Daily Archives: February 5, 2012

What about our thumbs ?

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Man is an animal. That much even I know. But a social animal? Well, so it would seem if one checks the evolutionary changes that has happened to the creature ever since it decided to try an opposable thumb to grasp things better a long time ago. It started the creature down a path separate from the rest of them, a path that eventually prompted cerebral evolution on a social front in a massive way. The animal and its relatives survive through combined efforts of groups of individuals held together by a social glue. Their lifestyle has evolved such that unattached individuals living outside of society might find the going a lot tougher.

Social behavior has evolved in species without an opposable thumb also. In fact it has evolved in creatures without a thumb altogether. It is hard to imagine a bee surviving and perpetuating its species without its colony and its queen bee. This is just one example of many, to confuse the heck out of a blog theme.

Anyhow, human social evolution has a long history and was highly complex long before the invention of the transistor, the tv the computer and the internet. During the times of Napoleon Bonaparte, or Ramses the first in Egypt, the glue for the society worked differently and had nothing to do with binary signals traveling around at the speed of light in wires or optical cables from point to point. It is indeed doubtful if people even had a clear concept about speed of light. If you were an actor, you travelled a bit, looked for rich patrons, and performed on stage in big cities, or small towns, or village squares, more or less daily. You probably did not have a fan club except in big cities and that too of a different kind than today’s. In today’s world, Shakespeare would have been coaxed by his agents and managers to either wear a wig, or have a hair transplant, and work on his speech delivery style, even if he was only a playwright and not an actor himself. In fact, even Einstein, if he was a celebrity today, would have likely been forced to change his hair style.

Anyhow, we are here and today, and not there and at that time. We are not in the court of Gengis Khan, thank goodness. So what kind of social animals are we, of the electronic age? Just for the sake of argument, could we be judged by our past society as anti-social animals rather than social? Or could it be that we are a bunch of pseudo-socials that wear a sociable face, but harbor some perplexing unsocial thoughts? In other words, are we pretending to be elites, or intellectuals, or just “me too” clansmen ?

What is the meaning of being a social animal in today’s world ? What should it mean and what does it mean instead?

To further complicate matters, a twist of the word has produced an offshoot – socialism, as against capitalism. Capital has created that opposing offshoot of capitalism. But why capital should oppose social, I have no idea and whatever the definition of capitalism is, or socialism should be – I am sure God does not know, and neither do I. One gets to hear quite a bit of talks on this undefined issue of Obama’s socialism against some of his opponents capitalism during this campaign season for the US presidential race. I am beginning to doubt if Obama himself is clear about the definitions and what they might mean.
But, I shall leave the Obamas, Camerons, Harpers and Singhs to their world. Perhaps in their world gravity is not a function of geometry and space is not curved around objects. What is curved instead is the atmosphere of spin, and it spins like crazy round Washington, London and Delhi, among other places.

For now, the target of this writing is not the social black holes in the capital cities of the world, both Capitalist and Socialist worlds, where matter can pass through, but truth goes into an endless spin and can never re-emerge. What does emerge, is various spins of it. No, that world of eternal angular momentum is not the intended target of this blog.
And frankly, I am not really too involved with theory of the evolution of opposing thumbs either, though I do have them. I have thought of them in different ways. Early in my life I noted how infants would suck their thumb as a reflect action that replaces suckling their mothers breast for milk. But later in life, as folks develop lactose intolerance and grow up to do different things with their thumb including using it as a visual expression of particular thoughts. This display of the thumb starts to carry a meaning, a gesture, an expression. And the meaning can be different to different folks in different societies.
Back in Bengal, where I grew up, showing an extended thumb was a sort of an impolite sign. It also has a name – showing the banana. I guess banana is used here because the extended thumb is usually curved, like a banana. Showing someone the banana is like tossing the banana peel on his path and having a hearty guffaw when he slips and sprawls on the road.
But the same gesture, in the US usually means all is Good. But, for all to be good, the thumb should be pointing up on a closed fist. Point the thumb downward, and the gesture means the opposite – it sucks. What about thumbs extended sideways? I guess that, accompanied with the owner of the thumb standing roadside, usually means the person is looking to hitch a ride. Either way, up, down or horizontal, it means quite a different set of things, than showing the banana in Bengal.

Nonetheless, I was not going to write about showing the thumb to Obama, Ron Paul or Mitt Romney. I was not even contemplating writing about our own evolution, or what an extended thumb might have meant to a Neanderthal.

