by M. N. KRISH
The canny political animal that he was, Lakshman knew that the director was only flattering to deceive. The Supreme Being on the Fifth Floor was one of those people who would pat a donkey’s back only as a prelude to weighing it down with a massive payload of dirty laundry and administering a painful prod in the ribs with a whip-handle. So Lakshman pricked up his ears and listened.
The director continued: ‘It’s this rare combination of ability and modesty that brings me to you time and again.’
Lakshman held his beer breath. Oh my God!
‘The Institute is in need of your services once again, Professor Lakshman. We need to organize another important event.’
‘Another conference, sir?’
‘No, not a conference, but a ceremony to award an honorary doctorate.’
‘Can’t we club it with the next convocation in August, sir? It’ll save us so much trouble.’
‘I knew you would suggest that, but no, we can’t afford to wait till then. We need to get it done by January.’
‘So soon, sir?’
‘Yeah. I know the time is short, that’s why I’m calling you so late in the day. If there is anybody capable of making it happen, it is you.’
‘Anyone coming from Germany, sir?’
‘No, not from Germany. From Bombay. Mumbai, I should say.’
‘Bombay?’ Lakshman asked, somewhat puzzled.
‘Yeah.’
‘Who’s coming from Bombay, sir?’
The director sighed. So heavily that it went whooshing into Lakshman’s ears like a cyclone and made him shudder.
‘One Mr Pomonia, Mr Chiman Pomonia.’
‘The . . . the . . . the . . . industrialist?’ Lakshman stammered.
‘If you wish to call him that, yes, the same Mr Pomonia. Our brief is to promote him to Dr Pomonia.’
‘WHAT!’ Lakshman gasped. He did not normally lose his composure with the director, but he was too rattled to observe the usual rules of engagement.
‘Do you mind coming over to my bungalow for a few minutes? I’ll be waiting for you in the garden. It’s better to discuss certain things in person rather than over the phone. Besides, it’ll also give me the opportunity to introduce you to the masala milk our cook makes; it’s the best digestive I have come across in thirty years.’
Lakshman could not believe that the Institute had chosen to bestow an honorary doctorate upon Pomonia of all people. Conferring honorary doctorates was all part of the rough and tumble of academic life at the Institute and Lakshman hardly expected to have any say in who got chosen for the award, but it was always someone he’d found acceptable or at least tolerable. Dignitaries from Germany could usually look forward to red-carpet ceremonies and honorary doctorates at the Institute by the sheer virtue of that nation’s contributions to it, as could be evidenced from street names like Berlin Avenue and Bonn Avenue on the campus. According a similar treatment to Chiman Pomonia rankled Lakshman no end.
Pomonia was, of course, a big fish, a billionaire, many times over. All self-made pelf, every single paisa of it. From a little boy in a village who was forced by his father’s sudden demise to drop out of high school and take up milk vending on a rented bicycle, he grew into a bigwig who sat at the head of a conglomerate that oversaw hundreds of companies around the world. His economic empire cut a broad swath across a multitude of industries, including dairy, textiles, IT, finance, retail, energy, media and entertainment, and contributed – or controlled, take your pick – the single biggest slice of the Indian GDP pie. Suffice to say, if Pomonia heaved a sigh, all market indices on Dalal Street would tremble in tune, like aspen in high wind.
Smitten by Pomonia’s phenomenal success, an American university had recently decided to invite him as their commencement speaker and award him a medallion of honour during a ceremony the following summer. The domestic media, always on alert to celebrate or shame anyone and everyone with the slightest soupçon of melanin in their skin, lost no time blowing the thing out of proportion. The deafening buzz threw all Pomonia loyalists in the government into a tizzy. There was of course the little matter of ten million dollars Pomonia had pledged to the university for the establishment of a Chair in his name, but somehow it never managed to get much attention. There was only one question echoing everywhere: How could Indian universities sit tight in the sidelines when a foreign university was paying such rich tributes to an enterprising son of Mother India?
