreme if a is one and hence b is zero you are the proud employee of any of the three hundred and eighteen Knowledge Processing Centres (KPOs) in and around Gurgaon’s famous IFFCO Chowk. If on the other hand b is one and hence a is zero you are an HR Manager or any Senior Manager. In my case a is .01 and b is even more close to zero. I work in the field you see. High Five!!!

So what I was saying is that all of us are simply twiddling our thumbs, albeit in fancier ways, and waiting till the CERN people serve their purpose.

I am sure the thought of being held responsible for all the inane work the rest of mankind would be doing years from now will be a source of serious motivation for our heroes at CERN and enough reason for them to speed up their efforts behind the AGO.

What a day it will be though, once we all have our own star-autographed AGOs. I will move to Belgium, or any other quaint place in Europe with a lot of snow, alcohol, history and cobbled streets. Also I shall look up Clémence Poésy and offer her the impressive proposal of spending the rest of her life with me. I think she will agree, she seems like a nice girl. Very smart too. You must check her out in In Bruges, it's brilliant otherwise too. The first movie I saw in months. Oh!! Only wish those nerds would hurry it up. By the way, what would you do in 0001 AG (Anno Gratis)?