My pal Sumon

Doston, I want to introduce my friend, partner-in-crime and roommate, Sumon. Uber-cool guy. Can talk to you about anything from Marx to mehndi. We hit it off at once, yaar. Evenings are spent watching TV, drinking wine and having extensive politico-social discussion. Mutual learning experience. His career path is also off the beaten track – he studied English Literature (that’s right, Shakespeare, etc) in Jadavpur University, premier institute of learning in Calcutta, and then went in for an MCA. He has composed a poem in a programming language:

#total control#

seed 127612

% do loop commence

define i=now

define j=forever

for me=i to j

input “fruits of capitalistic economy”

insert “marxian dialectic’

display “kurosawa’s rashomon”

set dummy parameters (1:3:65)

buffer overload suppress

i=i+1

end do loop

reset

out

Beauty of this poem is in the meaning. Let Sumon explain: “Total control exposes how the capitalistic society has robotized the citizens, and held them captive in a perpetual loop. The means is the greed/profit motive, which is making ppl mad for the fruits of the economy (eg money, entertainment, etc). But trapped in the garden of no-escape, the human soul experiences deep conflict between the oft-touted material happiness and the aspiration for equality: this is nothing but the 21st-century avatar of the Marxian dialectic. This conflict is well-embodied in the central character of Kurosawa’s must-see flick, Rashomon. The humans in the society therefore experience an emotional overload, but this is suppressed by all manner of means, starting from thousands of channels of cable TV, and ending with drugs and prostitution and all the vices of modern dystopia.”