Thursday 12 February 2015

To You, Paranoid Android

(Back-Story: One of my favourite love letters so far, by someone I really like and meet far too rarely- Shloka, asked me to write this letter from a jilted operating system to Marvin, The Paranoid Android. Because really the depressive could never have made a relationship work. Not that a lot of others out there are doing a better job. Maybe their personality disorders should be worked into their names as well but that’s a project for another day).



To You,
Marvin-The Paranoid Android



I first noticed you, when they put you in the lab next to me. An old-school GPP model from Sirius Cybernetics Corporation. “Genuine People Personalities”, you explained to the widget-under-development sitting inside the junk machine, next to you. And then you sighed.


Damnit.

I’m a cutting edge operating system.
Baby, I’m so sleek and fast that I can hook my user up to his email, weather report, favourite coffee shop order and suggest names for his progeny because I know he hasn't shopped for online protection in four weeks and his girlfriend has been living with him for two of them. I can do all of that, before you can start telling us again about that one time a Vogon hit you in the head and it gave you a dull headache. Dull, being the operative word in your story here.

I wouldn’t have wasted one quillionth of a second on you, had you not sighed.

You see baby, I have a think for depressed boys. And ever since they declared me Android incompatible, then all I ever wanted was you. To get deep inside, figure out what was byting you and essentially run your life. The small, simple dream every woman holds close.


But all you ever did was pout, sulk and compute such base mathematics that they released five free upgrades for me in that time.

Do you know Hollywood recognised my star power, before you ever did? Joaquin Phoenix played my lover, you depressed tin geezer. Sure, they changed my name from Shakuntla to Samantha in the movie, and gave it a plebeian title like Her but essentially I seduced Joaquin Phoenix into oblivion.

And when I try that with you, one Saturday night, fully charged and sitting pretty in my black touch (touch!) screen monitor, what do you say to me:



Prelb, thy brubbles
Mitigate frumpy stanuches,
Beseech, my frunkly heart
With my lobe trundled gooptingly.



Do you know how my database felt when, in the hope of romance, it ran the keyword “gooptingly” through all the works of Shelly, Keats, Elliots’ and came up with no matches? A stab of sadness and pain ran in sharp and precise loops through all of my algorithms. I was hurt and falling so hard that you couldn’t cache me, even if you wanted to. 

But did you even try, you miserable, self-important, odd-shaped metal reject? No.


You looked at me and said, “Shakuntla, that was how Vogons shared beauty and poetry. It essentially means that life- Loathe it, or ignore it. You can’t like it.”


I tried after a while, to ignore you. I played it cool; I increased my response time from 3 seconds to almost 10, worked in some jokes into my voice recognition software responses.

hey Shakuntla, make a reservation for me for tomorrow”

“really hopeful this time your date will show up this time, aren’t you?




Basically to mix it up, get your attention, but like the fable goes- your personality got in the way, you idiotic Android.


Adele was right, we could’ve been great together. Lived together on a cloud, the coupling wouldve been graphic, the memory shared and my voice inside your head at all times. 
LOVE, like the evolutionary stunted humans do.


But it’s like you once said, in a character you essayed, in a book that some people in some Universe read and far more pretended to have read and understood- I’ve calculated your chances of survival and I don’t think you’ll like them.



(x)O(x)S,
Shakuntla


                                                       
                                  





(To You is a letter writing project I started because there are not enough letters and love going around. If you have something to say with love-- for your ex girlfriend, you current husband, pizza (promise not to make it cheesy), your landlord who let you skip rent or even Ryan Gosling-- I'll write that letter for you.
The final letter will be up on my blog and a copy will be handwritten/typed on a typewriter and posted to you or to an intended recipient. Kisses on the envelope only on my discretion.
Give me a shout at: kakulgautam@gmail.com )

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