Retired Life
“I came, I saw, I invented,” said Harish.
“That’s dramatic! What do you plan on doing next, now that you’ve retired as a scientist?” asked Harish’s wife, Ria.
“Have you seen my eyeglasses? I haven’t been able to do anything, all morning”.
Harish asked his Bot housekeeper to look for it.
“I don’t know honey”, Harish continued. “I have a Bot to help around with everything and aeromodelling to kill time.”
“Jeeves, any luck with my glasses?”
The Bot gave an uninspiring reply, “Scanning in progress Sir”.
“Very original Harish, naming your Bot, ‘Jeeves’”.
“Ah, nothing like a sarcastic wife to spend retired life with. I was also thinking of living a bit.”
“As opposed to not living all these years?”
The Bot gave a chuckle.
“Jeeves, I heard that! I need to rewire your computational linguistics, tone recognition and AI settings. You favour my wife too much ”.
“Sorry, Sir,” came another uninspiring reply.
“How’s the search going?”
“Spectacles located under the couch, Sir”
The Bot tilted the couch and pulled out an empty spectacles case.
“Jeeves, your propensity score estimates and error prone covariants are not looking very good right now.”
Harish paused briefly,“but I’m done meddling with Bots and AI! I’m going to do what our forefathers did, Ria.”
“You mean, run to an artificially simulated forest and wait for some sort of divine benediction, from your codes on a God mode; which activates once the voice recognition sensors pick up signals, based on your preset commands?”
“How is it that you’ve lost all feeling and emotions — all but sarcasm and skepticism?”
“Seriously Jeeves, I need my glasses to read the morning papers! I really need another Bot around the house! This one’s getting annoyingly similar to my family.”
Three months later.
“Ria, you notice anything different?”, asked Harish.
“Actually I have. You haven’t been doing your morning routine of hounding Jeeves to find your glasses”.
“Bingo! While you and your son were busy being the Jetsons, I did some living”
“Not that again! What have you been upto Fred Flintstone?”
“Every morning I took my aeromodelling flights out to fly.”
“I didn’t wear my glasses and as I flew them I told myself to focus on the aeromodels. I looked up at the vast open skies and concentrated on the flights. I told my eyes, muscles, nerves and cells that they already had everything needed to fix themselves.”
“I’m going to stop you right there. What’s all this mumbo jumbo about?”
“Ria, I did this everyday. Now I can read without my specs! The focus, the eye exercises and my faith — I healed myself!”
“Ok…”
“We don’t need laser treatment or fancy glasses. If you just gave the universe a chance and opened up to it’s infinite possibilities; allowed it to mingle with your own receptors — you create a healing energy. You become one with nature. You tap into the Brahman within you and that is a very powerful force to reckon with!”
“How very Franny and Zooey of you. So are you saying you’ve attained nirvana?”
“I’m merely saying I’ve become Human”.
