reorganization of hell

Some 100 years in the future, although all the gods were thankful for conjuring up hell, it was now becoming increasingly difficult to manage the steady stream of people making the transition. Little did the new comers know that heaven and hell were all relative concepts and there were no third-degree torture chambers and oil cauldrons in hell or virgins waiting in the heaven.

It was all hell or at least that's what it seemed like as chaos reigned over the reorganization plans. Here's how hell works. Every dead person, after making the transition to this no man's land (but dead man's land) is inserted in a single file. An individual's own personal hell is defined by the two other dead peolpe who flank him/her and symbolize his/her personal demons. Up until now, the gods' ways of putting people in the queue were, at best, random and at worst, driven by their own personal agendas. But this changed as dissatisfaction grew among the tenants, specially after the arrival of Kim Jong Il who quickly took upon himself to increase it to manifolds.

So gods came upon a brilliant idea to use the power of knowledge that occupied the very base, call it heaven or hell. They recruited Albert Einstein and Leonardo Da Vinci as the project implementation lead and design lead respectively to give hell a vision and a sense of fairness to its occupants.

Einstein, regularly trounced Da Vinci's hidden codes and meanings after coming to this world. Da Vinci hated him for his intelligence while Einstein who was too busy on the earth converting mass to energy found only energy and no mass here, secretly despised Da Vinci for his flair for art. They both were in their own hell. The choices couldn't have been better.

While initially, the algorithm looked straight forward as everyone had to be lined up in a single file, the new arrivals tended to break the chain of co-relation. For each individual n surrounded by his/her demons n-1 and n+1, the insertion of a new individual m immediately after n should be such that both n and n+1 prove to be demons of m, where n, m are individuals who do not directly oversee the insertions. Easier said than done!

So Gary Kasparov was hired as an independent consultant to assist with these uni-directional displacements. Kasparov, however found it difficult to begin as he had always either started with a chess move and waited for his opponent before making another move OR started with a counter-move in case his opponent started the game. Vishwanathan Anand was recruited to overcome this hurdle. Again, they both proved to be each other’s demons and things were going alone fine.

Above all, Einstein was plagued by the boundary conditions, i.e. who should be at the two ends of the line. He shall reap rewards of hiring Kasparov sooner than expected. In a deft move, Kasparov placed Jean-Marie Le Pen, the French nationalist, to the farthest right. If he were any further right, he’d fall from the face of the hell. Literally! Anand responded in equally suggestive move. He took a priest and placed him on the far left. Initially the gods were dumbfounded by this move because priests are generally speaking, conservative. But his argument - you can’t be more left than when you become so liberal that you start taking liberty with the innocent kids - laid to rest all the opposition.

Kasparov then placed Bill O’Reilly to Le Pen’s left. Both were alter ego of each other and the move almost violated the necessary conditions but the fact that O’Reilly hated the French and Le Pen was downright infuriated to see that he didn’t know O’Reilly and still could tell that he was imbecile, made for a perfect placement.

Thereafter the moves and counter moves came in a hurry as both the chess players expected the other’s move even as Einstein started researching on how to optimize the placement algorithm. Lou Dobbs was placed between two illegal immigrants while Indian software engineers alternated with Indian managers with whom they shared their mutual loathing.

The so-called-swamis, chanting perennially but not knowing what it was, were put between wise guys – who would go “You talking to me? You talking to me?” every time they heard a chant – and scholars of Vedas and scriptures who knew exactly what the so-called-swamis were chanting.

Israelis and Arabs again found themselves next to each other while Bush found himself next to Osama and Ahmedijan. Oprah was flanked by two deaf guys while Joseph Stalin by capitalists Bill Gates and Rupert Murdoch.

Ordinary people had to fill out a questionnaire in order to get a fair placement. This was exactly same as what was optional information when filling out surveys on earth, viz., age, sex, religion, ethnicity and military service. These data proved to be the breeding grounds for all that was wrong with humanity and hence, right with hell.

While the reorganization was taking shape smoothly, Einstein came across a breed of individuals, which he called fillers. He found out that gay people were generally despised by a majority due to their lifestyles and because of this they can be put pretty much anywhere. This made the whole process go a lot smoother and suddenly gay people found themselves in-demand.

The only silver lining (or the occasional heaven) of this hell was when Mother Teressa and other social workers found themselves alternated by a kid from Darfur and Somalia. The workers were happy to find hunger-free and disease-free kids while the kids got the warmth they always longed.

All this while, Da Vinci was visualizing a new masterpiece which will be three-dimensional - a remake of Mona Lisa which would be a mosaic created out of queues of individuals, who will be surrounded by their demons from all the sides and not just flanked. Einstein was boggled by the complexities of computations involved in this design and denied it right away. This, however, would change as Einstein would later find during a conversation that Mona Lisa was Da Vinci’s father. Phase-II of the project was on!