Monthly Archives: March 2012

India’s greedy social climbing brainy youths

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Debal Deb (https://www.facebook.com/debaldeb01) is a fantastic character. I can say that, although I never me the man. I came to know of him through Madhusree Mukherjee, who herself is no pushover.

I have been trying to find an opportunity to interview him on the phone for a podcast, but he is a busy man, and I am a working man and we are half a world apart in our clocks. So we have not managed it yet.

Meanwhile, I come to know of his posts as I befriended him in Facebook. One of the reasons I have not quit Facebook completely, is that people like Debal are not around, as far as I know, on google + or other places.

Anyhow, I find I share many of his views about the root of some of the social evils of our time, and share some of his frustration about the general apathy of India’s upwardly mobile youth. Living abroad for so long, I have also come to be frustrated by the same apathy that afflicts the earlier generation of expatriate Indians that have succeeded in finding a cozier niche for themselves in the west. At a professional level, they are all mostly successful and able to compete with the rest. But on the level of humanism, their apathy has been made glaringly clear to me in the past few years. I too was part of the scene myself. But, like all thinking people, we are apt to evolve with time, and be influenced occasionally by chance encounters that force us to peek outside of our comfort bubble.

I was influenced by a chance encounter with the daughter of a dead cousin brother. The cousin was from India. The wife was American. The daughter lived in a permaculture commune in California. She, her mother, and her baby came to spend a few days with us in Vancouver. That triggered a cascade of events. She linked me up with other Indians that were trying to do something meaningful in their spare time in helping out India through more sustainable projects as well as participating in many events that related not just to India, but to all people everywhere. She had a personality that was so different from the run of the mill Yuppy that it was like a breath of fresh air going through my house and my life. Anyhow, that link she provided helped me connect with a wider world of people. And so the story goes.

Now, back to Debal Deb – He wrote something that I found very apt and worth sharing, within Facebook. It attracted some good feedback, which resulted in more observations from people within my Facebook circle of friends. Debal Deb, in his busy life, managed to notice some of these points, and came back to respond.

The thread became important enough, in my mind, to deserve a more permanent spot.

I am going to copy it here, as a special blog post – including comments from others. I shall inform them of this decision within that thread itself.

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I wish our bloated Indian greedy youth, drunk with their corporate jobs, satisfied with their high salaries and perks, stop once to think about what their employer does to the farmers and the natural world, and consider doing something like this! That would be genuine patriotic act – more than watching Amir Khan on “Mangal Pandey” and “Lagaan”.
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Worth sharing.

Chirajyoti Deb, Chaitali Mitra and Nabanita Banerjee like this.

Ravi Dwivedi shared Debal Deb‘s status update.

Basu Tapas Very true indeed, they do not have the intelligence or far visions…

Sandeep Shukla One question: those Europeans who declined job offers from Dow etc..why did they. Even interview with those companies? The companies can’t be offering jobs unless they applied! Does that mean that they would have taken these job had better alternatives not come up?

Priyadarshi Datta It is not that. Sure money is great and making it is even better. Balance comes with old money. The next generation and so will the next. Hope it is not too late by then. Dwarakanath made money, son Debendranath spent it grandson, Rabindranath was the product of old money. So with the grandons of Rockefella. Hemendranath Datta lost it in one generation and the rest was struggle.

