The X Files

Situation 1

X1 tiptoed into the room. He had to be careful. No one must know. The task at hand required utmost secrecy and noiselessness as rivals to his mission had only temporarily laid their guards down and this is the only opportunity he could use. He stretched out his hand. Yes, the thing was in his reach, as were many such enemy things. He knew he was an expert in these secret conquests. Man, wasn't he good?


Situation 2

Y3 was almost asleep. In her sleep, she could smell a strange smoky thing. Opening her eyes, and using her other senses, she could understand that it was coming out of the heating vent. "X5!!", she thought.
She called the Lord, the Master. The Master was very specific. "It's between you and X5. Deal with it".

Y3: "But it's so cold outside. I can't open the windows and breathe fresh air. And I'm allergic to this. Why can't you help me, Master?"

Click. Went the transmitter.

Y3 knew it was an unequal battle, like clash of species are supposed to be. She could hear other Xs in X5's room. But Y also knew what she could say and what probably would bring an effect.

Knock, knock.

Y3: "Hello. I'm allergic to {this particular} smoke." (Can we have a fair and just use of weapons and an equal war?)

X5: Emitted more smoke onto Y3's face. More smoke was coming out with the door of X5's chamber being open. "Sorry, it's not {that particular} smoke."

Y3: What is it? (Eyes rounding and wide looking)

X5: "Hashish".


Situation 3

Y3 was thinking what could she cook for Y4? After all, Y4 would come all alone, without anything. What would she like??


Y3 and Y4 were getting along fine. Fine, fine, fine.

Until after 2 months, Y3 discovered to her horror and utter amazement that Y4 was not a Y. Y4 was actually an X. To be precise, X9.

Several things happened which made Y3 better enlightened.

X9 stole her keys and refused to give it back.
X9 refused to pay for stuff that both Y3 and erstwhile Y4 (actually, X9) use.
X9 made weird, loud noises in weird times of the day.
X9 refused to return things that Y3 owned and had lent X9.
X9 refused to take the waste, the toxic things out of the cohabitation settlement.
X9 brought in more X-s and demanded full accommodation, in every sense of the word, of those X-s, from Y3.

And so on.

The enlightenment had better utilitarian returns when X10 came in. Y3 found an uncanny similarity between X9 and X10. Though X9 wasn't living there anymore, X10 who also came masked as another Y, had striking similarities as far as creating innovative situations of non-cooperation and conflict were concerned. The first step to clash was deployed with the refusal to bear the costs of consumption. The second, and subsequent steps were aggressive missions to capture spaces of Ys and cornering them. If done step by step, and little by little, Xs always found that Ys could be defeated just like that.

Y3 at least knew what was coming and how the process works.

Defeat by Y feeds on the Xs. It's a parasitic relationship.

And thereafter, the door would be kept closed.





FFWD>>>>>>>>>>>>>

"We have been observing for the past few months that you have been consistently eating our grocery stuff like chips etc. Initially we thought it was a one off incident, and may be you were running short of your own stuff, so we let it go. But eventually it seems that there is no stopping you, and starting from chips, to milk and we are not sure what more, the saga continues.

So we are forced to write this email as all of our efforts to make you realize have ended in failure. We want to make it clear that since our food habits don't match, we can't share our groceries. So it is better you get your own stuff and spare our chips etc. Since the ones you eat are not proportionate to the amounts we eat, it is not logical to share a subset of the items. So its better we don't share anything, you be on your own, and we will get our own share. For the items which you have already shared, we will share the prices (e.g., the diet pepsi and the milk from the last grocery). But in future, we will not share any of the groceries.

As you still don't have a car, we don't have a problem giving you a ride to the grocery store, but it is your responsibility to find out when we are going for groceries, and adapt your routine accordingly. We made initial adjustments thinking that you were new to here and needed some assistance in settling, but the things didn't work out as we thought and eventually ended up in such a scenario where we are writing an email to you. And if you want to use any of our stuff (like recently you were using Y1's and Y2's slippers), you need to ask explicitly from the owner of the thing before using it. We hope you can adjust yourself accordingly, and similar circumstances don't arise in future.

About the common duties which fall on us as we are sharing the same apartment, we all should share it equally. All of us have our own academic commitments, but that does not mean that such commitments stop us from doing the chores. You should also share the responsibility of occasionally clearing off the trash can, as it has been observed that you shirk that responsibility. Cleaning of the kitchen and living room area will be shared as it has been going for the past few months. Its a pity that being such a matured person doing your PhD, we have to explicitly tell you all these things, and we hope such a scenario is not repeated."

The above letter was received by X1 (Remember Situation 1?) from a group of Ys.

X1 obviously knew that letters like this, have little impact. He knew he had to be calm. And he was calm. For.... a letter cannot destroy the breed and mission of X-s. It was but common knowledge.

