H@ppY N3w Y3@R

New year; this is one time of the year all the narcissist, pessimist, optimists, misogynists along with every other misfits of the society join together and do/act what they call as a “celebration”, it differs from people to people; parties to parties, but most of the time, it revolves around drinks, booze and sometimes, if you are lucky, a midnight kiss. 

So cliched and regular;

It’s a morning after the great 31^st, people somehow assume that you have a hangover, and yet, you are expected to turn up in your office, wearing your best formal attire in a meeting and deliver a presentation.

My manager looks at me with somewhat disjointed look, it’s hard to figure out his looks sometimes, he is wearing blue jeans, so this must be Friday.

I sit there in the conference full of mangers and bosses, all suited up, their bald head shining, their face beaming with confidence, a fake confidence; a mask which they have learned to put on their faces so well, parker pen in their pockets, iphone 5, 5s, 6 ,6s, buzzing, with the same irritating ringtone, yes, they are all busy and they are all waiting for me to deliver this presentation about the new vulnerabilities discovered in our product.

“Get those glares off will you?” my manager whispers to me in his irritable voice. I have worn a crumpled white shirt, and faded dark blue jeans, yeah, I am the Steve jobs type; except I didn’t invent an iphone and neither I own one. I don’t want to use the shitty product made by children in China. Plus, it’s the easiest to crack, I have always preferred blackberry over any other phone, their sophisticated software keeps me and all my hacks/emails safe.

“you wouldn’t want to see me without them” I shoot back without looking at his face, yet another face beaming with confidence, a fake one at that.

“Allright, as long as you sell them with the security discoveries we have made..” he scoffs with a resigned voice and I flash my teeth at him. I haven’t brushed; I smell my own bad breath.

“Gentlemen, anything to eat?” asks the senior manager.

After gulping three cups of strong coffee, you don’t feel any hunger, neither, you feel less sleepy. Coffee was meant to provide you a kick, I suppose, to charge your motor neurons and get you “charged up” for the outside world in a better way. Or maybe that was just a marketing trick they used.

After gulping three cups of strong coffee, I still don’t feel any difference, my eyes still bloodshot red, the pupils dilating, eyelids constantly in a state of coming down like a shutter waiting to close down, and I am the owner of it, pulling it up against the force and inertia and gravity, what the hell is gravity, you don’t know gravity when you are an insomniac.

New year; people get excited for no reason, I just want to tell them.. “hold on, relax, nothing has changed, you have the same shitty job, the same shitty spouse ,same shitty car and same shitty routine, nothing changes, what is there to get excited about? Only the calendar has changed”

It’s the same world we live in, filled with corruption and mis use of power, of religious politics and dowries and farmers committing suicide. This is not a fresh start for all those vices, if it is, then yes, it’s a new year for me, but its not, it’s the same old year for me, New year; just like the old one.

I explain my part of the slides, and its well appreciated by everyone involved, some silly questions asked, non technical mostly, which I answer with ease. And then they discuss how our product has so many security loopholes? “ya right” I smirk inside my mind, If at all I go public or even private with the number of security defects I discover every time I use this product, this company will come to a stall.

But, that’s not my job and not something which I want to do, I want to stay an introvert, as long as I am leaking a few at times, it keeps me safe, gives me a low profile. It’s important for any hacker to stay low, not over do anything, or they portray you the genius of the world, give you more and more work and that’s not what we aspire for. We at FTW have been asked not to escalate our selves.

New year, finally the topic is back again in the conference, the sweets have arrived and all the seniors are eating those with a smile on their faces, again, a fake smile, fake beaming smile, fakers, all are fakers , nothing is real in corporate world, we are all meant to wipe our clients asses, US clients, UK clients. What has this country come to? Where is this country heading?

It’s been a while since I have slept. Must have been around 3-4 days or maybe more, I don’t even remember. That’s the thing about insomnia, it’s not a disease, it’s an illusion, a tangent of a circle of a tangent, attached ninety degree to its base and revolving anti clockwise with a centrifugal force applied. Or is it centripetal ? it’s a perpetual dilemma inside an already camouflaged dilemma.

Last night, I heard people outside wooing, cheering, wishing, dancing, kissing and doing everything other than what I was into.

I stood in my balcony with a coffee mug in my hand, watching the city lights glow further away and I laughed hysterically; slowly and then all at once. I laughed at their idiosyncrasy; their delusion, their fake hopes and their fake promises, their fake resolutions, fakers, everyone around, faker.

The city lights kept glowing and my monitor screen kept blinking as the Gh0stRat made entry into every machine that was ON, every laptop that was connected to all those mobile internet providers.

People; normal people, feel that the congestion they are experiencing in their network, the slow internet is down to the fact that there is too much “traffic”; I laughed at the very same thought of theirs. Traffic, that’s what normal people call it, traffic; it’s not something which you experience in the internet, it’s never traffic, traffic is such a physical word, it applies to things, cars, trains, air traffic. Fine; you have it, but internet traffic? Bullshit.

