STORY OF THE MONTH
Enter, Search, Select, Click
by S. Krishnamoorthy Aithal
Madhav had an unusual visitor on the Veteran’s day. He welcomed the gentleman who knocked on his door, while his wife and children had gone to watch the parade. When the guest introduced himself, Madhav was more than pleased to have the person’s company: He was an alien from outer space!
The name of the visiting guest was a cluster of what sounded like consonants and could neither be transcribed in English nor pronounced. Observing the host’s confusion, the guest asked Madhav to address him by any name Madhav pleased. Both agreed upon the name of Bruce.
Bruce gave his full address. The exact location didn’t interest Madhav very much. No use of other address lines because there was no US mail service there, anyway.
“I see the world hasn’t changed very much,” Bruce said.
“Well, I can’t confirm or contradict your statement without your reference point,” Madhav answered, trying to get more information.
“I was here last when the Crusades were taking place,” Bruce said. “I see wars still go on, if, at least, not openly in the names of gods. I hear gods are today retired from active duty, although nothing is said to move or breathe without their pleasure.”
Evidently, Bruce had seen the parade and perhaps listened to a few speeches on his way to Madhav’s place.
Madhav collected his thoughts before he spoke.
“Bruce, in your place I would be more cautious to draw conclusions based on what I see,” Madhav slowly responded. “What you saw or heard is all a part of the old world. Occasionally, people go there for a brief vacation. Today we live in a new world, not the one created by god in seven days.”
Bruce was taken by surprise. He thought he was visiting one of god’s creations.
“I am not an expert and can’t explain how exactly it works,” Madhav spoke in all modesty. “I will give you a thumbnail view and you can contact others, if you are interested in learning the nuts and bolts of the system. We all now live in separate worlds, each created by respective individuals to their taste and needs.”
“You mean humans no longer live in one world!” Bruce asked, full of curiosity.
“You are right, they all seem to, but they don’t,” Madhav confirmed. “In order to understand the nature of this mysterious reality, first of all you have to know the Internet.”
“Not god, nor heaven, as in the past, but the Internet. Is that correct?” Bruce wanted to make sure he was following Madhav.
“Yes. Please don’t ask me ‘what is Internet?’ just as in the world past, you were not supposed to ask ‘who is god?’ or ‘where is heaven?’ You will get misleading answers, if you persist.”
“OK, please proceed.”
“Then there are Servers and Browsers. I don’t know which one comes first. It is not important. You can live happily without knowing a thing about either, and likewise about many other new words and concepts, just as people lived in the past not knowing a thing about soul, spirit, after life, morality, etc. Of course, if you are curious and want to know further details, there are experts, as I said, --the new theologians and philosophers of the Internet who would give technical accounts, all of which sound gibberish, at least, to me.”
“It all sounds awfully abstract, I must say,” Bruce remarked.
“Abstraction is the foundation of all powerful systems,” Madhav said, adding a philosophical angle. Without it, how do you think you keep people enslaved?”
“You mean slavery is still in practice?”
“Let us not go into that unpleasant topic now. This would only distract our attention away from the subject on hand.”
“Could you please walk me through this Internet?” Bruce asked.
Madhav invited Bruce to his laptop. By way of introduction, he said all the operations that Bruce need to know are ENTER, SEARCH, SELECT and CLICK. Following this, he gave a demonstration how we create a cyberspace, a world of our own, by entering, searching, selecting and clicking, and how we live in it all day.
“In other words, the world is uploaded on the Internet,” Bruce said, picking up the jargon.
“You got it!” Madhav said, encouraged by Bruce’s quick grasp of the subject.
“Does Internet have prophets?”
“A good question,” Madhav replied, and continued. “We don’t. Wonderful, isn’t it? Initially, there was a brief debate over two candidates: Bill Gates and Al Gore. The matter was quickly resolved, in keeping with netiquette. Each individual is a prophet unto himself/ herself, p lower case, in the Internet and cyberspace.”
“What is, by the way, netiquette, is it something akin to god’s commandments?
“You guessed it right; netiquette is a set of strict rules.”
“Do you pray?” Bruce asked, hesitatingly.
“Everyone does,” Madhav said. “At home, in school, government offices, public places, and in the court. No ban for prayer here. Prayer is the foundation on which the Internet is built. We pray all day, and use four simple words—ENTER, SEARCH, SELECT, CLICK in our prayers. You may call them prayers or four-fold path, or four goals of life, whatever takes your fancy.”