Tony Mitra

You have your unique way of looking at the world, Priyadarshi.
I might opine that the old money of Dwarkanath, or rather, of the early generations of the “Thakur” clan of Jorasanko area, were “new money” of the time when the British were establishing a permanent base in Bengal.
I would also suspect that this new money came at the expense of the poor Indians – in short, the new rich Indian class emerged as collaborators of the British, helping them establish a stronger foothold on the subcontinent.
Along with all that, came education and eventually, a sense of social justice. Thence, the generation of Dwarkanath Tagore, having been born into affluence and not having to spend all waking hours in a struggle to feed his family, those who were born in progressive families and with the right questioning mind could engage in issues of social relevance, and a sense of Bengali-ness – expanded as a part of Indian-ness, came up. Folks got engaged in raising awareness of the fact that they were not independent, and the British were, ultimately, unfair to the average Indian so that an Englishman on average to enjoy a higher lifestyle. It took a while to filter all this in, and eventually different people of the next generation addressed it in different ways – Meghnad Saha, or Surya Sen, or Gandhi, Tagore, or Aurobindo, Annie Bessant, Charles Andrews, or Subhash Bose – each of them addressed it in his own way, and not all of them were born Indians.
But, if you go further back – those that were rich and powerful even before the British arrived, themselves were collaborators of the ruling Mughal emperor, and were in turn selling the country for the benefit of the ruler, thus enriching himself in commission. The main difference might be that under the Mughal rule, a social mass consciousness of Indian-ness did not arise, perhaps because the Mughals were not filtering money out of India to enrich a foreign nation, which the British did. Or perhaps the reason was something else.Anyhow, Rabindranath Tagore was partly the genes and intellect he inherited, partly the influence he was under as a growing child in Jorasanko under intense nationalistic flavor of thetime and efforts at nation and society building efforts. Also, his world view was influenced by the extensive personal exchanges he had in his tours across the world in all continents, and his personal contact with the famous folks of the time, from writers and intellectuals, to politicians, religious heads, scientists and social reformers.
Rabindranath Tagore was influenced by many many factors.Todays upwardly mobile social climbers that came out of good colleges and, for example, work for exploitative corporations – are just a new version of the old “collaborator” class.The difference is – these kids grew up mostly in todays middle class families. These families, at least in India, got into the middle class slot only in the last two generations, more or less.
Goes to show – our middle class is probably an uncaring, selfish and blind class that helps nurture selfish individuals that will collaborate with institutions that hurt his nation – and yet live to brag about it.This topic is way too complex – but its good to air out views and think about it. I feel thankful that, just like lotus grows in filthy ponds, the earlier affluent generations did create Gandhi and Tagore and the rest of the reformers, same as this generation has created the Vandana Shiva, the Ravi Kuchimanchi and so many others, including Debal Deb.Whoops – long post.
Cheers.
Subin Das

Tonu, do you think you are going to influence present generation with your talks? If done; they are just going to turn around and say,” What about you all?” How and why did you do what you have done to achieve your goals? Now that all of you have settled to a comfortable life style with lots to spare, why ask us to sacrifice and rally for a cause which does not harm their means and ways to glory? Isn’t it we who should take some blame for such deplorable state which our younger generation have come to? Actually; it’s high time that we look back and think seriously what damages we have done to them, by our own activities.
Tony Mitra Subin.. I fault it not just to ourselves – but at our Bengali middle class mentality that started about a century ago.
Tony Mitra

A century ago, this was not perhaps a hot topic, but today, with awareness rising, there is not enough excuse for ignoring these issues. As to my generation – they are the biggest disappointment. There is one thing to say about the younger generation though – the older generation is going to die. The younger one will be left holding the basket. So, they will not have the luxury that their forefathers had, of kicking the can down the line. The shit is going to be falling on them.
Debal Deb

Tonu, you have very precisely painted the broad difference between the early middle class youth and today’s middle class. A significant section of the early middle-class youth was socially conscious, introspective, and participated, even took a lead role in, social reforms. In contrast, today’s “educated” and “enlightened” middle class don’t give a dam for the development refugees/ farmers’ suicides/ dowry deaths/ global warming/ industrial crimes … as long as their comfort level is not affected, and are only interested in new models of cell phones with 12 functions, of SUVs, of AC fittings in the flat, … and yes, skin creams to look fairer and fairer!
In response to Subin Das’s very apt point: Bribes and corruption were all the time – from the age of Mahabharata. But do we remember anyone of our generation who considered taking or giving bribes to ethically neutral? Those who gave or received bribes wanted to conceal the fact, in shame. Today, it’s a fact of life. I (and surely all of us) have seen many young men pressuring their parents to gather money in order to pay “facilitation money” to ensure his employment in a govt. job, and then preparing for “recovering” that money (and more) from the “clients” of the office, soon after getting the placement. “Kickbacks” and “facilitation money” are simple steps to one’s career building, and nobody cares to waste time in compunction or guilt. [Bribing is not confined to money alone, and may include renting out one’s girl friend, too, to please “the boss”.] In our generation people hated to marry their daughters to a policeman. Today matrimonial columns advertise “extra income” over salaries of the suitor.
In 2001, I was in California when 9/11 happened. I witnessed how thousands of American youth organised public seminars, rallies, demonstrations, street lectures, street shows etc. to denounce the Iraq war and accused the US govt for waging unjust wars in different parts of the world. University campuses at Berkeley, Santa Cruz, Santa Barbara, and Davis became hot with students’ protests, and many professors participated too. In 2009, I witnessed, in Berkeley and other campuses of UC, massive student protests against privatisation of education and fee hike. The govt had to back out. In both these years, there was hardly any noticeable protest on those (and other) issues from the youth in India – especially eastern India. Rather, a majority of the middle-class youth accepted the moral superiority of the US to attack Iraq. Coke and Monsanto, to them are angel saviours of Indian uncivilsation.
One of my good friend, Saptarshi Biswas once served in Monsanto Co., (left some 4 years back), but never cared to know about the company’s crimes in India and other countries. He immersed himself rather in poetry (which I am not belittling, of course) thoughout his tenure with the company. He represents a highly intelligent young man, well versed in literature and information technology, but why did he not feel interested to know the company’s deeds, while the anti-Monsanto movement was simmering all over the world, and posted regularly on the Net? That’s Zeitgeist.
Debal Deb

