Yantrixa 11: Ramzu

Ramzu, a.k.a. Rehman, my batchmate from that place next to powai lake. In the first week we were both ragged by our seniors, made to strip naked and do all manner of amusing things like play football, hold each other dicks and taking the hostel oath, singing the national anthem, etc... Rehman went along with everything until the point when we were asked to dine in the mess stark naked. That was the point at which he put his foot down and said he never breaks fast during Ramzan without performing prayers. This came as a bit of a shock to most of the seniors who had seen Rehman drink and eat all manner of meats and never perform any kind of prayer ever. But .. Rehman stuck to his guns, said it was Ramzan and that is the only way he would do it.

The seniors were assholes but they weren't bigots, so they let him pray and told us to pray with him. After that we all went to the mess and had dinner there naked. Later that night we all got completely wasted and I am told Rehman puked (something about Sambar and Beer not staying down well) and that I slept in his puke. I have absolutely no recollection of this.

That is how the name Ramzu came into this world.

Now ofcourse, Ramzu was definetely one of the sharper folks that I had the privilege of graduating with. After graduating, he went on to do a PhD in that place on the Charles river in Boston and then became an assistant professor in Computer Science in Boston at a place that is a few miles north of where he got his PhD. He was all set to get tenure, but rather bizarrely he came back to Powai and took up as the head of the newly inaugurated artificial intelligence study group there.

I was baffled and pushed him on the issue where he told me that his brother had committed suicide and his parents needed support. I knew Ramzu's brother, he had served on Siachen some years ago and apparently he wasn't the same after that. I introduced Ramzu to Mita after that and things seemed to be working out, but Ramzu's parents weren't keen so it didn't go anywhere.

I went to Powai to meet Ramzu, I had been struggling with the contents of Amin's USB key and I wanted to understand how the Tetravaals worked and I figured Ramzu would be person to ask.

I walked to his office, it was in that oddly shaped building which had always bewildered us when we studied here. I hadn't realised that in the intervening years the AISG as it came to be known had expanded to fill the entire space. Ramzu now had a dozen full faculty members to work with. As I walked into his office the first thing I saw was a picture of Ramzu standing next to a stone plaque heralding the launch of the AISG a few years ago. On the other side of the plaque was the Prime Minister of India.

Ramzu was doing something on his computer so I had a second to take in his room. It was as I recalled his hostel room to be, an untidy mess of papers and books. There was an old robot he had built when he participated in a robot-war competition and then there were a few degrees on the wall.

Finally he got done doing whatever he was messing around with and since I had brought the coffee from the shack we began to chat.

Ramzu: So whats going on.. fucker -- you are lucky to be alive. That Jalalabad story was a very close shave.

Me: Yes ... yaar everyone gives me shit about it. It is all ancient history now.

Ramzu: Yes... chutiye you almost got killed - Mita told me.. what the fuck is wrong you man... you have a death wish or something?

Me: Mita... I didn't realise you were still seeing...

Ramzu: Don't go there... leave it..

Me: Okay okay... so what is up at you end..

Ramzu: Did you know Sri is here?

Me: Sri - here? where....

Ramzu: Down the hall, next office actually.

Me: Fuck... what he is he doing here.

Ramzu: AISG is growing, it is after all the "Indian Summer" of AI.

Me: I take it the money is all coming from you friend, the big H on the wall?

Ramzu (smiling as he turns towards his photo on the wall) : Fucker don't tell me you don't have photos like that.

Me: I don't put them on a wall.

Ramzu: Karna padta hain man, junta gives no respect otherwise. Those madarchods down at the management school would have the photo up to 10 foot by 10 foot size and put it in the lobby.

Me: You are so understated yaar....

Ramzu: Okay okay man enough cheap shots -- what brings you here.

Me: Tetravaal.

Ramzu: What?

Me: I'm making a movie about the Varun case. I want to understand AI and how it works.

Ramzu: I take it this is another Jalalabad action movie that has approval from the top?

Me: What rubbish? - I am a 5000% independent movie maker, I make movies about whatever I damn well feel like and no one tells me anything.

Ramzu: Yes .. yes .. ofcourse.

Me: So tetravaal, what can you tell me..

Ramzu: Not much really. The AI community as you know is very cloistered, they don't talk to each other. Too much money to be made and so people don't feel like sharing.

Me: Oh come on - you must know something.

Ramzu: No no really, most of the programming was done in Johannesburg by TechCor. There was a AI group at Berkeley that worked on a number of DARPA projects but then lost steam when the weather got cold. They moved to Johannesburg a decade ago and were re-employed by TechCor.

Me: So it is all locked down - how on earth did they allow this to be deployed in country?

Ramzu: Why man? - every computer you buy has software on it that is not made in country, so why is this any different?