The original notion was to think through this phenomenon of internet based social networking sites, and how it might help or hinder the natural growth as a human being that has learned the art of charm, spin and of political correctness.

I’d say this newfangled social media is a mixed bag. You win some and lose some, thumbs up on a few counts and down on a great many more.

Everyone is on the internet social bandwagon. Before I knew it, my friends circle had bloated to a ridiculous number of many hundreds, a majority of whom I had never met. Suddenly, I was confronted with an unending stream of trivia notes forcing themselves on me informing me that someone likes to pet her dog, or someone else likes the fact that his friend likes someone else’s comments. Matters begin to get ridiculous, so much so, that I had to go to war on the list of friends, and decimated the parasitic growth of friends without friendliness.

My experience here, is of a jungle of faceless humans, a vast majority of whom are like passing flotsam drifting in the stream. Its nice to be moving with the water. But I find it unattractive to be social in that sense, just drifting together, barely aware of each others existence beyond the fact that we are floating, and not yet underwater.

So, how much of a social animal are we?

More you get to know people, more you learn of their behavior. Just like a biologist studying animal behavior, you could, at a distance, try to figure out what it is that makes people tick on the electronic social media. I have, and have come to some heartwarming as well as heart wrenching conclusions.
First the good news. There are a lot of people that are inspirational and do amazing things with their lives. But, many of them are low key and work with people that are not in the limelight. They are a sharp contrast with people in the limelight, and in a fair comparison, they, those silent inspirations, would win hands down. But the world is not fair. Without a platform that sort of leveled the playing field, these folks would never get to be known beyond their village or town. So, internet has helped enormously, for persons like me, to seek real inspirations and not phony stage managed ones from religious headquarters like the Vatican, or political Headquarters like Washington, or cultural headquarters like Hollywood.

But what about the bad news? Well, the heart wrenching part comes later as you come to realize that folks you knew for a long time, folks you consider your friends, your kin, your loved ones, have not lived up to your expectations, and have betrayed your trust in them.

Its not personal. You were not expecting them to line up with you just because you were a friend. You however expected them to line up on the side of truth and speak up as responsible social animals. But, with the chips down, all you noticed was their silence. You saw injustice being done to individuals, to groups, to communities, to entire nations, and your friends chose to remain silent and selfish and sitting on the fence. Actually, they behave as if they live on the fence.

You yourself might have spoken out at times, and tried to seek support from others. But all those people you held in high regard, and considered to be giants, were actually pigmies. They would prefer that you do not notice them, or ask them or expect them to be fair and impartial and just. They wish to be silent, non-committal, and selfish. They do not care, where you thought that they should.

But instead of those fallen giants and dear one’s, you do notice a small trickle, one out of a hundred, that you did not know that well and did not think much of, have proven you wrong and have come up and surpassed your expectations.

This is the most heart wrenching and heartwarming aspect of growing up. You recognize that, while you might be a social animal, your cozy world has been an illusion.  People you expected to stand up for principles, were actually mice looking for a larger hole.

Social animal ? Well ….

Tonu

Glaciers of our ancestors

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It was the beginning of January, 2012. I had gone north from Glacier National park in the US, crossed the border and entered Canada in the province of British Columbia just west of the Alberta state border, and south of Banff. My intension was to take the southern route going west back towards Vancouver, and stop on the way wherever it looked good. I had travelled some of these roads before, but not in the dead of winter. A lot of high mountain roads were involved, with sudden change of altitude and weather. Heavy snow and limited visibility in sharply curving mountain roads were to be expected. One had to be vigilant.

I was also going through what many call the southern edge of British Columbia’s wine country. A few of the vineyards were within site, among the lower foothills of the mountains.

I was watching the scenery. It took me a while to identify what was intriguing me so much. It was the slopes of the distant hills to my left. There was something odd about it. It was not just a farmland, a few farmers vehicles in the foreground, and a low hill in the background.

I slowed down and watched the side of the hill for a while – till I could not continue any longer. I had to stop, and seek out a dirt road going through the farmland towards the low hills, so I could take a closer look. Beyond the flat farmland, as the land began to slope upwards, there is a vineyard. Someone had planted grape trees what were currently barren, shorn of leaves in the winter. Its not so visible from here, but can be seen closer to the hills.

But what drew my attention was the hill itself.

The side facing me was rocky, without much soil cover, and therefore mostly barren with no trees. At the upper regions, there was soil and also trees.

The rocky slope facing me had a light powdering of snow. Water coming down over thousands of years had carved the rock and made a few channels and ravines. Gravel and dirt coming down from top had collected into these ravines, enough to support a few trees.