‎@Sandeep Shukla: The individuals I cited – all are very well accomplished biotechnologists. Three of them were offered job by Syngenta and Monsanto Co. Two more, from Italy, were interviewed and offered jobs, but when they discovered the company’s profile, relinquished the offer (with no “better alternatives” in sight). I also cited a technologist from USA who got placement at Strategic Defence Intiative (SDI) = “Star War” project, but quit soon after she leafrned the objective of the project.
I understand quitting job for Indians always implies shifting for a better opportunity – unrelated to ethics or ideals. When I myself did the same in 1996, most people believed (some still do) that I got a better job in terms of higher emoluments & perks. This is the mindset I was referring to, in contrast with the youth in the West, who stormed in Genoa, Seattle and Cancun; who rose against Monsanto in Germany and France; who demanded closure of all nuke plants in France and Italy; who gathered in Barcelona to demand economic DeGrowth; who have abandoned techno-urban comforts and built sustainable communities in US west coast, Italy, Spain, Greece, Mexico… And I am a first-hand witness to all these movements led primarily by the youth. As a concerned Indian citizen, I always wonder: When will WE ever learn?
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Tony Mitra ‎Debal Deb – reading posts like this makes my day.

Reflections on an old Alumni meeting of my school

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Originally posted on Thurseday, February 12th, 2009

I decided to bring over some of my old posts sprinkled over the net here and there. One source is the iWeb blog site with Apple’s software and web space called শান্তিনিকেতনের খাতা (Santiniketaner Khata), which means diary from Santiniketan. Santiniketan, is my birth place. That is were I went to school. But the place is more than just that. It was where Rabindranath Tagore tried to make his dream come true, and leave his creative software. It was software that was designed to help future mankind – not just in and around Santiniketan, but around the world, along a path that would have been more creative, congenial, and harmonious for the people and the planet. Tagore had created a lot of poetry and literature, for which he was recognized. But the software was his best creation, and his best gift to mankind.

Unfortunately, the software today is virus afflicted and dying.

Some of my writings on Santiniketan, my birth place where I had five generations of exchange, starting with Tagore himself bringing one of my ancestors to the place to help in its inception and construction.

Its a sad story.

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Bubla has an expressive face, I came to the conclusion, after having seen a number of his pictures in my collection from the last Poush Mela. Faces float across our screen as I flip through my photo folder labelled “Santiniketan 08-12”.

I sometimes go back to a handful of these pictures and look at them again. They bring a smile. That expression of Uma di, intently listening to Somenda speak at the Asramik Sangha, or Baka da, with his sun glasses, that remind me of the movie “of all the President’s men”.

Then there is Bubla with his wiinter cap, and the wild haired Benuda. They all represent faces, and bring back the flavor, of Santiniketan. Benuda, at certain angles, remind me of his father, Bodo Daktar babu. I remember running about on our bed at Ratan Palli, and bodo Daktar babu trying to catch me. The issue was some vaccination, which I was unwilling to take, and he was determined to administer.

It was mid morning in Amra Kunja. The sun filtered through the canopy and struck the ground at a slant, coming from the north east. There were gigantic looking box shape speakers erected all around us.

They looked odd and intrusive, loud and somehow faintly offensive. They tried to pull me away from the Amra Kunja, back into the mechanical and noisy world that I had hoped to leave behind, to attend the Asramik Sabha. as the congregation was small, and every one was close to each other,

I wondered if there was a need for those massive speakers.