To be continued......sometime, somewhere.....

Long Footnote:

Since I earnestly intend to earn the status of an intellectual writer and thereby get an upgrade from being the "siren", I have employed the strategy of using quadruple meanings of words and symbols so as to elicit appreciation of possessing a large range of comprehensive thinking. Having said that, I'm also wary of being misinterpreted. Therefore, relevant and common meanings of X are given below. The list includes, but is not exhaustive, of all the possible connotations of X.

# X oftentimes is used to designate the unknown.

# Sometimes it is also used to mean the Independent Variable. Y is the dependent variable. X has effects on Y, the range, magnitude and strength of the relationship varying from situation to situation. But X always has an effect on Y. The relationship could be expressed as the following equation:

Y=a + b₁X₁ + b₂X₂ + b₃X₃

Y is the value of the Dependent variable (Y), what is being predicted or explained

a (Alpha) is the Constant or intercept

b₁ is the Slope (Beta coefficient) for X₁

X₁ First independent variable that is explaining the variance in Y

b₂ is the Slope (Beta coefficient) for X₂

X₂ Second independent variable that is explaining the variance in Y

b₃ is the Slope (Beta coefficient) for X₃

X₃ Third independent variable that is explaining the variance in Y

s.e.b₁ standard error of coefficient b₁

s.e.b₂ standard error of coefficient b₂

s.e.b₃ standard error of coefficient b₃

# X in this entry, is manifestly used to mean roommates of a special breed. Y is the cohabitant of the roommate. But cohabitation is the only similarity point between X and Y.

Images

Today I was talking with my husband and were mutually laughing over how our parents and bengali parents in general, go or rather used to go paranoid over "nijer paa er darano" (which not literally, but substantially translates as being involved in a respectable career) and did enormous levels of policing (in Supratim's case) and complaining (in my case) on studying times. The conversation then moved to how ....being up in night (raat jege pora) usually never bought us respite. Making up for daytime sins was how night time studuing was seen....as yet another mode of alleged detour from studies, notwithstanding how my dear husband never really studied at night. Night time activity would always comprise of different stuff for any urban middle class guy growing up in Calcutta in early 90-s...in that embryonic cable TV stage...and ahem...I need not say more.

And then I was telling him how our respective neighbourhoods would actually feel like very late at night even at 11:30 or 12:00, inducing our parents to "shun the sham" and go to bed. So much contrasted when I fast forward the images to our present grad student lives in a foreign land, when almost all of us would have done stuff like frying fish or making an omlette at 2 am in the night (i.e. catching up with cooking) and the night is still young (with work and play). Even though the noise pollution is much less in our foreign land neighbourhoods, night life here never feels so quiet and night-like sans the close and distant baying of the street dogs, wall clocks ticking away and ceiling fans humming lullaby-s back home. The mere nostalgic drop of those images are sleep-inducing to me.... but then the deafening silence in here, breaks through the comfort.

In fact, when in our day-to-day activities and thought processes, we make those little trips back and forth... and engage upon verifying the right images of things while picking up the compromised versions, the images are as much based on sound and feeling as they are on visuals. Although this is plain common sense herein as I'm saying this.....as we know and accept Cooley's looking glass concept......and accept the fact of our embeddedness in images, the power of images are perhaps more determining than we can expect and consume.


This entry is not supposed to be a treatise of how and where images are overpowering and staggeringly so...but a pondering piece on what could we do and they do. Images stare back at us, and then stay in our heads. They do not talk back but yet, do the talking. Think of particular words, certain photographs and even the sonorous shapes of words heard aeons back, the traces of which refuse to leave our head spaces and instead creep into every later images formed, including those that were formed to drive the formed ones off, as well as those that were formed to complement them. Social Construction of reality? I can almost hear one my dear friends (a sporadic reader of this blog too..) come with Berger and Luckmann and probably wondering what's the motivation of questioning a basic cornerstone after 10 years of indoctrination in the camp. My confusion stems not from refusing to accept that basic cornerstone, of the construction part of reality, but making sense of the fragmented pieces that are left in the multilayered tensions of being there in everyday life.

And then, there are a few choices, making the task a lot easier (less choice always equals easy, in my opinion)

1. Being a passive receptor of images
2. Being a passive maker of images (passive--> not active, and probably subconscious)
3. Being an active receptor
4. Being an active maker of images and actions

Of course, these are not mutually exclusive categories and intertwining formations could very well occur, complete with qualifying adjectives. Even with the knowledge of all possible permutations and combinations of the above, the confusion wouldn't leave. There is no problem in reckoning passivity but there is a problem in being passive. It does hurt our images of the self and our consciousness of our active agency, and sometimes urges to change the fluidity of it all.

