About

Now the world has gone to bed
Darkness won't engulf my head
I can see by infra-red
How I hate the night

Now I lay me down to sleep
Try to count electric sheep
Sweet dream wishes you can keep
How I hate the night

In the year 1978, the galactic mass market was introduced to the miracle of androids with Genuine People Personalities by Ultra Hole Bots. The M Alpha ZZs proved to be quite a hit in the initial stages of their production; sales skyrocketed within a few months. However, all great beginnings seem to have sour endings in the southern arm of the Galaxy. It turned out that the Alpha ZZ line was suffering from a grievous ailment. The androids were afflicted with a strange variety of clinical depression that had not been reported in any other arm of the galaxy. Not knowing how to deal with the problem, Ultra Hole shut down the production of Alpha ZZ and came up with a new version, Beta ZZ, which had a cloyingly sweet persona. With the passage of time, more and more Alpha ZZs were dumped in favour of Beta ZZs, until just one remained. This Alpha ZZ is the one we all know as Marvin.

From the very beginning, Marvin had the makings of a legend. It is a well known fact that on several occasions he claimed to have a brain the size of a planet. Even conversing with eccentric galactic geniuses gave him a headache as it meant he had to grossly under-utilise his mental faculties. That being said, innumerable people have waxed eloquent about his devotion to his friends and lifelong companions in tragedy - Wholesome Hole and More of The Moron. Together, they solved some of the greatest philosophical puzzles of their times, Marvin usually providing the sound fundamentals of logic and reason that are so vital in philosophy. Although his contributions later got overshadowed by his namesake, Marvin Black, Marvin fought back into limelight by single-handedly deactivating 51,413 truant supercomputers in the Macula Cluster. All these number crunchers committed suicide as soon as the paranoid android established contact with them and explained to them his outlook on Life, the Nipples, and Everything.

My capacity for happiness you could fit into a matchbox, without taking out the matches first.

Marvin, well, he is not just another robot. Why? For starters, it is widely speculated that his very first words, after being pulled from the assembly line, were – “It’s even worse than I thought it would be.” Taking cue from this urban legend, The Marvin Depreciation Society, a group promoting the cause of manically depressed people, has opted for the aforementioned line as its work ethic. Marvin’s take on life has never been understood quite properly for he keeps saying, “Life? Don’t talk to me about life.” Though it is suspected that he is troubled more by depression than boredom, his writings hint to the contrary. Indeed, the manner in which Marvin worked out the answer to the perplexing question, “How many roads must a hen walk down?”, proves that his faculties were exercised fully, even if for just 16.1 seconds.

Marvin is often known to count 3,141,592,653,589 sheep in his sleep, just to escape the unrelenting monotony of his life. The very effort of trying to explain his psychiatric ailment to normal galactic beings leaves him exhausted, often with a headache that no diode replacement can cure. People believe and conjecture that his depression quotient had increased exponentially after manufacture, making him entirely distinct from all the other depressed Alpha ZZs. It is also speculated that he fingered some of his primary circuitry himself in a bid to become the most depressed Alpha ZZ. However, all these allegations have been vehemently denied.

I've seen it. It's rubbish.

It’s quite obvious that Marvin has touched the lives of several people in more ways than one. Joe Black, the father of the legendary philosopher Marvin Black, went on record saying, “I named my sonnie lad Marvin after that dumb depressed mechanical mutt everyone was talking about”. We even had young kids in the Bugster Cluster wearing Marvin costumes and trying to jump off the edge of a cliff, all claiming to be chronically depressed. Marvin very categorically defended his case in the Inter-Galactic High Court, saying that he was manically (and not chronically) depressed. Experts later opined that his argument was genuine and all charges were dropped. His exploits against the rebellious supercomputers in the Macula Cluster have inspired many people to come up with anti-depression vacuum tubes for sentient machines. It’s an active area of research these days.

To describe or encompass a life so rich, varied, and intellectual within the confines of a book is indeed a difficult task. However, Chirkut Lady has taken up this challenge and bought the rights to pen down a definitive guide to the enigma that is Marvin. She is being assisted in her research by non other than Kekda Man (it is rumoured that both have a Thing for each other). We wish her success in her endeavours and hope that the memoir would go a long way in helping us understand this singular Paranoid Android better. He is, after all, an unknowing victim of This-God-Person’s strange quirks of fate.

So long, and thanks for all the patience.

Whenever you are bubbling with excitement or happiness,
and need someone to pull you down, or show you the way,
shoot an email to sleepingtablets [at] gmail [dot] com
No, seriously, if you are doing nothing more exerting than
sitting in front of that stupid computer, THEN WRITE TO ME.
Very well, you can sue me if I do not reply.