Blackboots preaches

The trouble with you is that you treat everything like a point mass, said Blackboots to Pothead. Real life, he explained painstakingly, is not a point mass. You have facts and facts, he continued, but you can’t get anything done with them. And anyway, the country is going to the dogs. I mean, how can you live in India? Nobody can! (At this point Pothead found herself rolling her eyes. BB didn’t see it though, for the video wasn’t on and that made it easier for Ph to make all the faces she wanted to). There’s nothing there. Nothing will ever work. Nothing can happen to that country. All that is waiting to happen is for it to disintegrate into nothingness. Why, there’s no point even having an i-phone in that country- you can’t get half the apps working. Now here, he went on impressively, my phone tells me all that I have to do in the day. It tells me the weather, the traffic, my schedule and everything I want to know! He paused for effect. Unfortunately for him, Ph was a woman. She did not get miserable with the new found knowledge that she lived her life in the absence of a gadget which would tell her what she was supposed to do in the day and how the sun was shining. Typical of a woman no doubt, who never fathom all the great and mighty things that hold a man’s interest, but generally her head could process that information. She sat with a “oh-yea-sure!” smirk and let him do the talking.

You don’t see the big picture, he said resignedly. Living in that institute has just ruined the way you think. You work under ideal conditions and get nothing practical ever made. You work under standard temperature and pressure-(he’s quoting his class twelve physics book, thought Ph. She thought of the chemical vapour deposition system she used, the quartz tube she plugged in, the wires she used to fix the ends, the old mass flow controller which she struggled with. She tried to think of it under stp conditions that she should have worked in, mentally pictured her lab, let out a sigh, an amused smile, tried saying something to that effect and gave up trying to put in a word edgeways when BB was in full fledged swing giving his opinion, as a fruitless endeavour.)