I remember Alo di and a few others mention that some of the seniors had a hearing problem, and wondered if some

kind of speaker system could also be used during the general discussion. It did occur to me that, instead of speakers, one might consider providing some of the new generation hearing aid devices, where the microphone is a small hand held piece of plastic the size of a box of matches, with matching radio operated speakers that fit the ears of individual listeners that need them.

This would make them unobtrusive, and same time spare the others from feeling an oppressive presence of huge speakers and the corresponding noise. In the adjacent ground, more loud speakers boomed, and we were forced to hear the preparations for the Alumni Association meeting. Somehow, I could not bring myself to appreciate the loud speakers.

Well, I should write up some more in the next few days… even include some of the topics of discussion. But then, I already put all that up, from the recording, on a Podcast. But, as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words.

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Well, that was what I had written in Fab 2009 about a meeting in December 2008. But, in this case neither a picture is worth a thousand words, not any number of words is worth anything.
The slow decline of Tagore’s influence can be seen from observing the effectiveness of meetings such as these.
The Alumni of the University, that are alive today, should perhaps go over a hundred thousand individuals. But the number of people that attended were barely thirty. Even the number of ex-students living or present in Santiniketan would have been several times larger than the attendees.
So, first of all – the group hardly represents the ex-students. More importantly, it does not seem to hold much of an attraction in the minds of the ex-students. It might be here that its greatest failure lies.
But that is not all. This meeting is supposed to be serious, to chalk out discuss what the alumni did in the previous year and what it might do in the year ahead. NO serious analysis was made of what was to be the original purpose of this Alumni association, and if that purpose was being fulfilled. There was no serious discussion of what should now be the real charter of the group. The name of the group was Asramik Sangha, or an association of people that are Asramiks, meaning people who had spent time in the Asram – i.e. exstudents. It could, in essence also include teachers and others that spent time in the Asram – but I shall not get into such finer points.
There were discussions of parallel association, called in fact the Alumni Association – an English name for basically the same thing. This was required by the Government of India where it funded any University. The University was to have this association and it was to elect members annually. And the executive board of the University, should have two elected members from this Alumni Association. The original “Asramik Sangha” created by Tagore himself at a time when the country was ruled by the British and there was no funding by any Government. The new “Alumni Association” was a requirement by the Government when it decided to fund the University, a few years after India got independence and a decade after Tagore’s death.
The two parallel bodies where to be merged into one. That did not happen.
Its a long story.
But, the main thing is – whatever was discussed in this miniature meeting of the Asramik Sangha, nothing much came out of it. Most of the participants were old folks. Some have passed away. The rest mostly do not remember what was discussed. There is no follow up of any kind. We do not receive any notice or a request or any other kind of information regarding any kind of follow up.
These meetings are self contained cocoons that, like fossilized bones, exist only as a reminder of a past existence, but otherwise having no influence on the present or the future.
Asramik Sangha has become an annual get together place for a few old folks reminiscing about the good old days that are fast vanishing.
It already behaves like a fossil.

Whose fault is it – (Tagore’s fading influence)

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(Moved from an older blog of the past)

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 2009

Whose fault is it ?

No one in sane mind would dispute the fact that Visva-Bharati has fallen from grace and is not living upto expectation of any kind, past or future.

There are long stories, doing back fifty or more years, on who did what and when, and how this or that factor contributed to the future malady of the University. Looking through all that, it is not difficult to get mired in it and end up with a headache, and a feeling of disillusionment, a defeatist view that nothing can really turn the clock, or bring a change for the better.

While most of the pessimism might be placed on some ground reality, it still might be worth thinking outside the box, and trying to see whose fault it might be. This is not necessarily for the purpose of pointing fingers, but rather, to see if change can be brought, for the better, even at this late stage.

First, who are, or should have been, the stake holders? We know a few – those that are inside Visva-Bharati. The list starts with the VC. But his is a temporary job – lasts for five years. Then there are the Students – who might stay for 2 or three years, and in some cases, if we include the school, as much as ten or fifteen, depending on where one starts and ends. Then comes the workers and their multiple unions, albeit politicized.

Next comes the Government, which is the custodian, and the financier, of the University.

Lastly, there is the vast diaspora of Alumni, literally spread around the Globe.

