There’s a Bug in that Cockroach!

Foreword: Light shall scare away the darkness; the right shall triumph over the Left, Mrs. and Mr. Karat notwithstanding; and the scheming developer shall beat the project plan. Thus, ladies and gentlemen, here I am. A lot has happened over the past few weeks, but don’t worry, I’m not planning to make this an information-packed power-post. It will be as devoid of any utility as everything about this blog has always been.

Recently, researchers at the University of Brussels introduced a miniature robot among a colony of cockroaches to observe them closely. How the Belgians can ever make anything other than chocolates, discreet banks and knives, given their huge demand and the ridiculous size of their population, is completely beyond me. But I digress. The said miniature robot looked like a matchbox that has been on the road at the same time as Britney Spears and yet succeeded in wresting leadership of the colony. Proving, in the process, that not looking like a cockroach is an essential leadership trait. Is Rahul Gandhi listening?

But that’s not what is bothering me. Personally, I have always had a lot of respect for cockroaches, particularly their uncrushable, er, spirit. They have preceded the human race by millions of years and on account of not using the roads of Delhi at the same time as Blueline buses, are expected to exist long after. Being of discerning temperament, dear reader, you will realize that the roach must clearly outrank humans in terms of intelligence. The point that settles it for me is that I am yet to see a cockroach wearing cargo trousers. Imagine my unrest, then, when I realized that even the mighty cockroach had been fooled. My view of the world, based on an intellectual pyramid with cockroaches and yours truly on top, followed by the average humans in the next few rungs and finally credit card salesmen making the rather wide base, changed radically. Now I’m at the top, alone. That’s when I discovered absinthe, but that’s a different story.

Leadership is a subject I have long been interested in. Then, when one of the oldest species on earth decided to entrust their leadership with a robot, and a not too good looking one at that, I was bound to be concerned. So I decided to devote my considerable mental faculties to analyze this anomaly. After stimulating my intellect with half an hour’s worth of Ekta Kkkapoor’s deadliest, I concluded that she was REALLY sick and that there was a mother-in-law to blame somewhere in the cockroach-crisis. That’s when I laughed at my folly. Being such an evolved species, cockroaches have done away with the concept of the said relative, exchanging her for a case of the house’s best at the wedding party. Consequently, cockroach marriages last a whole lot longer than the case.

After considerable thought and strategic inputs from the said bottle of absinthe, light dawned on me. Damn! I had forgotten the curtains yet again. So I just turned the other way and slept off. And the cockroaches? Well, they were probably running an experiment on the effects of crazy observations on the overeducated. The results are hard to interpret: there are way too many cockroach droppings on the report to read it.

The last I heard, the robot roach had deluded itself into believing that it was a real cockroach and raised strong objections to the report. Arundhati Roy has already promised support to it against exploitation by the government. Mrs. and Mr. Karat expressed their sincere regret that such a thing still goes on in the land of Mao. On being reminded that Belgium was not the land of Mao, Mr. Karat philosophically allowed, “Only their chocolates are perfect.”