The Hacker
First year at
NITC. Walking through the meandering corridors of A Hostel, I met him. Making a room at the corner of the corridor his den, he hacked away to glory. He seemed busy when I approached him that night. I asked, "
Hey what are you doing with your phone with the lights off?". "
I am trying to hack into the Airtel network using my cell and I didn't want to disturb my roommate by switching on the lights", said he ,the
Hacker (his name henceforth). The Nokia cell on which he was working looked similar to the one below.
He was typing the keys furiously as if he found the hole through which he can loop into the Airtel network and use the GPRS offered by them for free and unlimited. Eureka! I expected him to say. But it was not supposed to end that way that night. He struck a nerve cell in my mind killing it instantly with his hacking skills. Was a geek in disguise? The revival of the Einstein era? Making a fused bulb glow - that was his specialty.
I didn't know how deadly he was in bluffing until one of my friends send him a lewd sms. All hell broke loose. The Hacker barges into my friend's room and says, "Why the hell are you sending me these kind of SMSes. Whenever I receive any SMS, my parents (based in some Gulf nation) gets one automatically." I wasn't surprised as I my reflexes were conditioned from the previous Bluff Encounter with him. Wonder how much his cell phone bills come to because of all the international SMSes that gets automatically forwarded to Gulf.
The Hacker was hell bent on being the Numero Uno Bluffmaster of NITC. He was a student of Computers and he chose that field by choice that would give him the required skills to master over his Hacking (Bluffing) skills. In programming labs he used to write self destructing programs that would refuse to run the first time or the second time which was because of the fact that it had self destructed even before it being run. Maybe the time sequence of its self destructing mechanism was set at T-n (T being the time and n a variable).
Days went by. There wasn't any deadly bluffs from the Hacker until that day, when our discussion was centered on some sports related topic.
"Do you people know that I was the Sprint Champion in my school?". It was Jaws-4, with whoever heard them dropping their jaws wide. More was about to come.
"I created a new record of 9.00 seconds for the 100 m sprint". Then and there we all came to know a new thing about the Hacker- he doesn't read newspapers. We were not in the mood to enquire further on his achievement. Maurice Green would have suffered a heart attack if it was made public then. The Hacker thus became the uncrowned king of Bluffs.
The stories of Hacker never ended there . He was ought there to make a statement. A statement of bluff. He chose to spread his area influence far and wide. Finding no one to kill in his free time, wandering aimlessly his eyes caught a guitar lying in one of the rooms (S. Kite's room, my batch NITCians can make out who he was). Hacker at once took hold of it and started to try a few of his notes. He was doing good until S. Kite came and told him that he was holding the guitar in the wrong direction. Hacker was stumped but he didn't lose his cool & replied
" Yeah, I know. I was just trying to tune the guitar". Some words were to escape from S. Kite's mind but he controlled his mouth from letting it escape.
The stories of Hacker spread far and wide. He became the new Playboy of our hostel. Tired and frustrated from studies, the poor souls would find solace in him. He became the wholesome entertainer with TRP ratings beating the occasional night shows being screened at the Hostel common room. For earning a credit, people had to enroll in some kind of sports or gym or yoga for a semester. Our Hacker chose football. The reason of his choosing the same being that he represented a Gulf Nation in U-18 football tournament (he must have won). Truly an all-rounder. Time to India's football fraternity to take notice of him.
The Hacker continued to prove his all round performances. He was also a fast (super fast-101mph) bowler in cricket. It was indoor cricket there as there wasn't a proper cricket ground there in the Gulf. Hacker used to practice bowling to middle stump alone and it was so fast that the batsmen didn't get the time to react every time he bowls (some souls dragged themselves out of there to save themselves from further torture). He was the terror in cricket. Now it was time the BCCI took notice of him.
The Hacker was also extra ordinary in extra curricular activities. He was selected for the Inter-Asia (came across a new term there- Inter Asia) Singing competition when he was in 12th STD from the Gulf. It was supposed to be held in Singapore but his parents didn't allow him to go as they feared that it would have affected his studies. So revenge in the mind of the Hacker he studied and studied very hard he did that he got about 92% in his 12th with the marks of all individual subjects not adding up to 92% (extracted this info when someone asked the Hacker his individual marks in the subjects).
The Hacker was a
DASA, true to the core.
-tə-rē\ 
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