No, this is not about control and externality of situations or their determining influence. But being able to know oneself, of finding the receptors that act differently with similar and even same images, transport us into different worlds and make different selves of ours. Yes, this is a lifelong journey, or even transcendental of lifetimes, so to speak, ....but where, when and how do we know to stop, to move, to perceive or at least, to make an attempt? Now, the question could be: is it essential to know in lieu of a "right" answer, but if we have a vague sense (in fact, very vague...would be good enough) of the maps (to be encountered), based on the past paths taken, probably the ensuing pain and confusion would considerably lessen?


Is it possible to consciously solve these puzzles? In the attempt, do we merge our selves and form a coherent distribution where overlapping areas attract the process of knowing our reception, perception and reaction to images?

If it is possible, one good thing will happen for sure. I will be deemed as less angry and more cool. Cool as in both bangla and English slang connotations.

So much for my image!

Of earrings and ears

There could be more things than the infamous bloggers' block in writing as sporadically as I have been doing, for quite some time now. As a rooter for cumulative causes and coming from a social science brainwashed camp, it is indeed very predictable that I would hereforth put in several reasons for not writing in the pace as I was doing before. So, here they are (and they would be repeated with unabashed shamelessness in near future when I stop writing again):

1. Lack of time (Try being a TA for a stats course and then we will talk)
2. Lack of interest in anything that could call for interests...such as movies, books, girls, pals, tagging, weather.
3. Lack of having a rocking social life that could serve as a fodder for this blog with no sarcasm barred.
4. Not doing well physically, and perhaps mentally, if inability to make and understand any coherent thought could count. I guarantee you'll see traces of that mental state now and then in this entry as well.

Now, it is impossible that nothing would not have happened in my life. Yeah....right.

In between and as far as I can clearly remember one thing has been happening with alarming regularity. And I'm left with these:

Yes, I've lost the other pairs. All from my left ear. And in many instances I've realized I've lost one of them after enough time have passed since I've made a fool of myself by wearing one of them in a TA class, in a meeting with my supervisor, and after I've finished grocery shopping.

Life doesn't spare me, at all. Not even in the usual trivialities where you could count on things.

Things like being politically correct, at least in front of others. As I was walking into my TA class sometime in last week, some of the students were discussing about the American Election Politics. Their comments were not very interesting in any way...and I was looking into my notes when I heard, "I can take a minority only as long as it's Black". Instantly my ears went upright as radars (and I don't know whether I dropped and lost my left earring in the process, but mah ears were right upright!)

I was hoping someone would at least condemn....but well nobody did. People were bashing minorities, with a minority TA hearing it all.....thinking and trying to analyze why and how Blacks earn their respect among racist White richie kids? Once I went through some completed questionnaire that asked if the respondent felt any hatred towards any ethnic group in particular and why. Most of the respondents mentioned Ukranians, Chinese and "Paki-s" as the ethnic group that are "sick" and should be "out of Canada". Surely, there is a colour-coded hatred mosaic and I'm gonna work on that!

So, yeah, I got some research idea, which should translate as fantastic, because 3 years of PhD life has made me a dead head as far as research ideas are concerned (well...ahem...also in other areas but I better not divulge all my secrets in a single blog entry. Some could serve as inspirations for more to come, especially when the situation of nothing-to-write-about has an immense imminent probability to strike).

And then, things have been delayed in the professional front...but finally falling in place.

Though I still haven't started going to the gym.

Oh...three of my friends' email id-s got hacked (or cracked), their chat histories read, selected and doctored. The rest is history. Friendships were severed, people were suspected and clueless mindsets were transmitted over phone. Taking sides and being involved were never murkier.
I also had to hear that nothing could be severed if it were not actually severed. No, it's not a circular statement, the actuality of the breaking event is emphasized here. That is, friendships that are already tampered, severed, cannot be broken any further. As one of my very cool and cold-headed friend told me this, I couldn't but agree, though partially.

After all, when conversations in a messenger chat take place, between two people, people will and do comment about a third person and engage upon "he said-she said" sort of "bitching". Human nature cannot be expected to be just. It is less often than not that we learn it the hard way and though it does not justify giving in reasons, it could probably make us see things analytically, if not forgivingly and indifferently.

But when persons do not choose to say those things in face of that third person, obviously those persons are exercising a choice and agency to maintain a "facade", so that the particular relationship or friendship could go on. As to why is it necessary to maintain a friendship, even on the surface, and even in the face of being called a "facade", there could be various reasons. But then, who's listening? This is a lost cause and it doesn't take much to lose ears on an issue.

As long as our positions in a chain of relationships are secure, and ego-s are intact, ears and earrings serve as food for blogging, all of us should be happy neighbours, if not a family.

Oh...the above emoticon is meant in its true connotation, not sarcastically. The disclaimer is categorically given since people love and hear my sarcastic avatar more too often than I mean...and it never hurts to take a precaution. Better be safe than sorry, ain't it?

Later!