There is a sixth party – the citizens of India, whose tax money the Govt doles out so generously to the University. But I shall for now discount the 6th group – they have many items on their plate, and the University might be virtually invisible in their list, when they go to vote.

So, taking the five groups : VC, Students, Workers, Govt, and Alumni, it is this last group, the Alumni that shows up as the oddest one. This is one entity that is wholly divorced from the affairs of the University – and yet, it is this group that Rabindranath liked to most depend on, in order to protect the University. There is a reason – this is the only group that does not, or should not, have any vested, selfish, interest.

And, this is the group, in my eyes, that has failed Rabindranath, and the University, most spectacularly.

Mind it, it is not that the Alumni are all insignificant people, barely eking out an existence, too busy keeping body and soul together, and in no position to think of grander issues like their alma mater. Quite the contrary. A vast number of them are highly educated and professionally successful. They are spread around India and around the world. Many have acquired foreign passports, as citizens of nations in Europe, North America, Australia, Japan, etc. Some are well known locally and even globally.

And yet, this is the most disorganized, disunited and disinterested group among the five stake holders of the University.

Why is it so ?

 Frankly, I do not know. A lot of them maintain a cursory interest in Santiniketan, and the University. Many of them attend to cultural functions here and there, listen to renditions of Tagore songs and dance drama. Some make a career out of it. And in spite of that, in the last fifty odd years, there has never been a ground swell, a movement, to get the Alumni diaspora under a single umbrella, with a specific agenda, to try to give something back to their Alma Mater, to repay a part of their debt, and, most importantly, be a serious stake holder for Visva-Bharati.

So, today, among thousands of news reports, analysis, and endless rounds of discussions on what is the matter with Visva Bharati, and how and why it has become what it is today – the Alumni shows solidarity with the Union leaders of the University in one critical sphere – its refusal to analyze itself, before judging others.

Its not that effort has not been made a few times to appeal to the Alumni to join hands, and decide what we can do, or give, instead of passing judgment and comment on others. But, typically, while such appeals might stir an unconnected third party – the diaspora of Alumni, 99 out of 100, would shun such appeals.

Why ?

It is high time when this critical group that has thus escapes scrutiny, be placed under the microscope.

This group is the biggest failure, the biggest shame, in the history of the University. And it happily remains invisible – while willingly passing high judgments on all others.

It is perhaps just as well that Tagore was cremated and not buried. He would have had a restless stay, having to turn in his grave so often, for the misguided faith he had placed on the ex-students of the University.

For the last 25 years, being involved as I have been with ISO 9000 Quality Assurance system, and with developing tools for self-analysis systems based on searching for the root-causes of problems in order that a firm might be able to self-regulate itself for perpetual and incremental improvement in its function and its operating process, so that the ultimate product can stand the competition and be counted as a quality product – I have tried to think things through for the past two years, about Visva-Bharati. And hundred times out of hundred, I come back to the same issue in the root-cause analysis, and in thinking through a road map for the betterment of the University, from the stand point of us, those that are not working for the University. Every time, without fail, the ball ends up in our court – and the Alumni are identified as the first and most critical group that should have, from our perspective, been engaged, been unified, and been proactive. And we have not.

The first step in all this would have been to get the Alumni together under one umbrella, and instill the first lesson in the process of self-assessment – learning what this group as a stake holder could potentially do, and what is has so far done.

One does not need to be certified as a lead auditor for ISO 9000, or for that matter, to have high level of experience in root-cause analysis. After all, these systems were thought through by ordinary people, using nothing more than a bit of common sense, and unbiased analytical thought. It was astute of Rabindranath, that he had come to the same conclusion, long before ISO 9000 was born, that the most important stake holder for the Asram should be the ex-students.

And we failed him. And we continue to fail him. And we continue to waste time, judging others.

Sure, we engage in some token activity, in a path of continuously diminishing returns, where more and more effort produces less and less significant return, and bring no appreciable change for the better. We all know, that the path so far pursued is a slippery slope going downhill.

 And still – the ex-students continue to fail, and continue to feel good about themselves.

Sorry, Gurudev – I am truly, genuinely, sorry.

Tonu

Living in a ten percent world

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News should be a lot easier to get today from mass communication, multiple channels on the TV and endless sources on the internet. Right? Wrong.
It has never been more difficult.
TV is the last place I can find meaningful news these days. News channels are not exactly news channels – they are corporate owned TV channels designed to get a generation of potential couch potatoes hooked to it so the channel gets higher ratings, and therefore, higher revenue through advertisements of insignificant junk. The economic driving force – the prime mover – is junk goods that the industry aims to dump on the drugged public. That is what drives most channels including the news channels. They do not search out news that should be relevant for humans, or the planet. They manufacture news when needed, only to fuel “hot topics” of useless trivia.

