The Encrypted Email and a much more Encrypted Education

Year 2018,

On a warm afternoon, i was working in my office, sitting beside my window that affords a "beautiful" view of the congested roads outside our apartment, when a message popped up notifying me of a new mail(obviously an e-mail as everything has become 'e' now, it goes by default). In fact its been long since insecure 'e-mails' have become obsolete. But there was a time when they were not, it was 2008:

"Studying for the exam of Network Security, or rather i should say the 'Nonstop Slogging' because of its large syllabus. I took a break to practically look into a few of the concepts i had read until then. One of them was, PGP, abbreviation of Pretty Good Privacy. The motive of choosing this topic was that the book was all praise for 'the man', Zimmermann, who had invented this concept. A laudatory excerpt from the book goes like this...

Bless the man who man who made it,
And pray he ain't dead.
....
He gave it out for free,
Now every common man has PGP.

I do not remember the complete poem, but this is how i got enthused and chose to dig deeper into the concept. Googled PGP (to google then, was to use the highly illustrious search engine, Google), followed simple instructions to download the software. Perplexed by the simplicity of the procedure, i quickly became familiar with it which made me realize the extent of superficiality in the knowledge imparted by the forceful memorization of the permutations and combinations of letters. Sitting on the chair, my book kept on the table, i could visualize each and every friend of mine rote-learning PGP and preparing to 'throw up' in a manner so as to maximize the score.

With scores of ideas frothing up in the brain, while contemplating on each of them one by one, the Mac-book said "Its twenty hours". With a note of thanks to Steve Jobs, i realized that i had challenged Anuja to beat her. Giving up the thought with a pitiful conclusion that the 'whole system is flawed and stubborn', the 'other' thoughts instantly purged out of mind. A transition took place from self 'less' to 'fish' thoughts, setting aside the laptop, getting back to the book, the next topic to memorize was - Message Authentication And Hash Functions."

I am grateful to my interest in the subject per se that today, i at least remember the names of a few topics i had learned while graduating in 'Computer Engg'. But i am pretty sure, these memorized permutations and combinations of letters of english alphabet will fade away soon.