karma police

the kobayashi maru

A sunny afternoon on the school grounds, and six children lined up to run what was the most important race of their seven-year-old lives. Our heads bobbing up and down, elbows crashing into each other, and our panting breath. Amidst it all, me, laughing, then my knees clashing against each other in a misstep, falling, tripping, and then crying. Some blood flowing from my scraped knees, the dust being wiped from my perfectly white PE clothes, and the scenes of a Sports Day injury.

In Star Trek, the Kobayashi Maru is a test that every Starfleet Cadet must take. This test is unwinnable.

I soon learned that this wasn’t about a misstep. This was about a condition called knock knees – where your legs bend inwards at the knees even as your ankles stay apart. Today, I have very little recollection of this period. I have only bittersweet tales collected from my parents, who rushed from clinic to clinic, and my grandmother, who insisted on tagging along to every visit.

It is meant to ensure that each cadet faces the fear of certain death and can maintain their calm in such a no-win scenario.

I am told that back then, I wasn’t particularly cooperative with well-meaning adults. When warned of surgery, I balled my fists and shouted back “NO NEED!”. When provided leg braces to correct my posture, I whined and cried an entire night and vowed to never wear them again. I finally compromised and settled for what seemed like the least drastic action – physiotherapy. James Kirk doesn’t believe in no-win scenarios. The captain believes the test itself to be a cheat. It wasn’t easy. Back then, there was just one doctor in the entire city we trusted to help us – except he lived 4 hours away and all his appointments were booked a year in advance. I soon realized that this would be a years-long process. I didn’t have to nurse a fracture or bandage a bleeding wound – my still-developing bones had to be bent back into shape. There was no way out of it. It had to be done.

He hacks the mainframe responsible for administering the test, becoming the only Starfleet cadet in history to have passed the Kobayashi Maru.

Once again, I am told that I made some dramatic choices. For me, physiotherapy meant dramatic recreations of Johan Cruyff and Ronaldinho and Lionel Messi, my favorite footballers at the time. I would waltz through my cramped apartment – dribbling through doors and tables – the space between the two legs of a chair serving as my goal. Outside, it also meant cricket coaching, falling and tumbling frequently, but loving every second of it.

Don’t get me wrong – I did the doctor-recommended exercises. I went to a local physiotherapist and did my hamstring stretches and I took my calcium supplements – but rabonas, Cruyff turns, and rainbow flicks just had to be part of it too – it was who I was. The words the doctors were saying weren’t for me. This period of time wasn’t real, and this wouldn’t define me.

Captain James T. Kirk rewrites the rules to win a no-win scenario. Ultimately, it faded away. I stopped stumbling when I got up, stopped falling in cricket coaching, and the visits to the doctors became less frequent. There was no single defining moment where this ended – instead, it just slunk away into the distance like a wounded wolf, never to be seen again.

I fell in a curious love with unwinnable scenarios. The audacity to refuse braces and surgery or the audacity to colonize Mars. The audacity to write a research paper or even wriggle out of a complex math problem – I chased it, wide-eyed. Words like audacity, gall, and grit came to the forefront of my vocabulary, violently displacing all the stumbling and tripping and falling.