The selfish gene – by Richard Dawkins

I stopped watching TV a long time ago. A movie, of whichever country, could be somewhat better. It does not pretend to give you news and it does not contain the irritating insertion of unwanted advertisements, and it provides a make belief feel good story.

But that is only for entertainment and not for acquiring news. Why do I need news in the first place? I need it because, at least to me, it feels important to be aware of what is going on around me in this universe. I feel connected when I can relate to the events that happens around, which may affect not just my life, but even the life of other humans, other vertebrates, other multi-cellular organisms, or the landscape or the biosphere. I am part of the whole. Therefore, I wish to know about the whole.

So, if one does not watch TV any more, what then?
Newspapers ? Forget it.
The days of independent newspapers are over. All the major papers across the nation and across the continents are owned by a handful of corporations. News through the newspaper is centrally controlled by profit generating market oriented thinking. News is not doled out to educate the reader. It is a commodity sold to make profit. If the news sells, it is printable. If it does not sell, it is not news.

Therefore, in Canada, the disenfranchisement of the African bushman tribe, and their decline, starvation and possible extinction is not a salable news. But, how fat an average American junk food eating woman is, is a salable news.

Or, how Israel is being threatened by Iranian designs of possibly wanting to develop a nuclear deterrent of their own, and therefore why Iran is asking to be bombed – is salable news.

Why Canadians continue to go to Mexico for vacation, while there is so much of violence and illegal drug dealing, is salable news.

Try to find out an analysis of the plight of the blackfeet Indians straddling USA and Canada, or the rate at which first nation young women are being lured into substance abuse – you will have a hard time finding this news on local papers. More importantly, you will not find average Canadians getting excited and raising this topic to a major national level debate. A first nation teenage mother selling its baby in order to buy the next round of drug is not popular news. Therefore, this news does not sell. Therefore, it is absent from newspapers.

Take the current crop of news on the mainstream media. The list may go like this:

More hiring in USA but unemployed rate remains unchanged. This is typical junk news and irrelevant. There is no economic recovery. The root cause of the economic meltdown is never discussed seriously. Therefore, what constitutes a meaningful step towards correcting the economic downturn is left vague. And then this kind of snippet news is fed like daily snacks to a group of fish in an aquarium.
A to Z guide to March madness – all about college basketball. Hardly an earth shattering news – but the news outlet decides to call it March madness

A documentary detailing the brutality of Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony has gone viral on social media (independent or alternative news circles). It has 50 million hits in a few days. It has increased groundswell of public awareness and possible pressure for Government involvement in his capture. A month ago, nobody knew of Joseph Kony. Today, he may be among the most wanted man. This is a good example of news coming to mainstream through the back door – after everybody already knows about it and after it has already become a major public debate.

Europe welcomes huge Greek debt deal – another piece of junk news that does not tackle root issues, and only offers bogus surface views.

High profile attorney calls for prosecution of Rush Limbaugh – another example of junk news.

Jennifer Aniston wears leather leggings for Joe Leno – huh ?

So, where does one go?

Clearly, the choices, at the moment, seem to be what is known as alternate sources. Some call it counter-current. I suppose it means counter to the current trend.
Unfortunately, there may not be a single source that covers relevant topics of all kinds from all corners. One needs to keep track of a number of sources – web sites that cater to single items – for example the plight of some indigenous people somewhere, or one organization engaged in one social activity at one location.
There may be a million such small sources. They are not even listed properly in one location and circulated widely. One may never even know of the existence of one such source tucked away somewhere.
One way to describe the current state of affairs may be – information overload.
Our senses are dulled by repeated bombardment of junk news from all directions. The brain feels stuffed by it. We feel sated.  Our appetite for searching out new news is therefore kept perpetually at a reduced level. We are living not just on junk food, but also on junk news.

