Cows Give Milk!

Ajay-Kumar Tannirkulam Mudambi, henceforth referred to as ATM is one of my closest friends. He was also my room-mate for six months in the year 2004. ATM is by far the most highly educated, highly travelled, highly published, highly accomplished yet highly unassuming of all my buddies. Yet ATM had one flaw. Whenever my room-mates and I got into a conversation (and we had many of those), ATM's responses or comments were never quite understood by us. It is not like he used alien parlance or cryptic coded metaphors, just simple statements that perfectly made sense by themselves but had no relevance to the existing conversation. For example (and I speak anecdotally, yet without exaggeration), if asked, "ATM, what are your views on homosexuality?", one might expect an answer like "D, I think Indian politics needs a paradigm shift" or "ATM, are we out of sugar?" would yield something along the lines of "D, I think phirang women prefer men with hairy chests". For a few weeks I thought I was just plain dumb. ATM was a smart man and I was not equipped to understand his statements. Fortunately, I found out that the other room-mates were dumbfounded too and so we set up a support group. We reasoned that people who are excessively intelligent cannot be bothered with our menial conversations, instead are continuosly thinking more important things. Thus when asked a question, we should not expect an answer but a comment on the lines of where we broke their thought process. But, this was not helping our situation and conversations (did I mention we had many of these) with ATM were getting increasingly exasperating. We wanted respite, we wanted revenge! To give him a dose of his own medicine, my room-mates and I coined the phrase "Cows give milk" as a statement we would put out there if we noticed he was, well, being himself. It served two purposes namely therapy for us and a way to signal to him that we were confused (we tried just telling him we were confused to know avail). Till date, ATM occasionally slips into cows give milk (since changed to "Soy-beans give Soy" as ATM is a vegan now) mode but I have made peace with the fact that I will never understand the ways of the exceedingly intelligent.