Pomonia’s lapdogs in the government got into action before long and decided to launch pre-emptive strike on America. Their strategy: Get a premier Indian institution to deck up Pomonia in royal regalia and dole out an honorary degree at a glittering function before he flew off to graciously accept his medallion in the US. The minister for human resources, a true son of the Madras soil who lorded over institutions of higher learning in the country, passed an unwritten decree that his hometown would be the one to do the honours to Pomonia and it would do so by the end of January. By the time Lakshman was done sipping his masala milk in the director’s garden, the project had become his primary responsibility.
Lakshman couldn’t digest the fact that the Institute was stooping so low, choosing a businessman who revelled in operating on the margins of the legal and the illegal, moral and the immoral. Being made the ringmaster of the whole charade rubbed it in even further, bringing him down from the high with a thud and leaving him not just sleepless but in a state of ferment. Exiled from the bedroom by Urmila, his T-shirt and veshti drenched in sweat, he continued to pace the reading room furiously, cursing himself: Why did I even get promoted?
The masala milk had joined the beer now and they swirled around each other like yin and yang, the ensuing vortex sending the tikkas on a spin. Individually, each of them was an epitome of gastronomic delight, but together, they were a recipe for gastrological disaster. All that frenetic walking up and down only made matters worse.
Lakshman stopped pacing and took a deep breath, but the churning in his belly only got wilder like a simmering volcano. He could feel the hot bile bubbling up to his throat. Figuring it was only a matter of time before it erupted, he decided to pre-empt the process. He ducked into the toilet and started retching. As quietly as he possibly could. Urmila had fallen sleep with much difficulty and he couldn’t afford to wake her up with his theatrics.
He was just about done washing up when the phone rang, breaking the stillness of the night. Thinking of Urmila yet again, he hauled up his veshti and dashed out of the bathroom wondering who on earth was calling at this ungodly hour.
3
Joshua had been in good form earlier that evening. But he hadn’t reckoned that he was going to meet his match soon, least of all in the shape and form of the petite girl seated inconspicuously in the back rows.
If the reigning movie star could be taken as a touchstone of progress in any place, Joshua had told Lakshman, then I can state confidently that Madras has made no progress at all. It was Rajnikanth whose manifold Technicolor avatars were painted over the city walls when Joshua had visited back in the Eighties, and it was Rajnikanth who ruled the roost even now, pixellated and Photoshopped. So Joshua had no trouble tapping into popular sentiment to drive home the idea of his new shortest path algorithm.
‘Suppose point A is this auditorium right here and point B is a movie theatre in the city where a Rajnikanth movie is playing, how do you get from here to there as quickly as possible? That’s the Shortest Path Problem in a nutshell,’ he said, his eyes sparkling with mischief as he surveyed the audience for their reaction.
The audience hadn’t expected an American like Joshua to be so tuned in to the zeitgeist in this part of the world, and they roared in approval, much to his delight. Lakshman too broke into a handsome smile in his seat, suddenly realizing why Joshua had earlier made that comment out of the blue. But then that was vintage Joshua. He knew when to kiss, when to bow and when to shake h
ands; he knew what it took to elevate an academic presentation into a performance in any corner of the world.
‘The Shortest Path Problem has been researchers’ favourite for several decades now, ever since Dijkstra published his algorithm in 1959. But I must point out that it was not Dijkstra who first invented the shortest path algorithm. While it is true that he came up with it independently, it was the guys at RAND Corporation who had it first. But they kept their stuff tightly under wraps, whereas Dijkstra published his work in Europe a few years later and set the ball rolling for all of us. Dozens of shortest path algorithms have been developed by researchers since then. These algorithms are all fantastic in their own way, but – there is always a but – none of them runs as fast as this new algorithm here. This baby uses what we call an asymmetric radix bucket data structure which speeds up the computations to unprecedented levels. Let me show you how it works and you can see for yourself where it gets its mojo from,’ Joshua said and moved towards his laptop.
