I and She

Hello everybody, finally it’s a write up on the blog after a long poetic concourse. As a typical IT Engineer that I am, it’s no wonder to see me going gaga behind Computer and Programming. Till date I’ve shared a couple of articles with you all which cite the symbiosis between human life and the Computer/Programming World. This blog post of mine-“I and She” categorises into the same lot. But it’s a lot different from one of my previous writings-“Life through Computer’s Monitor”. Having a glance at the title, you might have anticipated something spicy, but unfortunately for the non-technocrats reading this, the blog post has barely something of your interest. Well it’s not going be murky for sure, but in this blog post I am going to talk a lot about She, she here is my ”C Programming”. I will basically be sharing with you all, some things which I have inferred from C Programming about human life. Here I go.

For a programming aficionado like me, C is not just a set of codes for me, but a non-living yet a living cohort who confabulates to me through its behaviour and more explicitly errors. I have been trying my hands on coding and specifically C Programming since 9^th Standard. It has been more than 5 years now since I’ve been coding, and through all memoirs I have had with her, one thing I have grasped is that, she(C) has not only conveyed my requests to the computer, but she has also consorted my requests to me myself. Yes, the first thing the C has done for me is, she has projected myself to me. We humans at times are so entangled in the fathomless attire of academics that we don’t realize what we want. We are at times excessively dazzled about our aims, desires and aspirations. Sometimes, the case is also such that we know something, we want something, yet we flee away from it, thinking that it would be a ”More than Make Believe” kind of a desire. I too have had such moments. There have been times when I have tried to curb my desires; there have been times when I have tried to conceal my emotions, immaterial of their being positive or negative, yet C hasn’t let me do so till date. For a IT buff like me, who codes a little every day, my coding each day reflects my mood that day. When I have been happy, I have coded programs with printfs having “HURRAH”. When I have been sad I have coded programs with the else block of the “if else ladder” containing “If you print this, I will Kill you”. When I have received such printfs on screen, I have come to know what I ACTUALLY was like that day. Else I have been too busy to judge and analyse my state of mind. Not only the general things of life, PAism too hasn’t been aloof from my programming mania. Recently I gave Priyanshi a program which manipulates a string and prints something WONDERFUL on screen. Though it wasn’t anything extraordinary, but it conveyed those unspoken emotions which wouldn’t have been possible to explicate by even thousands of write-ups. It was all the miracle of C. She has tempted me to reveal my emotions out. And once I have given those emotions to her, she has shown me them so perceptibly on the Black Background Command prompt saying -“This is you”. I have been a very introvert person when it has come to my part of sharing, but somehow I have not been able to resist myself opening up to C.

After me, comes life and relationships. C and her descendant C++ both have gospels to preach about life and relationships, the most important of those aspects being “UNDERSTANDING”. I was astonished to witness that, C – something that man made is making man understand the lesson of understanding man. I know the former was a horrible statement to read, but a damn good one to understand. I have a memoir to share to legitimize my statement. A few days back I was making a small C++ assignment, a simple banking program that performs deposit-withdraws transactions for multiple users and keeps the tract of these transactions and the latest balance. I was just a neophyte to “Class Object” theory then. What I was trying to do is- I was trying to pass objects for any action to carry out-be it input, deposit, withdrawal or just display. Though I had been operating the object with the dot operator on function, I was explicitly passing the object to the called function. This was screwing up the output of my program. I struggled with this hitch for about 2 days. On the third day, I don’t know what struck me; I just called the functions on the objects with dot operator, without passing the object to the called function. And Eureka, IT WORKED! What I realized then and what C++ told me then was – you need not specify everything to me, I too understand some unspoken things. I was awe-struck. The reason being I had gained an important perspective pertaining to life and relations. We humans are bestowed with something called a brain and a heart. When it comes to relations, any relation A Parent Child, a Friend-Friend, PAism or anything, there are some things which need not be specified. They’re to be understood and that’s what makes those relations SPECIAL. If you expect a specification to every emotion, the crux in the relation will disperse. That is what just happened with my C++ code. I tried to specify something to the Compiler which it didn’t need. The same happens with we humans too. We demand a specification, an expression and that too an explicit one to everything, even though when we ourselves refrain from doing that, still we expect the other end to be explicit and expressive. Strange but true. I would request each one reading this to contemplate over this issue. Does everything need to be specified?? If yes, then why do we have a heart for? The bottom-line is – to understand the unspoken and to see the concealed is the soul of any relationship.

Third thing I find worth imitating from C is her explicitness. She is so clear and so direct! Why can we humans be so? The feature which enchants me towards C is her “EXIT STATUS” attribute. To the non-programmers reading this, exit status is a number which C returns to the user (rather the system) at the end of every request (generally a Function). Now the thing worth noting here is C is very clear about her concepts. When the cases have match (here: string matching) she returns a 0, else a nonzero (1 in Boolean) number. This 0 1 behaviour of C has certainly captivated my senses. Why don’t we give a YES/NO reply to so many things? Why are we so elusive about ourselves? When computer made by us can be so decisive, then why not we ourselves? Why do we reply with an “I Don’t Know” to so many questions? C never keeps her user hanging in amidst of anything, where as we humans by our indecisive approach keep so many people hanging. Astonishing but true!

And lastly, I would mention something in praise of C. My friends in the college to tease me at times call “C Programming” my girlfriend to which I readily blush. Yesterday I was talking to Priyanshi about C, and I happened to moot that we have C Programming in the curriculum for this semester only; we won’t have it further then. But then at night, when I was coding I realized it was not the case. I would have her(C), as long as I code i.e. almost the whole life. I would have her in different names. This semester I have her in her name that’s C, in the next semester, I would be with her as C++, then Java, ASP, PHP and so on. The rest mentioned have all originated from C Programming which is aptly called “The Mother” of all Programming languages. From this observation, I inferred one thing that if you want to have something/somebody in life you can always have them forever with just one difference that your relations with them might just have a different name, at times according to your wish and at times according to destiny’s wish. If you want to have them as per your fancy fight with destiny and win them..

Hope you liked reading this piece.

Love & Regards,

Anish.