He had started writing the new blog on Friday. But, after going through six pages – he junked the whole lot, not even keeping a copy of it. The software he was using to write it all – pages from Apple, did have a habit of making backups. But he often trashed various versions of backups of an article that the software would create, leaving only the final copy. Not having any professional association with other writers, he did not know if this was a good habit or not. He himself did not miss the texts he had trashed. It had always been easy for him to type in new text, or jot down new feelings, and observations. Writing was never a problem, in either of the two main languages he used – English and Bengali. The problem was spelling, where he was known to make mistakes at times. More importantly, the problem was that he did not relish proof reading, and often sent out texts that had mistakes, both in spelling or in grammar.
His other issue was, he thought, his sentence construction. He seemed to be a bit long winded in that area. Its just the way his brain worked. One side of it encouraged him to construct rather long sentences. The other, told him to keep it simple. He knew he was writing from two reasons. One was to express his thoughts, and to have a creative outlet in that field. The other was to keep his writings tidied so that a reader might find in interesting to read.
Proof reading was a good habit that he sorely needed to develop.
Meanwhile, he was enjoying a new blog he had created, using his own domain name. It was www.tonu.org. He used WordPress, and he was already liking it a lot. One of the plugins or widgets allowed him to see which parts of the world people were reading his blog from. It had a world map, and tiny showed blue stars on it with name of the places where folks the readers were.
That was where he found the name of the place – Othello.
He did not know such a place existed in the US. But apparently, it was close to his own home, just across the border in USA and a bit to the east, or inland.
He guessed the name was derived from the famous Shakespearian play of the same name. What the link was between that play and the place in USA, he did not know.
But it fired his imagination anyway. Shakespeare, so long ago, had touched upon a rather sensitive issue – interracial love, passion and jealousy, on the play. He thought it was rather bold of him to do so. He personally had another version of it etched in his memory. That was a Bengali cinema he had seen in his teenage years, that depicted a famous pair of Bengali screen actor and actress playing out that scene in a college play. The man was supposed to be a high cast Brahmin boy studying medicine. The girl was recognized as a white girl of an English father. The boy had make up to look like an African, which crinkled hair and boot polish black paint on his face. The girl looked virginal in white. The short act proved powerful in the movie, perhaps planting a seed in the heart of the girl for the boy. Life was to take strange turns for them, and the story ends in the middle of the second world war, where the two of them meet up again, in very different circumstances.
The scene had left a powerful impression in his young mind – both in terms of the scope of the original play Othello, as well as the movie itself, perhaps one of the best movies he had ever seen in his native language.
The issue of race had been in his mind from his childhood, partially because he had a questioning mind and the scientific background of race was never quite clearly explained to him. He did read here and there, that race was more of a casual term used by people and not quite substantiated by science.
It took the development of genetic science, and sequencing of the human genome, to better understand the issue. He was no expert, but natural curiosity had prompted him to study more of it. Eventually, he even landed his own tissues samples for professional analysis to trace his ancestry through eons of time, by famous gene research firms.
Various issues had become clear to him, by a combination of sources. It is now more or less acknowledged in the scientific world, that the entire human population, despite differences in appearance based on our perception of race and tribe, are way too similar, compared to even our close genetic relatives such as Chimpanzee and other apes. Humans are far larger in number and far more widespread than any of the great apes. By that count, it would perhaps have been more natural for humans to show greater genetic diversity than the apes. But as scientists also check genes of the great apes and compare them to humans, the truth turns out to be the opposite. In short, there was some kind of a genetic bottle neck in the evolutionary past of humans, whereby a very small segment of humanity, bearing a small slice of the gene pool, survived, and all others perished. Subsequently, it is the descendants of this small slice of humans occupied the whole planet and diversified into so many sizes, shapes and colors. But, under the skin, humans were remarkably identical, from the evolutionary point of view.
And so, the differences in skin color, body shape and facial features, are all very recent. Not only that, he now know, from the analysis of his genes for maternal as well as paternal ancestry – he was as much a product of India, as from almost any other part of the planet. His ancestry was so checkered that depending on which time frame he looked, his ancestors, or their cousins, could have been an African, a middle eastern, a European, a Chinese, or an tribals in Eurasia, north America or Australasia.
He had read quite a few books on archaeology, geology, paleoanthropology, paleontology, genealogy and what have you, to quench an unquenchable thirst to know where he came from. He remembered having read the about the discovery of the near complete skeleton of ‘Lucy’ by the team under Donal Johanson, and reading several books on this early hominid, along with discoveries by the Leaky family, and so many others, from Africa as well as Asia and southern Europe. The book on Lucy profoundly affected him, and he never forgot the name given to that species – Australopithecus Afarensis. Those discoveries proved, once and for all, that our ancestors first became fully bipedal, and freed their hands for jobs other than locomotion, before the brain started expanding. Language developed later, and transformed the brainy creature into an unbeatable social group. Man, thus, stepped past a threshold and started controlling the biosphere around it, perhaps ushering in its own eventual demise by over taxing the planet that nurtured it.
Man’s greatest achievements and longest lasting legacy,  might be invention of junk, destruction of habitat and genocide of various species of living creatures.
The front bell rang. That should be the couple that wished to check their basement suite for rent.
He drained his coffee and prepared to go down to meet the potential tenants, his thoughts going back to the reader in a place apparently named Othello, in USA.