But, right across that bare rock face staring at me, were horizontal gigantic scratch marks, over which the water-cut ravines ran zigzag down the slope. These scratch marks, were the ten thousand year old footprints of a gigantic glacier that ploughed and ground its way through this land, carrying huge boulders, rocks and other material that caused those horizontal markings on the rock face. Those tell tale footprints of the passing glacier has survived the ten thousand or so years, and remains visible primarily because soil and trees have not hidden them from view.
Water has done its work over it, cutting all those vertical channels over the horizontal scratches. And trees have grown where soil collected at the depths of those channels.

I am not a geologist, and never studied the subject except for reading a book that Gautam Sen had given me, written by a French Geologist, some fifteen years ago while I lived in Florida.

And yet, here I was – mesmerized by a geologic text book facing me through a simple rock face of a hill by a quiet stretch of highway heading west towards Vancouver.

Wanted to speak with Debal Deb

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What kind of a topic heading is that ?
Well, I don’t know what kind – except that it is what came to mind, with a fresh cup of hot instant coffee Sunday Morning, after having mopped the kitchen table. I do not feel too good this weekend because I did not go outdoors and walk about in the reeds, and did not train my binocular on far off mountains. It does not feel nice if household chores take precedence over nature. But then, nature can survive without me. In fact, nature does survive pretty well without human interference. But the kitchen table had dried stains of old coffee, specks of marmalade, dried butter, crumbs of bread, and other associated tidbits. It needed cleaning. The trouble is, whenever I engage in some household chores, my lower back starts aching after a while. Somehow, when I am carting a heavy lens on a big camera, mounted on a heavier tripod, across uneven grounds and through bushes, for hours on end with very little respite – that same back seems not to be bothering me at all. I wonder if the welfare of my lower vertebrates are somehow linked to the subconscious wishes of my brain. I am not even sure which half of the brain is involved in encouraging me to spend time outdoors with my camera.
Anyhow, mopping done, I started another household chore – converting old DVDs into digital files in hard drives, so the physical disk and its plastic jacket can be retired out of my study and hopefully out of the house. It takes up space and its no more convenient to run a  dvd player to see movies.
Anyone heard of iTunes store and netflix ?
But that’s not a proper chore – you click a few buttons and then the computer does its thing without needing further help from you. You are free to do some more mopping, or finding those dirty trousers that are tucked in this or that corner, and take them downstairs to the laundry bag. Well, I do not take clothes downstairs per se. I toss them from upstairs into the air, and curvature of space does the rest. This curvature is not seen easily, but felt – in the form of gravitational pull between two objects that have mass. The earth pulls my dirty trouser down towards the centre of the planet, and my trouser tries to pull the planet up to meet it in mid air. But since the relative mass of the planet is a tad more than that of the trouser, the earth manages to pull the trouser proportionately more down. The tiny amount of upward motion of the planet, is so small, that folks standing on its surface, and moving up and down with it, do not notice. Folks do notice heavier unplanned motions of the planet, but usually recognize them as earth-quakes or being attacked by enemy bombers and such – most unpleasant turn of events that have little to do with my dirty trousers.
So, the trouser lands on the carpet on the ground floor near the entrance door. I descend through the stairs – because I cannot do what the trouser can, i.e. Meeting planet earth in mid air, without the selfsame lower back vertebrae and other parts of the body facing some serious damage.
I usually pick the dirty clothing off the carpet and move sideways about four meters into the passage where we have the washer and the dryer. We do not share it with our basement tenant – they have their own.
But the point is – the lower spine gives an indirect indication that I should consider sitting down at the dining table with a hot cup of coffee and do something less strenuous and more stimulating, for a short while at least.
And thats when I thought about how to arrange a telephone talk event with Debal Deb, the social activist that I am just beginning to fully appreciate, as I read more about his activity in India, as well as read his book. I should cover those issues properly on future blogs, perhaps. Meanwhile, I was looking for an opportunity to speak with him. I wanted Madhusree Mukherjee to sort of co-ordinate it on the phone, she in Germany, me in Canada and Debal in India.
But, man proposes, woman disposes. Madhusree is on her way to India for a vacation. Debal has been silent on this issue.
And so, here I am, dirty trouser tucked away in the laundry bag, a large cup of hot instant coffee next to me, sitting at the dining table with the mac pro notebook open, writing yet another blog, where the subject heading has only circumstantial reference in an otherwise strange blog.

Tonu