Ably supported by thirty slides, most of them densely packed with Greek symbols and other mathematical exotica, he illustrated the intricacies of his new algorithm. Most of the students assembled in front of him looked as if they were at the screening of a movie in an alien language without the benefit of subtitles. Joshua tried hard to make the technicalities as accessible as possible, but he began losing his audience at a drastic rate, starting at slide three. Lakshman dropped off at slide fifteen and by slide twenty, there was only one person in the entire auditorium who was still with Joshua, furiously scribbling down notes on the scrap papers spread on the desk. Joshua was on a tight schedule – he had just enough time to have dinner with Lakshman, check out of the Oceanic and make his way to the airport, and he’d planned his presentation for under an hour. But he slowed down a little when he saw the clueless faces in front of him and took an extra ten minutes to run through the slides.
A palpable wave of relief swept through the audience when Joshua was done. Lakshman prompted the crowd for a round of applause and threw the floor open for questions. Seeing Joshua sneaking a peek at his double-dial Rolex and getting a little restless, he added, ‘Professor Ezekiel’s running out of time, so we have to keep it brief.’
‘Sir,’ a slender hand decorated with a red wristband shot up in the air from the second row.
‘Yes, young man,’ Joshua said.
A stubbly chap in his mid-twenties clad in an electric yellow T-shirt rose from his seat twirling his wristband almost as if readying for a fight. A wireless mike passed from hand to hand and made its way to him. He grabbed it and said: ‘Sir, your algorithm looks very good, in fact, fantastic in its own way, but – there is always a but – like you said in the beginning, people have been working on the Shortest Path Problem for so many decades now and dozens of algorithms are already available, so what is the real necessity to develop yet another algorithm now, sir? What is the point? Why keep re-inventing the wheel? Why can’t people use something already available and just move on with life?’
Joshua felt his face flush with shock and rage. Such rudeness! That too in India! ‘May I know your name, young man?’ he said, summoning as much politeness as he could.
‘Pathivendaparuppu Adianthaprabhu Bommuluri Bhagavatharao Vivekandanda, sir. But you can call me Vivek.’
‘What do you do, Vivek?’
‘Doing my PhD, sir.’
‘In . . .?’
‘Economics, sir,’ the fellow said proudly and sat back down.
‘No wonder,’ Joshua said, trying hard not to snarl. He turned towards Lakshman and gave him a fleeting but piercing glare. You let these people in for my talk?
Lakshman threw his hands up in the air and shook his head. I didn’t know.
‘Well, some of you, like our economist friend Vivek,’ Joshua said sharply, making it sound like an insult, ‘may feel tempted into thinking that there is no justification for new research on the Shortest Path Problem, but as I have tried to show you, the new algorithm runs much faster than all other algorithms available in the market. I’m not really re-inventing a wheel here; I am, in fact, all for dispensing with the wheel, because what this algorithm has got is wings to fly. When you have a big sprawling urban area like Madras with thousands of streets and intersections, hundreds of origins and hundreds of destinations, and tens of thousands of origin-destination pairs, finding all the shortest paths is not easy. There’re way too many possibilities to consider – even the best algorithms out there could sometimes take minutes to run on state-of-the-art workstations. But this radix bucket data structure makes it easy to solve thousands and thousands of such Shortest Path Problems almost instantly. If you want the quickest route to the movie theatre, it’ll be there in front of you before you’re even done clicking the mouse.’
‘I think sites like MapQuest do pretty much the same thing, sir,’ Vivek sprang up from his seat and shot back into the mike. ‘Also, if we want to go from here to the movie theatre, we don’t really need to save time. It’s all right to take a longer but more convenient route and reach a few minutes late. We don’t really need a highly complex algorithm like this one. Other than trivial situations like this, is there any real use for your algorithm?’
Vivek’s abrasiveness set off a flutter in the audience.