It was a well planned, well timed DDOS attack initiated by us, and the enormity of it was so much this time, the targets were 99 percent achieved, the success rate made me beam with confidence and smile with confidence, not the fake smile which we see everywhere, it was a real smile on my face, and I was so lost into tracking the nodes of it, flushing the .dat file from every machine using the script that I almost lost track of time and then, just like that it was morning, the day after, first day of new year, the night these people polluted our environment, the air that we breath, we polluted their computers, tit for tat;

As the clock struck 12, they shouted happy New year; fireworks, a lots of those went in the air, bursting polluting the air, already 90 percent polluted air in this megacity, noise pollution wasn’t even considered. People do this to themselves; pollute everything and everyone they belong to, the environment, and then they complain, get weird formulas, odd number of cars on the roads , even number of cars on the road, cars with odd number plates, cars with even number plates. There is so no such thing as odd and even, the entire world comprises of binary. Zero and one. You initiate ‘one’ somewhere then you can’t undo it, unless everything shuts down. And then initiated again, applying zero.

That’s exactly where M@dR1 is spot on, he is spot on about a lot of things, about how we should erase everything and start over, how, when evil grows, there must be a shut down and a restart. We buy his philosophies, every one of us believed into him and his ideas, his vision. 

A not so while ago, even I were amongst these celebrity kids, hanging around everyone and everywhere, being a faker, roaming on the streets celebrating new year. Firing crackers, shouting at the top of my voice, drinking, vomiting and then drinking again, an act of socializing what they used to call, now I see it as an act of faking.

But eventually, every one changes, and everyone has to change, everything has to change.

I clearly remember the day it all changed for me, the day I changed, the faker in me died and I became a part of this revolution.

It was 13^th of December 2013, a Friday.

I lay there listening to the humming sound of tap slowly transforms into whooshing sound of water followed by hissing and dripping, I felt the hard hitting noise of water falling on the tiles; tethering.

It wasn’t my turn that day. It was Rogers. I watched him sleep with his shorts slid on his fat ass showing his bum-cleavage.

A cockroach was strolling joyously on the half eaten pizza lying on the small table, its antennae vying for signals in all direction probably blessing the original owner of that pizza.

In a half asleep state I lay there, half dead, half hung over, like a lifeless body; lazy.

The Liverpool and Manchester flags waved their own sweet glory at the side of the a 29 inches television set with Liverpool flag fluttering ferociously owing to its victory the previous night.

Three beer bottles were fallen lifelessly on the smudged floor, smudged with butter chicken gravy. Next to it ,a newspaper spread on the floor containing other left-over food items, cashew beans and a half full beer bottle, the owner of it, Viresh, lay further ahead, with wide open mouth snoring ever so loudly.

I watched it all; I didn’t know how long I was watching it with smeary eyes until the bell rang.

 Once, twice and then continuously for few more times, my eyes were wide open now.

Again, nobody got up. “bastard, get that” I shouted, but nobody responded. Viresh hushed in his sleep, stopped snoring for a while and got back to his sleep again, needless to say his snore frequency returned again.

I heard the footsteps recede as the tranquil calmness inside and outside the flat returned.

I woke up cursing both my flat mates, blanket, unwashed for many days, wrapped around my shoulders. I looked into the mirror. I looked like a drug addict. Or maybe I had become one. Our flat looked like a typical bachelors flat. With things thrown around everywhere, it was like mini chaos in our foreign style open hall combined kitchen flat. The bedroom was occupied by Rohan and shayana, I didn’t want to disturb their only night in Pune in our furnished yet pathetic flat. The only people I could curse and I had a right to curse were both sleeping shamelessly.

I put on the sleepers, in left mine, in right viresh’s and walked towards the door with groggy eyes.

The door made creaky noise as I opened it slowly, a delirious wave of cold wind struck my face sending chills down my spine. There was no one as expected, I turned around and checked the letter box in which I found one letter.

While walking back towards my bed with a letter in my hand, I kicked Rogers bum with my leg like a football half expecting him to swear at me which he did as he went to sleep again, his bum-cleavage even more visible.

I clearly remember this all, what if I had not woken up and got that letter; letter with no name, only an Indian flag printed on it. what if?

I doubt M@dR1 would have tried approaching me again would he?

I remember it all.

Fast forward to present day and this meeting is still ON, half the things I can’t hear, half the things I don’t want to hear. A vote of thanks, followed by more sweets and coffee, I drink another cup of coffee and my eyes have finally stopped revolting , given up sort of, and just when I am planning on going home and catching a much needed sleep, my blackberry buzzes, there is a text from M@dR1.

“It’s #0n3ym00n tim3”.