Geology of British Columbia

If a person is still desirous of finding independent real news, one can of course search through alternate channels, such as google search. Unfortunately, even that might be filtering some of the news out, due to pressure from one authority or another. Recently, even the Government of India summoned google and Facebook for example, to demand that they filter out what the Government perceives as undue criticism of its conduct. The Government probably calls them unfair and derogatory remarks by individuals. You might call them free speech. Add to all this the fact that ‘terrorism’ looms large in our collective psyche, thanks to incessant harping of this issue over the last decade, as if man only invented terrorism in the year 2002 and before that, only honey and milk was falling from the skyBut, going back to the topic – where can you search out proper news? There may not be any easy solution any more. But there are alternatives.
One could begin to search out like minded folks as a start, and try to hang out with them, in real life, as well as virtually. They might lead you to the water. There are hangouts around, and most are open to public. Some are simply blogs which you can read and comment on. Some are hangouts you create and invite like minded folks to join in. Then there are NGOs, or non-Government organizations that are engaged in good work.
I picked up Vandana Shiva’s case that way, and ended up speaking with her once on her work. I came to know Association of India’s Development that way. I came to know of Madhusree Mukherjee because her book on Churchill was available as an audio book. I spoke with her, and through her, I learned about Debal Deb and Felix Padel.
I searched out themes and subjects within google plus and begin to follow interesting people that post there on say, anthropology, climate change, or sustainability. Sometimes I comment on some of their posts. Sometimes, they add me to their circle. Gradually, you create an ambience around with content of your own choice. You create a newsfield that filters out junk and lets in the type of information you consider worthwhile.

Genome – by Matt Ridley

So, what are the results, in my particular lifeWell, on a scale of one to hundred, if I have a hundred persons in my virtual world as friends, I still have ninety that are acquaintances from personal contact. They include people I know from childhood or met up somewhere and stuck a friendship at that time. They include relatives. They moved from my real world, to my virtual one.
But this ninety percent do not supply me with news or activity that so attracts me. They do not really share my interest, nor my world view. This is where the remaining ten percent comes in.
In a way, my world of news could still be awash with people that do not stimulus to my crave for information. They are there to anchor me to my physical past and to send personal tidbits time to time – like news about a relative getting married.
It is the rest ten percent that provide the chemistry and the wavelength in the information that quenches my virtual thirst. As to inspiration, this ten percent is also a source, but not the only source. There are more sources of inspiration than just people on my social network. Writers that wrote books that enlighten and inspire me are one. People that speak on U tube or podcast, or  write blogs, or articles on magazines, and still others. People I might meet by chance somewhere who may not be well known, but whose perception, observation or comments profoundly affect me – are the random sources.
So, in a way, I live among the 90 but search out the 10. It is almost like what Tagore wrote a century ago – সব ঠাঁই মোর ঘর আছে আমি সেই ঘর মরি খুঁজিয়া।
But wait – I did mention eBooks, audio books and the Gutenberg project, did I not? Electronic publishing, bot on written format and spoken one, had exploded on us. Without it, I doubt I would have had the time to read, for example, Madhusree Mukherjee’s book on Churchill’s action and inaction during the Bengal famine of 1943. I would not have been able to reread the extensive writings of Charles Darwin on evolution of the animal kingdom and about the descent of man. I would have left Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Emil Zola, Mark Twain and a lot of others alone simply because I did not have the time.
With audio books, I found something constructive to engage in while driving to work and driving back home, five times a week. Turnover of book I read ( or listened to) every month increased dramatically. And since I was not particularly fond of fiction, my percentage of non-fiction reading shot up. These books, to me, were pure knowledge – or news at a different level.
Take the Indo-Aryan controversy. A very fat recent publication, covering both sides of the argument that Aryan people might not have invaded India four or five thousand years ago but instead might have been of indigenous stock. Covering more than a dozen world renowned experts on the topic, both for and against the Aryan invasion theory, both Indian born and non-Indian – is an exhaustive document meant for the scholars and professionals on the subject, but also for serious amateurs. I have an eBook version of it that takes no space other than my iPad, which also holds a hundred other such books. It is only about 8mm thick, or one third of an inch thick. It helps me refer to specific chapters and articles to it at almost any time, and it includes all the photographs, sketches and other tabulated data, apart form textual matter. I might not have been able to refer to it so often and so easily, had I not the eBook version along with the printed one.
My interest in human genome was perhaps first stoked by George Gamow and Isaac Asimov. But my reading of the book “The Selfish Gene” by Richard Dawkins had a profound effect on my understanding of where I came from. It, along with further interaction with people involved on the subject resulted in me sending my tissue samples to an US Genetic lab for analysis of my own genes to trace paternal and maternal ancestry, which in turn further reshaped by idea of where I came from and how.
More recent audio books on the human genome, covering chapter by chapter explanation of each of the 23 pairs of chromosomes has enriched my understanding of the living blueprint of not just ourselves, but the entire history of the evolving design, from the simplest to the most complex, contained within ourselves.
Online publishing of books through electronic media has changed so much in the last decade that I am even reading a book circulated free of charge about how to publish your own book online without much of a cost and have the option of a potential reader simply buying the eBook by downloading it, or to have a print-on-demand function where the store will only print a book when order for same is received. The guide book that explains all this, in 143 pages – is free of charge. I only read it at lunch breaks in office, and have covered the first 18 pages of it.
I am also reading about the 10,000 year explosion, a book that explains how the advent of civilization and its complexity has reportedly accelerated the genetic code building in humans in the past 10,000 years. How blue eyes, or lactose tolerance, are both a very very recent development in humans, and how that might have come around.