“Interesting! What about crime?”
“Unfortunately, crime has followed us,” Madhav said with a sigh. “Our law-enforcing authorities work round the clock to catch adwares, malwares, spywares, physhing agents, and a host of other criminal gangs and quarantine them, but we do still have crime.”
“What about death and salvation?”
“Death is unknown in the cyberspace of the Internet, so the question of salvation doesn’t arise,” Madhav said. “Once something is uploaded on the Internet, it lasts for eternity, becomes immortal. That is our glory and sorrow.”
“I understand your feelings,” said Bruce, commiserating.
Skipping from topic to topic, the discussion turned to the subject of love.
“Take, for example, the dating practice,” Madhav lectured to show how the ritual was simplified and made efficient. “You know that it consumes a lot of time of men and women trying to find a date and make an appointment. You try one, and if it fails you try another until someone is free and willing to date with you a given weekend. Think of all the telephone calls and seemingly endless correspondence involved in the process. None of this is necessary now. You simply outsource this job to a company who has the staff specialized in communication skills. They take care of the entire process, find a suitable person of the same sex or the opposite sex, and make the appointment for you online. You want a date this weekend? You can see how it works.”
Bruce wavered.
While Bruce was trying to make up his mind, Madhav’s wife and children returned home, and went straight to their computers without even saying hello or serving up a simple smile.
Madhav asked, “How do you like this new world?”
While Bruce was lost in contemplation, Madhav opened his e-mail account and saw communications from his wife and children. They were happy that he had company in their absence. They wanted to know if the gentleman was a relative or friend from his village Saligrama, India. They planned to celebrate his visit and were ordering pizza online.
Madhav showed Bruce the e-mails, containing warm greetings decorated with animated smileys and emoticons.
“It would require a separate session to introduce you to the e-mail feature,” Madhav said. “This is enough for today. You have still a long way to go. You have only scratched the surface of the Internet. I won’t press you to give your opinion hastily. I advise you to consult the experts before you form or give an opinion.”
On the pretext of other engagements, Bruce excused himself to avoid embarrassment over his lack of knowledge of the appropriate dress code, etc. for online pizza party, and took leave of Madhav, happy to keep his own counsel.
Leaving, Bruce thought he would have certainly loved to have a date at the weekend, ready and waiting.
CONGRATULATIONS, SALIGRAMA! TELL OUR READERS MORE ABOUT YOURSELF:
A scholar, critic, and an English teacher with publications in refereed international journals. His short stories have appeared in Critical Quarterly, Short Story International, Indian Literature, and New Quest. Two collections of his short stories Many in One and One in Many are editorial review. Contact.
I have published articles on a wide range of authors and topics—Walt Whitman, T. S. Eliot, Willa Cather, Ralph Ellison, Scott Momaday, Toni Morrison, Leslie Marmon Silko, Bharati Mukherjee, James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, Aldous Huxley, Northrop Frye, Indian English literature, East-West encounter, cultural diversity, and stylistics in scholarly international journals, among them, ACLALS Bulletin, American Notes & Queries, American Studies International, The British Journal of Aesthetics, Commonwealth Novel in English, Eire-Ireland, English Studies, Essays in Poetics, Explicator, International Fiction Review, James Joyce Quarterly, The Journal of Literary Theory, The Journal of South-Asian Literature, Language & Style, Neophilologus, North Dakota Quarterly, Southwestern American Literature, Studies in Bibliography, and World Futures. I have edited The Importance of Northrop Frye (1993), a collection of essays; co-authored ESL textbooks Access through English, I (1986), II (1987), and III (1988); contributed a chapter on Willa Cather to Literature and Ethnic Discrimination, Rodopi P. (1997); contributed a chapter on Aldous Huxley to Critical Survey of Long Fiction, IV (1983). My article on Raja Rao’s The Serpent and the Rope is excerpted in Contemporary Literary Criticism (1982). After a long record of scholarly work, I discovered my talents in creative writing. I have now made up for lost time. I have two collections of short stories One in Many and Many in One doing editorial rounds.
