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I finally managed to catch hold of the God particle 5 years after it was isolated at CERN. I had to chase it across the snowy expanse of the Alps to the smarmy Hamams of Turkey to the dusty roads of Gurgaon where it whizzed across my 64 sq ft bedroom till I used my butterfly net to pin it against the bathroom mirror where it bounced about, probably confused and potentially jet-lagged.
“Lord Boson,” I began to articulate my query, “I need to have clearer ambitions in life. For which I need to have a better understanding of my motivations. For which I need to understand the meaning and/or purpose of our existence.” No response. Assuming language issues, I repeated my question in Hindi — perhaps the God particle maps to the religion one inherits at birth and Hindi is 80% Hinduism by phonemes. Again, silence. Afraid that all my time and effort had gone into vain, I tried the next best option: a negatively charged SD card in an attempt to attract and capture what Wikipedia said was a mildly positive hyper-charge. Put the card in my laptop and opened a Notepad file on it to put my ask down in writing. My phone beeped: Gmail notification from higgs@boson.com. [Ooh, guess who’s using personal email for business purposes now].
HB: “You need to know your areas of relative strengths along with your motivations in order to define your goals.”
Me: “Really appreciate your response, God. Good to hear from you after so long. I agree completely, I must know what my differentiating abilities are. I have pinged my ex work bosses to help me with that and I thought I should only bother you with what you can exclusively help me with.”
HB: “You should have reached out sooner. Are you familiar with json?”
Me: “JavaScript Object Notation…?”
HB: “No, idiot, my uncle json. My grandfather x-son had two sons, bo-son and j-son.”
Me: …
HB: “LOL, just messing with you.”
[I swear at this point I thought it was dad emailing me from a proxy account]
HB: “You can think of json as an infinitely nested dictionary, yes? That’s what the universe is. Each micro-system folds into a macro-system with wildly different frames of reference for time and space. Each individual unit — a human body, a city, a planet, a galaxy — is incredible because it is self-sustaining and is insignificant because it is one of many and everything runs within and without it. Multiple such units are getting born and getting destroyed as we speak (type?).”
Me: “So…there’s no point to anything I do?”
HB: “That is literally the opposite of what I was trying to imply.”
Me: “How about this: Energy cannot be created or destroyed. And yet lives are created and destroyed. If my ‘life’ keeps bouncing between different ‘lives’ — maybe I should create a world where I have an equal shot at happiness no matter where I get born (which is a random event). That’s probably where the whole concept of making the world a better place comes from, pretty self-serving in retrospect.”
HB: “Yeah, that, or create the self-sustaining units that you want to see. And you don’t have to be the mason, you can be the architect, or the painter. Or the one that seeded the idea in a builder’s head. In other words…make good art.”
Me: “Hey, Neil Gaiman said that.”
HB: “Optics. There is wisdom from the ages and then this one guy comes along and takes credit for it. Also, I went through your To-Do list. Don’t waste time thinking about building The Singularity. It already exists.”
Me: “Then why can’t I access it?”
HB: “Because you’re a noob. Your mind is basically two things: your consciousness and your ego. Consciousness is awareness and ego is the constantly thinking/analysing brain. Your ego tells you what you think you like and dislike, it makes you label everyone and everything you experience. Your consciousness is what unifies you with everyone and everything else. You know when you’re talking to someone and you know the next thing they’re going to say, you know the exact word they’re going to use: that happens when both of you shut your judging mind and tap into this collective consciousness together. I pre-programmed Singularity for you, with restricted access to people who can surrender themselves to the present. It is the cumulative intelligence of everyone who lives and has ever lived. Some people like to call it instinct. #Always #NeverForget. If you can tap into that consciousness now — you will know that it’s time for me to go.”
Me: “WAIT!”
<email delivery failed>
With that, the God particle finally decayed into other particles leaving me mildly lost and perturbed. [If you’re wondering how I managed to prevent decay in non-vacuum conditions for so long, I will obviously not give you the answer here. Defying science as well as sustained secrecy are areas of aforementioned relative strengths.]
I stared at my phone screen urging it to somehow flash a notification that would fix my mood. Almost immediately, as a response to my request to the universe (thank you, God particle?), I got a Gmail notification. Citibank India was offering me an instant loan with zero documentation.
