An SOS from Hamelin

Who exactly was the Pied Piper? And why is he back in the news?

1284. Hamelin. A bustling little town in Germany where shelves were stocked with cake and cheese, the kitchens were forever making food and there were parties every night. (And the town's council wondered why there were rats.) Luckily for them, the Pied Piper came over and played a ridiculous Bollywood tune that made the rats develop suicidal tendencies and jump into the river Weser. (Shah Rukh's movies have been a rage in Germany ever since. And there have been no reports of any rats after that.)

2012. Batman and Spiderman were back. So was Catwoman. Unfortunately, Hamelin saw the return of another super species - rats. But where was that dratted Pied Piper when they needed him the most? The council met once again. They almost didn't recognise one another - after all, it had been over 700 years. "We need to know who this Pied Piper is for us to call him again," declared the Mayor. “And since making an army of rats disappear needs hi-tech methods, look for him in the tech world.”

"It's Dean Kamen, the Segway guy,” stated Mr. Brown. “He’s known as the Pied Piper of technology.” The Mayor scoffed. "Apparently, the last time the rats vanished, they used his Segways as escape vehicles, which is why we don't see any today. No, it can't be him."

"It's actually two persons," said Mr. Black. "Why do you think so?" asked the Mayor. "Because," stated Mr. Black emphatically, "a man who drives out rats for a living cannot make his fortune at the click of a mouse. My guess is Jerry Yang and David Filo," replied Mr. Black. The Mayor shook his head. "They're too busy trying to fund their website with a reality show titled 'Yahoo's got problems'. Leave the poor guys out. Incidentally," the Mayor blushed, "do you know that their new chief is also a Mayer?"

"What about Larry Page and Sergey Brin?" asked Mr. Black. "The Google guys? But why them?" "The clue lies in the misspelt name. Most people misspell Hamelin as Hamlin - likewise, Google is actually..." "Googol," completed Mr. Orange. "Bingo! Besides, they were the ones last seen searching for rats," added Mr. Black. "But then," sighed the Mayor, "they search for everything. You can rule them out."

"It's the Apple guy," said Mr. Orange. "He would have just had to play his iTunes. All the kids would have put on their iPods and walked on, until they were lost." "But the Pied Piper was dressed in such garish colours - and Steve Jobs was forever in his black turtleneck and jeans," remarked the Mayor.

"It has to be Mark Zuckerberg," cried an excited Mr. Blue. "He got the rats to post their party pics on Facebook. Their bosses saw the cheesy images and all the rats were fired from their jobs. They had no choice but to move to another town…” "But," interrupted the Mayor impatiently, "What about the children? How did they vanish?"

"Well, Mark Z had asked the town to oversubscribe to his IPO in exchange for getting rid of all the rats. And that was how the IPO came to be known as the Pied Piper IPO. But the council didn't think much of his efforts and so didn't buy any shares. The IPO was a flop and Mark got terribly bugged. He first unfriended them all and then added a whole lot of apps and games to the site. Predictably, the kids went crazy and followed him to a place where even Google Plus couldn't find them..."

The great geek tragedy

A gift horse can be deadly dangerous, even if you don’t look it in the mouth…

Why does history repeat itself?

As always, technology answers this question best. The fact is, if history was made only once, we would still be trying to figure out how to carry around the monster DynaTAC 8000x mobile phone in our pocket and Bill Gates would still be crying himself hoarse that he never said anything as dumb as 640K of memory being enough for anybody.

However, according to Karl Marx, “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” That’s the reason why the first Trojan horse that was introduced to man resulted in the great Greek tragedy - and the one that followed it in the technology era ended up being a geek tragedy.

It all started with the Trojan War when the Greek soldiers sneakily gifted a large wooden horse to the city of Troy as a peace offering. The battle-weary residents were polite enough not to look at the gift horse in the mouth, but they should have looked at its gut. Perhaps they thought that the horse didn’t have the stomach for a fight, but they were wrong. By midnight, the horse’s belly spewed Greek soldiers who jumped out and conquered the city. The incident ended up contributing an important phrase to the English language, without which Martin Scorsese and Ram Gopal Varma would have felt quite lost – the dark underbelly of crime.

But more importantly, creating a diversion and slipping through the strongest walls, or firewalls - as the case may be - of security would become a dreaded nightmare in the future. The malicious programs that get into your computer pretending to be harmless, and then proceed to create havoc were aptly named after the Trojan horse. The only difference was that while the original Trojan horse had more to do with the doors of the walled city of Troy, the ones that followed, like Stuxnet, busied themselves with Windows.

What makes these Trojans so God-almighty powerful? Well, if Zeus, the king of the Gods, couldn’t escape the trap of deception, how could mere mortals? Zeus was distracted by the beautiful Hera while the Greeks emerged the stronger force in the Trojan war. And for this blunder, Zeus was cursed to lend his name to a Trojan – the Zeus Trojan horse – that would gain notoriety in the banking sector because of its exploits in collecting personal data and passwords.

The concept of creating a diversion and hoodwinking many evolved during the churning of the ocean, when a ravishing beauty named Mohini deceived the asuras while the devas ended up having all the nectar to themselves. The incident set a bad precedent - soon a legion of Trojans and viruses named after beautiful women was unleashed to haunt the internet. Shakira, Jennifer Lopez, Britney Spears, Angelina Jolie, Anna Kournikova, Pamela Anderson, Jennifer Aniston and Beyonce Knowles – in their cyber avatar - teased, trapped and tormented millions.

The geek tragedy not only brings us a truckload of Trojans, but also three vital lessons. One, the perils of resorting to deceit and subterfuge are many – just look at what is happening to Greece today. Two, fortunes keep changing. Troy may have lost the war, but has made its presence felt across the United States - over 30 states in the country have a city or town named Troy. And three, never take English phrases too seriously. One hears of ‘shutting the stable door after the horse had bolted’, but in the case of the wooden Trojan horse, it was quite the opposite - the door was stealthily opened after the horse had come in.