“I will bitch-slap you back to that Guantanamo Bay you call office if you speak one more word about work”, I said in a frustrated tone while puffing my Marlboro and sipping Chivas. It was November 2014 and I was very much exhausted from one of the consulting projects I was working on for the past 2 weeks without a break. I had finally delivered the report to the client and to relax myself, I had come out for a drink with my colleague on a not-so-dull weekday night. Judging by my enthusiastically sound response, my colleague suggested we should watch a movie after the drinks. Since I was tired, I thought passing out on those recliner sofas in the movie hall wouldn’t be such a bad idea. We booked the tickets for the movie “Interstellar”, which I thought will be seeing again since I would be sleeping in the hall. Surprisingly (Or unsurprisingly, since its a work of Christopher Nolan), I was glued to the screen throughout the movie. Not just because it was a great piece of work by Nolan combining visual effects, plot, soothing music, and hardcore physics. But also, there were several scenes in the film shot in space which I visualized in my dream most of the time. A little terrifying and spine-chilling, and still shockingly adequate to make me freak out for 2 hours.
Good evening my beautiful people, Harvard says hello! I should really stop with this wannabe way of greeting the readers and come with something different. But I am a big time procrastinator, so I don’t know if I will actually do that. Anyways, over the week, I got some surprising responses from people I knew and didn’t knew asking about my next blog. Some of those who don’t know me separately emailed me asking my real name. It was really touching. To date I didn’t even know I had got that many readers in just a week. But it’s good to know when people read my stuff and want more. So after a busy week, I got some time to chill, and the first thing on my mind was to build my next blog. Like Mark Zuckerberg said : “I’m a little intoxicated, not gonna lie.” You would be surprised how error-free I can be while typing even when I’m drunk.
Anyways, some of you may know about my upcoming internship in Verizon. So after 2 weeks of running around, gathering documents, taking signatures, I just got the official approval letter for my work visa from the International Student Services department, after which I had to run to my class. Since I’m a student of analytics, the professor today taught us database management while citing the movie “Interstellar” as a visual example. For those who don’t know, the movie revolves around a crew of astronauts who travel through a wormhole (a shortcut connecting two separate points in spacetime) in search of a new home for humanity. Since I’m not a party pooper kind of guy, I won’t go into the technical relation between analytics and Interstellar. However, I went into flashback as soon as the professor mentioned about the movie, taking me back 3 months ago, 1.5 years ago, and 4 years ago. Since this was a work of Christopher Nolan, a living legend who gave us epics like Memento, Batman Begins, Dark Knight, Dark Knight Rises, Inception, you can expect a kickass plot, amazing music, mind blowing dialogues and scream-in-excitement twists. But this movie had a little more than that. It bought me back to a time when I used to dream about certain sequences, like me in a multi-dimensional world, or getting lost in space, or falling in the black hole. All this while trying to remember or meet someone right there, someone who is now no more. What’s gripping about the movie is an astronaut who goes on this mission, away from his children, specially his daughter, not knowing if he would ever come back. And when he does, it’s in such a ‘what the fuck’ manner that you wouldn’t even understand if something like that is possible. He travels through a wormhole, passing by other humans with 4-5 dimensions, travels to a place where each hour is equal to 7 years on earth, and finally falls into a black hole, where he is locked in a 4-dimensional tesseract, and sees his daughter from the past. He then wakes up in a new world orbiting Saturn in another multi-dimensional world. Surprisingly, he is now 124 years old, still looking the same. He finally gets to meet his daughter who is on her deathbed. You see all this, and you will question your very existence in this world. In fact for a moment you won’t even believe that this movie is in reality, and that there is a possibility that such events can happen.
The film made me so confused. Not because of the complexity of physics, but because I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that what I saw in my dreams was actually being shown in a movie in front of me. But despite all the weird and awestruck emotions, I did realize one thing : love, and also acknowledged that it’s multidimensional. Love is something beyond our understanding, or something we can’t yet understand. Its some evidence, something of a higher dimension which we cant consciously perceive. I mean just like in the movie, I’m drawn across a universe in my dreams to someone I haven’t seen for a long time, who is now no more. Despite that, love is the one thing we are capable of perceiving which transcends the dimensions of time and space. And I want to trust that, even if I can’t understand it yet.
Jumping back from now to 3 months ago, when I was still with my girlfriend, I watched this movie again, and all those memories came back, with a slight addition. After watching it again in December last year, I realized yet another thing which was unimaginable to me. I somehow came to this theory that love is 5th dimensional. That means if you think hard enough you can actually summon your significant other. And shockingly sometime after that, I was missing her so much for some reason, it’s like I was doing telepathy with her, trying to call her with my mind. And about 5 minutes later she messaged me saying she was missing me. That was a combined “wow” and “what the fuck” moment for me and I freaked out for a couple of seconds since something of this sort had never happened to me before. As unbelievable as it sounds, this incident did happen, and it made me laugh about how the universe plays these tricks on us.
Even now when I am doing my workout, I listen to this movie’s soundtrack and it makes me go into a 4/5 dimensional world where I’m looking for someone who has gone far far away from me. Still intoxicated, I think I’m writing about something I will never write again, I probably won’t even remember writing it. But right now all I can say is love is truly amazing, something unimaginable, not quantifiable. It drives us towards things we want the most. No matter how logical we try to make it seem, it’s really the love or hate of something that drives us.
And I really hope it remains something that people can’t comprehend. Because inability to understand and resist is the true essence of love.
World of Harvard 