A Reservoir of Humour

[Written and presented by Jyotishka Misra in Soul Pepper's "Proscenium 2011" under the category of 'Stand-Up Comedy'.]
[Disclaimer : The author will not be held responsible, read at your own risk as this piece may contain views and present ideas in a manner that IS NOT savory to some people. To those people, you have my utmost apologies but you are way too much fun not to make jokes out of. Embrace it and learn to live with it.]

Good evening everyone, I am a Bengali. Many people believe that the renaming of West Bengal as Poshchim Bongo makes it more Indian somehow. However, I resent this change because it essentially turns me into an African drum. I am now a Bongo!

The world is going crazy. The best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy and the tallest NBA player is Chinese. Let me tell you, there is a little bit of insanity in all of us. I’m Schizophrenic, and so am I! Truth is, we don’t exactly suffer from insanity, we enjoy every minute of it. Recently, we even went to the National Schizophrenic’s Convention, anybody who was everybody was there. There were some cases where the different personalities of the same person were all following different religions and that’s when things really start getting messed up. Thank god I’m an atheist.

Do you want to know what’s really insane ? Vegetarianism. I think that the human race is going backward. We did not fight our way up the food chain just to eat the stuff at the bottom. If you really like animals so much, eat them. It gives them a quick merciful death. Instead, you guys are starving them slowly by eating up their food !

Anyway, other than being a dedicated non-vegetarian, I’m a petroleum engineer. One of the most important parts of petroleum engineering is geology. Now, I’ve met quite a number of geologists in my time and the most important thing that I learnt is; whatever you do, never, ever lend a geologist money. He may say that he’ll return it after a short time, but remember, a geologist thinks in the geological time scale. A few millions years is nothing to him. Some people keep on mixing up geologists and archaeologists. A Geologist has the safest job in the world. If he’s wrong, it’ll take a couple million years of tectonic movements to prove it. On the other hand, an archaeologists, well his career always lies in ruins.

Scientists never stop thinking scientifically. If you go up to a physicist and ask him “Hey, what’s new?” he’ll probably say “New is one of the Greek alphabet and is used as symbol of mechanical efficiency”. No matter what, you can never isolate the science from a scientist. Even if a scientist is reading a Harry Potter book, they’ll be thinking about corrosion chemistry because both are about sacrificial protection. The worst thing possible is a drunk scientist. You should never drink and derive. It’ll end up as a summation of disaster.

I believe that the greatest engineering achievement till date is the computer. One of the things which fascinates me is artificial intelligences working on the human genome project. They are essentially robots designing new and improved human beings. Pretty soon, we’ll have Human version 2.0 and then Apple will release their own i-man. Many people believe that if artificial intelligences became any more human – like, they would try to take over the world. I just think that they would get lazy just like us and refuse to live up to their true potential. What we do by procrastination, they will do through processor latencies.

Some people prefer windows, some Linux and yet some others go for a Mac. They may all have great GUI support, but my favourite “Point-and-Click” device will always remain an AK-47 !

Thank you and Good night.