Manu Joseph - Serious Men

The auditorium was full. There were silhouettes on the aisles. Scores of people were outside the doors, denied entry, denied the Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics. And they were disconsolate. She could hear their angry demands to be allowed to at least sit in the aisles. But then even the aisles were filled. This was a strange parallel world.

There was a deafening applause now. On the stage appeared an amicable white man, and Arvind Acharya. The two men sat on cane chairs in the centre of an illuminated circle. The sheer expanse of the stage was fit for ballet but the Institute allowed only lectures. A pretty girl, somewhat preoccupied with her long straight hair, arrived at the podium. ‘Look at my hair, look at my hair,’ Oparna thought she was going to say, but instead the girl said, ‘Science is an evolution of the human mind. It is the true history of mankind.’ After a few lines like this she said that the men on the stage needed no introduction and then she introduced them. The girl was not from the Institute and Oparna wondered where the men had found her. She remembered Jana Nambodri asking her if she could introduce the guests and hand out the bouquets too. ‘We need some beauty out there’, he had said. She had refused because she had felt like refusing him. Also, even though she understood the banality of men and the aesthetic improvements a woman would bring to an occasion like this, she was privately against women being used as ceremonial dolls. And, for reasons that were not clear to her then, she wanted to look at Acharya from a comfortable seat in the shelter of darkness.

His initial geniality had vanished. His red cheeks were now molten, his infant bald head shone under the lights and he was surveying the audience in dismay. Keeble rose from his cane chair and went to the podium. He drank two glasses of water. He was a tall slender man, elderly and pleasant. ‘It is a pleasure to speak to a gathering like this,’ he said, and then looking at Acharya, he added, ‘A bit intimidating too.’

A gentle hush of laughter went through the auditorium. Some laughed aloud late to show that they understood the joke. Keeble began his lecture. Oparna endured the Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics by observing what Acharya did throughout the speech. He would open his mouth in a trance or glare at the roof, or signal to someone for a glass of water, or a faint smirk would come to his face at something Keeble had said.

At one point, he was looking angrily at Keeble, and she felt nervous. She hoped he wouldn’t do anything stupid. Keeble was talking about Time and was coming to the perilous conclusion: ‘Though Stephen Hawking had misgivings about what he had said earlier, I am of the opinion that the arrow of Time moves both ways. In some conditions we would remember the future and not the past, and a ripple would cause a stone to fall. Time can be reversed.’

Acharya’s deep operatic voice exclaimed, ‘Not possible.’ He said it again, this time softly. ‘Not possible.’

Keeble looked a bit embarrassed, but the spontaneous gasp of the audience, then the laughter and the festive murmurs that ensued, diminished the shock. Also, there was no malice in the voice that had spoken. Acharya’s comment somehow invoked the spirit of science and everybody understood it that way.

‘We will talk about it later, Arvind,’ Keeble said jovially. ‘Maybe we can meet yesterday, if you have the time.’

When Acharya eventually rose to speak, and steered his trousers around his waist, Oparna laughed. A studious stranger sitting next to her looked at her curiously before returning his expectant eyes to the stage. Acharya walked like a tusker to the podium. Oparna felt the world around her quietening. There was then a silence that was eerie and total. It was broken by the squeal of the mike when he tapped it gently.

‘I like Henry Keeble very much and so it hurts me to say that the end of quantum physics is near,’ he said, his voice manly and powerful. Yet, innocent, rude and pure. ‘The Large Hadron Collider will confirm that many exotic particles do not actually exist and that many among us may have been talking rubbish for the last three decades. Maybe we cannot understand physics at the quantum level without understanding other things which are not considered physics today. Other things like …’ He paused. He appeared to decide if he must say it. He did not say it.

‘I believe it is time for a new kind of physics to arrive,’ he said. ‘Honestly, I don’t know what this new physics will look like. Anyway, I am too old for that revolution. Maybe someone in this auditorium will one day bring it to us. But this is not what I want to talk about today.

‘There are research students here who will be leaving us this year. They will be pursuing their interests in other universities. I came here, primarily, to tell you something. Go with the knowledge that man has just scratched the surface. It is a very impressive scratch and we must be proud. But there is a lot, a lot of things, to be done. I wish I were as old as you now, at this time. There is so much to do. But I have no tips on what you must do. In fact, I came here to say what you must never do. There is no pleasant way to say this, so let me say it the way I want to say it. Most of you will probably never really discover anything. You may not contribute anything to the great equations that describe the universe to the world. But you will have the good fortune of encountering people of exceptional intelligence. People who are much smarter than you. Never get in their way, never group together in disgruntled circles and play games. Respect talent, real talent. Worship it. Clever people will always be disliked. Don’t exploit that and crawl your way to the top. By the laws of probability most of you are mediocre. Accept it. The tragedy of mediocrity is that even mediocre people shake their heads and mull over how ‘standards are falling’. So don’t mull. Just know when you’ve to get out of the way. Most of you will be sideshows, extras in the grand unfolding of truth. That’s all right. Once you accept that and let the best brains do their jobs, you will have done your service to science and mankind.’

Oparna studied the faces in the auditorium. There was hurt and there was acceptance. She saw the light in their eyes, and it was a moment she knew she would always remember. They were under a spell, they were at the mercy of an ancient genius who was speaking his mind. The tension eased as Acharya changed course. He began to speak about the Balloon Mission and infected the audience with his conviction that microscopic aliens were falling on Earth all the time.

‘We will find them,’ he said.

Two days after The Talks, the work on the Balloon Mission intensified. The dormant machines and boxes and borrowed research hands in the basement sprang to life. And the lab in the bowels of the Institute became a hive of activity. It was now the most important place in the Institute, connected in spirit to the chamber of Acharya on the third floor. He began to arrive at the Institute before nine in the morning, bumbling down the corridors with more purpose than before, always with a comet tail of research assistants. One by one, Acharya’s old friends from different parts of the world descended for short durations to help. In the company of the old hands he relaxed a bit and appeared less preoccupied with his own contempt for the world. Oparna began to see him the way she guessed he once was.

His eyes, that usually cast an insurmountable distance, now looked with the connivance of fellowship. The friends who came his way, he hugged fiercely, and in the meetings, which had become some sort of a festive reunion, the old men recounted the memories of their golden days and their battles with people whom they often described in a derisive way as ‘normal’. Acharya was becoming easy to be with. In the middle of a discussion, when someone said the Balloon Mission needed a name, he did not consider it a frivolity. He understood, and was game. He even thought through a brief silence and said excitedly, ‘Superman.’ His bellowing laughter shook his paunch, and a button snapped. They discussed various names until they decided that they would just call it the Balloon Project, probably BP.