Shocking Thoughts

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I was 14 when I got my first shock from 'current'. Till then I was living in a village which had no 'current'. In 1957 I shifted to my uncle's place for my College Studies. The house there had just got 'current'. And there were no 3-pin plugs. Just 2-pin plugs without switches. You can imagine how a curious village bum would play with unfamiliar 220 Volt invitingly empty sockets.

I was simply dashed away and my heart started pounding like never before. I decided then and there that that would be my last shock ever. Since then I was like a kitten, once bitten twice shy, always using footwear when fiddling with 'current' (which I had to do all my working life in Physics Labs).

Then I bought a Maruti 800 at age 57. One fine whistling morning in winter I tried to open the car door and was knocked down by shock after half a century. The Mechanic said there was nothing wrong with the car...it was just static electricity...and showed repeatedly how nothing happens when he touches it (come on!). Many of my friends said that they do get a mild pleasant sensation in winters but nothing alarming. Since then my toy car was a daily terror to me in winter; till I cleverly engaged a 'boy' to clean the car every morning @ Rs. 200 a month....a small price to pay for keeping the car clean and letting him in for it. But he never complained.

Then I retired and was visibly sinking into what turned out to be a Major Depression which took a good couple of years to get over. The first inkling that something was going wrong was that I got a terrific shock one afternoon while trying to sink into a nap (a perfectly harmless and routine thing to do).

I was somewhat amazed that I could get a shock from 'within', without the help of external AC or DC power packs. I then recalled that the entire physiology of animals like me is driven by current impulses generated within. The twitching of muscles (Galvani and the poor frog with its rotating smoked drum), neurons within nerve cells and what not. My entire brain is wired electrically. The EEG's and ECG's and such beastly kits are all electrical contraptions.

O Well, thoughts are electrical too; some good, others crazy! If they are electrical, we must be radiating and leaking them all over via our earlobes (some! like Obama's) as antennae. I guess that is how our thoughts are read by mind-readers using 'their' earlobes as receivers. I have a screwy bunch of thoughts in store for them.

But Why ME? I asked my psychiatrist if shocks are precursors of Depression. He brushed aside my query laconically saying that such symptoms are part of 'arousal'. Arousal my foot! That sounds very sexy. Then I recalled that these same psychiatrists used, in earlier times, 'shock treatment' routinely to revive their poor patients.

Then I read about 'electric eels'. These chaps wantonly generate a pretty high voltage difference (around 600 Volts) between parts of their bodies like the two ends of their tails, without inflicting any shocks on themselves. They then catch a poor fish which at once dies of shock and gets happily eaten.

Oh Well! Can we not do what a lousy witless eel does? A curious thought. Maybe some Yogis can do it. With intense reverence to Him and equally to rationality, could this be what Ramakrishna Deb did to Vivekananda when he 'touched' him and dispatched him into a well-described trance state?

The question: 'Why ME'? is easily answered. In 1962, our University held a 'Science Exhibition' where one of the attractions was: 'Resistance Meter'. The paying guy (or girl) was asked to hold a couple of innocent terminals; and a spot on the Galvanometer moves and gives the reading: a foolsy High Resistance Bridge. Many were pleased that they have a 'high body resistance'. I had the least. There was also a 'Complexion Meter'. Just a beam of light reflecting off your face falls on a photo-diode and gives a reading on a spot Galvanometer. There also I scored very low.

There was this Demonstrator in our Electronics Lab at our University. We were constantly working with a terrifying 500 Volts DC. And we had too few Voltmeters to go around and most were dead most of the time. Whenever the circuit we rigged up didn't give 'oscillations' on the Oscilloscope, we would fetch him with baits of tea and biscuits. He was always wearing thick boots, never heard of in the warm Waltair weather. He would pass his finger touching it along announcing: 20 Volts, 150 Volts, 80 Volts etc and declare that this resistor or that capacitor has gone phut and needs replacement. And the diagnosis invariably proved correct and the circuit would dance into 'oscillation'!

Chap must have had a body resistance of a Hundred Mega Ohms!

This trend of thoughts is provoked by a news item which said that many youth nowadays induce electric shocks upon themselves to get 'kicks' and thereby get addicted to high voltage batteries which they have to carry wherever they go! Crack seems easier to carry; no?

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