Q. What would you want our readers to know about you?
I want your readers to know that I am not one of those who could easily be profiled, pinned down, boxed in. In fact, I myself don’t know who I am even after years of unceasing search. I thought for a while that I was, for example, only good at scholarly work; then I discovered that I have creative talents. I live in many worlds, --eastern, western, and whatever lies in between. I feel comfortable wherever I find myself. I get along easily with people around me, notwithstanding my vegetarian food habits, love of peace and nonviolence, and close attachment to Washington, DC, a city everybody else loves to hate. I like all religions and gods, but I don’t personally believe in any of them, no disrespect meant by my disbelief. I wish I could to avoid all the confusion, but I don’t think that is likely to happen in this life, and, as I don’t believe in rebirth, ever.
Q. Do you write in a particular genre? If so, what genre is it?
I have written a few poems, but my chosen genre is short fiction. I try to blend prose, lyric, drama, and even criticism in my short stories, though.
Q. What, in your opinion, are the most important elements of good writing?
The same elements that make the daily conversation interesting are, in my opinion, the most important elements of good writing. You often use the common words and phrases in a conversation to mean something new or different by change of tone, intonation or stress; imply more than you say in words; use words to paint, sing, dance, and create a new world with plot, character, setting, dialogue, prophecy and all, don’t you? When the conversation is interesting, you become unmindful of the watch and miss an appointment, let the dinner on the table grow cold, or retire to bed late. When writing imitates writing, as it often tends to happen, then comes the problem. You yawn to read the stuff. Good writing aspires toward the perfection of a lively conversation; it engages the reader the same way a conversation does. Whatever it takes to make a conversation delightful, the same elements go to make good writing, and I wouldn’t want to even begin to list them.
Q. How do you develop your plots and characters? Do you use any set formula?
I pick plots and characters from what I see and hear. I move on from there to develop them so as to make them strange and new until no trace is left of the original that provided the inspiration so as to keep out of trouble.
Q. What do you do to unwind and relax?
Reading and writing help me unwind and relax.
Q. What inspires you? Who inspires you?
Truth, beauty, and love are endlessly inspiring. Who inspires me? I would rather keep it a secret.
Q. Are you working on any projects right now?
I have two volumes of short stories, One in Many and Many in One ready for publication, and I am looking for a publisher.
Q. What is most frustrating about writing? Most rewarding?
The frustrating part about writing is to find a publisher. Most rewarding part is to have pursued writing without any definite hope of publication.
Q. If I were sitting down to write my very first story, what would your advice be?
Be ready to revise the story.
Q. What advice would you give to writers just starting out?
Do you want to make writing your career? You have taken a wise decision. You don’t need any special skills or extraordinary love or war experiences to become a story teller. Basic writing skills are all that you need. Everyone has experiences of one kind or another. Even day-to-day experiences will serve the purpose, so don’t look down upon them as worthless which deserve to die with you.
You can write a story a day. If you keep on working at it for a few more days, you may be able to find a publisher for it and, if you are unemployed or not employable, a new career may open up for you. You may even find a path to higher orders of the universe--heaven, immortality, and the vast Emptiness itself, depending on your luck and choice.
There is no pastime like writing and nothing comparable to the pleasure one gets by writing. In the world of a writer, time passes quickly. Boredom takes to its heel. Loneliness and lethargy take flight. Some strange spirit more powerful than alcohol flows through the veins. Limbs loosen. Mind opens. Scales from the eyes fall. Everything looks strange and beautiful. No wonder that it has been claimed that writing keeps people away from drinking, gambling, and other vices, cures them of minor ailments, and brings relief from pain from loss, separation, and serious illnesses. In a manner of speaking, it removes cholesterol from our blood vessels, opens up clogged arteries for a smooth flow of blood, supplies oxygen to your body and mind. It adds beauty to life, however ugly it may seem to the physical eye. It brings you to the full awareness of your soul and spirit. It prepares you to face the inevitable death bravely. Through your writings, you will be able to leave behind your legacy for the benefit of mankind, unlike those footprints on the sands of time, and achieve the state of your preference mentioned above.
Whatever your age, nine or ninety, it doesn’t matter. All that you need is a desire to produce something beautiful out of the clay of your personal joys and sorrows.
Disclaimer: You are, dear beginning writer, warned against taking any statements made above, literally or legalistically. Your literary advisor cannot be taken to court for any loss, injury, or pain resulting from your literary endeavors.
Saligrama K. Aithal
Potomac College
E-mail:saligrama.aithal@Potomac.edu
