Character Analysis
Aww, poor graduate student. Although, according to Tina Fey, he deserves what he gets.
Here's the lesson from Zulfikar Sharif: do not download or open email attachments from people you do not know. It's not a hard lesson to learn, but you'd be surprised how many people make that sort of basic mistake—both in our time and in the future. In Zulfikar Sharif's case, not only does he let Miri Gu and Rabbit hijack his virtual presence, but also this is the second time his virtual self has been infected.
As he explains to Robert, he was hijacked in undergraduate and he had to "fry-clean" his whole system. And since he wasn't very good at backing up (hold on, we need to back up some stuff), he lost a whole semester of work (15.17). Notice, though, that even after going through that terrible experience once, he still hasn't learned how to keep his system virus-free… or that he should back up frequently. (Hold on, we're backing up our hard drives again.)
Honestly, because Sharif is so compromised, it's hard to talk about him as a character—he's probably not himself half of the time he's on the page. We can say this about him, though: the fact that he's terrible at computers and more interested in poetry may give us an idea of what Robert was like before he was cured of Alzheimer's.
After all, Sharif isn't just some guy studying literature: he left his home in Kolkata to travel to Oregon in order to gain "old-world insight into the literature that he loved" (10.40). That's the kind of sacrifice that, well, Robert would make. So Sharif—the real Sharif—sits at the crossroads of two big themes here, "Technology" and "Literature."
But Sharif is also useful as just a guy for Robert to talk to. In his interviews, Robert reveals more of himself (especially to us, since those interviews are usually from Robert's POV). And at the end, it's Sharif who gets to ask some important—and unanswerable—questions to Robert. Questions like: "Do you think your talent and your malevolence were a package deal?" and "What really changed in you?" (35.25). In his way, Sharif points us to some interesting questions to ask about Robert, as well as being the hero of a cautionary tale: do not let your system get infected!