Joshua had spent several months hammering the algorithm into shape and there was no way he could take it lying down. He stared at the student inscrutably for a few seconds and then said, ‘Well Mr Economist, let me try a different tack and see if it washes with you. Let’s take the same network as before,’ he clicked back to the only slide with a picture, ‘but with a little twist. The nodes you see here are not traffic intersections but currencies of nations. The links connecting them are not lengths of roads but exchange-rates between currencies. Say, node A is your Indian rupee, node B is the Malaysian ringgit, node C is the US dollar and so on. If you want to go from A to B, that is, convert rupees into ringgit, there are many ways you could do it. You could buy ringgit directly using the exchange rate, or you could first buy US dollars and then re-convert the dollars into ringgit, or you could go through a long chain of conversions to other currencies before winding up with the ringgit. The shortest path algorithm can help you figure out the best way to do it, the one with the least exchange cost, the one that gives the most bang for the buck. . . . Is this a trivial situation? Yeah sure, if you’re trying to change the cash in your wallet. Do you need a complex algorithm that helps you save a few pennies? I don’t think so. But all that changes if you scale things up a bit.’
‘To what level, sir?’ Vivek asked.
‘You tell me, you’re the economist,’ Joshua trained his gimlet eyes on Vivek. ‘What’s the turnover like in forex markets?’
‘Oh, it’s in trillions of dollars, sir.’
‘Every year?’
‘No sir. Every day.’
‘Every day? Are you sure?’ Joshua asked, incredulity writ large on his face.
‘Yes sir,’ Vivek said with a confident smirk. ‘People buy and sell billions in various currencies in the blink of an eye; the trades add up to trillions by the end of the day.’
‘People like who?’
‘Banks, hedge funds, national treasuries . . .’
‘If you walk up to them with a new currency trading algorithm that can run very fast, say, in the blink of an eye, are they going to listen to you or turn you away?’
‘They’ll listen to me, sir,’ Vivek said confidently.
‘What makes you say that?’
‘Exchange rates keep fluctuating, sir. They could go up or down in a second, so decisions to buy and sell forex have to be made very very fast.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes sir. Even milliseconds and decimal points matter in the world of economics and finance; that’s why finance companies lay their own special optical fibre cables between trading centres, they don’t even
want a millisecond delay in transactions if they can help it. If I have a fast algorithm, it could be very useful in high-frequency trading. Even if banks save only a small fraction of their exchange costs, it would add up to millions of dollars given the sheer volume of transactions.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ Joshua said to Vivek with exaggerated politeness, even bowing a little, one hand on his tummy. Then turning to the audience, ‘See, I keep my friends close but enemies closer. This smart young man here is now my new best friend.’
The audience broke into guffaws. Vivek looked around, puzzled for a moment before realizing how Joshua had played him. He passed the mike over and sank back into his seat swearing never to open his mouth again.
‘It’s not just road traffic or economics; shortest path algorithms come in handy in genomics as well. It’s useful in Sequence Alignment, for comparing long strings of DNA, RNA or proteins, like it’s done with evidence collected from crime scenes. Anyone specializing in this area here with us today?’ Joshua said and paused to survey the audience.
Seeing no hands go up, he did the honours himself, spending a few minutes explaining the idea of Sequence Alignment with an example on the whiteboard and driving home the importance of having an efficient algorithm like his in the arsenal.
A few more questions mostly of the mundane kind followed next and he cleared them one by one with his customary skill and ease. But his comrade-of-old who had invited him to give this talk was getting tetchy in his seat, appalled by the sort of questions being raised by the students. If that fellow Vivek was abrasive, the others were inane and inconsequential. Lakshman edged forward in his chair, twisted around a little and started craning his neck: Was there no one who could show a little bit of class in asking questions? A little bit of spark?
Where was Biju John? He was supposed to be doing his PhD in this area but was he even attending this talk? What about his most favourite student? Did she manage to come?
Row by row, Lakshman carefully panned the audience and before long, she came into view.
