Deep Adhya, PhD

"I decided to sell my Hoover ... well it was just collecting dust." This was a one-liner by Tim Vine at the recently concluded Edinburgh Fringe Festival which was voted as the best joke of the year. This line provides instant gratification. It causes one to laugh at the insane relationship a hoover can have with dust, other than well, collecting dust. The line is all but 65 characters in length, and well within tweetable limits. Similar one-liners that are usually associated with comedians, have become quite the rage nowadays with the advent of twitter’s 140 characters policy. But question is, has the attention span of human beings reached such a low that any bit of text not as succinct as a precis and greater than 140 characters seems so verbose that one is compelled to turn the page or hit a different link? Let us take the case of cricket, just as an example. Just this week concluded the test series between India and England. India lost the series....

Chapter 1 What I am going to write about is a subject which has been done to death, because it involves the internet and how it has played mischief with the aspirations and expectations of ordinary human beings. I will start my mockumentary by introducing an average joe, Sam. Sam is a typically developing, healthy individual with no known mental or physical disabilities. He is born to a middle-class family, is quite talented, and a potential leader of the future. He has scored good grades at school, excelled at college and has been vastly regarded as a success story by all people around him. He is not too adventurous, and likes friends. He hopes to give back to society what he got from it, get married, and raise the ideal family. He is starry eyed, and buoyed by the confidence vested on him by his immediate society. He steps into the world to leave his mark on it. Chapter 2 There is a huge debate these days between those born into the age of the internet ...

Moses was born in the Land of Goshen, destiny’s child, who would grow up to save his people. Well, not really! This is not the story of the Moses born in 14th century BC, but rather of a namesake born in a more modern world closer to the 21st century AD. Act I Moses is 10 years old, and he is very happy. He has his whole life ahead of him. He can be anything he wants to be. Act II Moses is 20 years old. He is an adult. He can take decisions for himself. He is going to set everything right. He will be all that his predecessors could not. He has the potential and believes in the science of the cultural evolution of man. He believes in how one generation always learns from the mistakes of the last. He knows that he will avoid the pits in which his ancestors fell trying to shed light on the unknown. Act III Moses is 30 years old. He feels naked. He feels like he is out of control. He feels like he is not being able to restrain himself anymore, and that by some unkno...