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 31st,
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 13th 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”.
