Delhi's 'Dilbert' Character Can't Die!

NEW DELHI, Dec. 11, 2007 — -- In the corridors of the vaunted Indian Institute of Technology, the students and the staff are weeping. Asok the Intern, their beloved alumnus, is dead.

Well, he was dead. But not anymore.

And actually, they're not even weeping. Most of them don't even know who Asok is.

"Who?" asked IIT student Deeksha Gupta, 23, when told by a foreign reporter about Asok's untimely demise. "Sorry, we don't have time," she said as she walked away.

For the unenlightened or the overly busy, Asok (pronounced a-shook) is a character on the "Dilbert" cartoon strip, the satire of cubicle culture where the management is incompetent, the workers are "pathetic defeated losers" and ignorance, as the creator once wrote, is a point of view.

The cartoon is published in more than 2,000 newspapers in 65 countries.

Asok the Intern, introduced 11 years ago, is the green supergeek of the bunch, an overeducated Indian who loves Hindi music and works on the weekends to fix his co-workers' reports. He actually was educated at IIT, which he says is the reason why he's "mentally superior to most people on Earth." He can reheat tea by holding the cup to his forehead and thinking of fire. He only sleeps during national holidays, a habit supposedly picked up from his alma mater. And he once stole doughnuts during a meeting using only his mind. His IQ: 240.

"He's exaggerated," said 21-year-old IIT student Sumeet Khullar. "It's not that we're extraordinarily brilliant. We are brilliant — just not 240 IQ brilliant."

But even Khullar admits that Asok is extraordinarily naive.

He was once persuaded to jump into an air-conditioning duct to turn off the furnace. Later he was asked to create a poster for a customer appreciation campaign. The slogan: "Thank Goodness There Are So Many Idiots."

It was Asok's loyalty that led him to temporary death.

The story line began Dec. 3, when the world's worst boss, aptly named Pointy Haired Boss — the man who once said his computer was warm because the firewall was acting up — announced that his company would test a private spaceship. By Wednesday, PHB had chosen his victim, sealing Asok's interstellar fate: "Asok, I need an intern to test-pilot our new shuttle prototype."