Me: Still they must have done something to ensure that it wasn't a problem.

Ramzu: If they did - it is not public knowledge.

Me: Okay forget that then - talk in general terms about AI.

Ramzu: Sure, all this AI stuff is a problem in information reduction. If you sit and analyse every little detail from every cell in your retina, you will take forever to see. So your brain cuts the data down into things that are most relevant. You focus on the person you are talking to and the brain automatically filters out the inputs and puts them into a format that triggers responses.

Me: But the responses are different for each stimulus. And when you program an AI you program the responses to various stimuli?

Ramzu: Yes, but the true strength of the AI is that it is not simply a look-up table. An AI formulates responses based on a learning process. That makes it capable of responding to a situation it was not specifically instructed to. It is like an ordinary human being in that sense, you go to school, you learn some general laws of say physics... then you go to your place of work and then you apply those laws even if the problem in front of you is not one you have already solved in a textbook before.

Me: So if an AI is trained... where is it trained? at the company... there must be one single AI that serves as the first one... and the rest are copies of it?

Ramzu:.. Aah... probably at the company... yes there is a Prime... [hmm.... why is Ramzu's voice changing tone....]... usually the first version of a software is tested on a single platform which is put through the reliability tests, and then the beta release takes places on a cloistered system.

Me: So there is a Prime and a First Cohort?...

Ramzu: [definitely changing tone...] yes something like that.

I can tell when Ramzu isn't or doesn't want to tell me something.

When he was GS(Cult) during our last year, there was a problem in MI, our youth festival - an incident had occurred. Usually two big players in the Kanjur underworld, Mr. M and Mr K were issued contracts for work in MI. Propriety dictated that contracts be split equally between them, Mr. M supplied all the construction material and Mr. K provided the transport vehicles and private taxis.  But this year there was a problem. The Dean's office had intervened in a high handed fashion and demanded that Mr. M's contract for key services be cut down as punishment for allegations of indulging in corrupt practices the year before. I was on Ramzu's special adviser group. There was no way to give Mr. M any more contracts and in complete honesty he had only commit corrupt acts as part of a kickback scheme that funneled MI money back into the Institute's student politics scene. So I had proposed that all alcohol and drug trafficking be handed to Mr. M to compensate for his loss due to the Dean's action - it would not add money to the system but at least spread the loss equally over the two suppliers. Ramzu had accepted my suggestion and placed me in-charge of event security. I had proceeded to discourage all of Mr.K's friends from selling any narcotics during MI and routed all the people wanting to buy anything to Mr. M's men. It almost worked... almost because the arrangement made Mr. K's people think that I was on Mr. M's payroll. One of Mr K's boys proceeded promptly to molest a girl who Mr. M treated as his sister.

I was informed of this incident about ten minutes after it happened. I immediately moved to control the situation. I got the victim out of the area and sanitized the crime scene. I got her a new set of clothes and burnt her old clothes. The victim identified the attacker as the "one in the red shirt". There was only one person who matched that description, and one of my chaps, a freshman called Pondi,  had already picked him up. On my instruction Pondi removed the perp to a secure location where Mr. M's people could not get to him. This was necessary to prevent the incident from turning into a full blown gang war in the middle of MI. I also revised all routes for VIP transit and arranged to have all VIP vehicles leave via the lake-road -a private road protected by special security unit that reported to the Public Works Department. This was necessary to prevent the VIPs from being assaulted by Mr. M's people. The publicity if a VIP convoy had been challenged would have been unbearable.

As I was doing this I briefed Ramzu and told him of the increased security measures. At first Ramzu seemed very interested and then after about fifteen minutes, I saw him talking to Mr. M... and then I felt his tone change. The next thing I know is I found myself and Pondi standing in the road near Powai lake and handing the perp over to Mr. M's guys - the man was begging me to save his life. I found myself telling him "Kiye ki kimat toh chukane hain na.." Pondi was even more rough, started beating the crap out of the perp and finally shoved and kicked him into the Pajero that Mr. M's guys were sitting in. I think the last thing Pondi said to the perp as he slapped him in the face was "Why are you crying? you knew what was coming when you did this... you know the rules ... no going after family... why do you now cry?".

 I saw the man's face in the dim light of the Pajero's back, his eyes were filled with fear. I never saw him again, I heard a week later that Institute Security had found a body in the lake. and that its balls had been cut off. I never asked who the body was but I heard it had a red shirt on. Some weeks later Pondi told me his sister had been raped and killed years ago and since then he felt that people like the chap in the red shirt were not worthy of being called human.

Now.. as this conversation about the Prime and the First Cohort proceeded, I detected the same change in Ramzu's tone... and I knew....

Ramzu had programmed the Prime and the First Cohort.