The Speaker In Between

The grand old man of Indian science was the first speaker in the post-lunch session. He had asked for that challenging 2 pm slot. He believed that such an august audience needed him, and not soporific lesser mortals. His mental and gastric faculties too required that exertion, however disagreeable that twin assault might be to others. He arrived with his entourage of professors, lecturers, students, technical and secretarial staff. They followed him and his words faithfully, never deviating from their place in that evolutionary order. For more than fifty years (from silicon to bucky-balls, cuprates to blue-phases, macro- to nano- materials) his research factory has produced scientific articles like the dailies, tweaking names, rearranging figures, the different presented in a similar whole. He raised his Caeserean snub nose and surveyed the packed house, rather pleased and quite surprised to find a full auditorium. Even the floor was taken. He frowned when he saw one of his cronies seated in front, nodding sagely, in dotage or in stupor. That relic was known to rise once during every session with the question, ‘Doesn’t this go against the second law of thermodynamics?’ Not that the grand old man did not have an answer to that. He had an answer to everything he did not understand.

The large audience was there not for him but for the foreigner scheduled at 3 pm, the third and final speaker in that session. That star had a cult status among the intelligentsia, having astounded the world with three original papers when he was just an undergraduate student in the early seventies. He spoke on the God matter. His prodigious talent was still evident. None in that audience were able to figure out if his subject had been technical or philosophical.

Slipping in between these two giants, the second speaker at 2:30 pm, a diminutive unknown from a local research lab, shocked the audience. She started with the picture of a vulture with its head in the rectum of a dead carcass. That generated a collective queasiness in that audience already left lightheaded by the first speaker. She spoke with a great deal of enthusiasm about how the vulture’s system relishes and tolerates the toxic feast. Then, she shifted to the subject matter of her research. She began with the clichéd disclaimer that every great intellectual work is a result of 10% perspiration, 10% inspiration, 30% luck and the rest, plagiarism or a great deal of twiddling the thumbs.

She noted the twiddling of thumbs in government offices. She compared the mountains and highways of garbage, and secret landfills, with the vulture’s meal. She revealed that the residents had revolted and dumped truckloads of stinking waste in the only clean site in the city, the legislative assembly. ‘Lady Luck stepped in then,’ she gushed, ‘remember the discovery of penicillin?’ Her research lab investigated the strangest of strange events. Within hours of dumping the waste, the stink had disappeared and the toxic mounds had mutated into a garden of exquisite beauty. ‘Was it a miracle?’ she asked the stunned audience. She concluded with the admission that her study had been put on hold when she had requested access to the genetic makeup of the occupants of that site.

Did the case end there? ‘It got curiouser  and curiouser’, as the literary sort might say. That scientific study found no mention in the published proceedings of that conference. As far as the world was concerned, that speaker in between never existed.