10,000 year explosion, by Cochran & Harpending

Since I got interested in the genetics of the living and the extinct world, I started reading another eBook named The Molecule Hunt – Archaeology and the search for ancient DNA. On my iPad, it is a 723 page document and I am now on page 298.
Take the book on British Columbian Geology. It taught me why Burgess Shale is on top of a mountain in British Columbia and yet provides the worlds best fossil bed for the earliest of life forms that happened in shallow tropical seas at the equator in the Cambrian period, more than 500 million years ago.
All this information, to me, is variations of news. To me news is description of a combination of events that happen at the present and events that happened in the past, providing a connection and a trend. It proves the link between now and then. Projected properly, in could try to predict what might happen in the future.
So, my ten percent world is not quite empty, nor is it drab and uninteresting. It has texture, shape and colors. It is a kaleidoscope that covers the length and breadth of my interests and concerns. It keeps my brain ticking away. As a result of this ten percent, my outlook to life is forever shifting and turning and fine tuning itself. It connects me with the rest of the whole.

It balances out my other 90 percent.

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Suta at the edge of the grasslands

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Suta held her baby at her waist and glanced north. A grey blue sky was interrupted by low hills and the brown earth of an arid land without much vegetation. Ahead of her, to the north east, lay the end of a huge fresh water lake.

By now, Suta knew the difference between a fresh water lake, and the ocean. You could not drink the ocean water, but could eat fish that lived there. A fresh water lake had drinking water she could carry with her.

The planet was gripped by the last of the ice age. It would remain thus for many more centuries.  The time frame was about ten thousand years ago.

To the south of the lake was the beginning of an unending stretch of undulating land of lush grass. It was a scene Suta had never seen before. As far as her eye could see, it was just green and more green.

And the land was teeming with animals. She could see the slow moving dark dots on the savannah. It was that land, and the game, that proved to be such an attraction to her clan. It was into this land that they wished to enter. But it was still a day’s walk away, and downhill.

Twice before they had tried to enter this land of the endless greens, and twice they were attacked by other humans, driving them away. Their clan had lost its old leader and two younger men. One woman and child were abducted, and another child was killed, stricken by a thrown rock.

They were recuperating and regrouping.

They were not hungry, since rabbits could be trapped and firewood was available. They had succeeded in carrying the smoldering fire, they they could cook even when it rained.

But they knew, come winter, food will get scarce and it will get a lot colder. There were not good caves in the area as shelter. They needed to go through the mountain pass into the green savannah, or they would die. There was no going back either, since the land they left behind, was so difficult to live through in the winter. Their only good route lay ahead of them – and roving bands of spear and rock throwing bearded men has successfully repulsed them twice already, with almost no casualty to themselves.

The old leader was dead. He had held the small clan together through many a winter and helped them move through difficult land for the past ten years. But now he lay in the open hill side, his skull cracked open, and how soon the vultures arrived to tear into his flesh. As it grew darker, they kept lit a fire in their camp behind a few boulders and fed wood into It all night, to keep animals away. But she had seen, peering above the boulder, scanning the land downhill from her, how the leopards had come sniffing around at the carcass, as had the hyena and the jackals. Before it got fully dark, there would be little of the man left at the spot where he fell. Animals will have scattered his bones right across the land.

Moy, the younger man still left able bodied, had tried to take control of the group. Suta had lost her man a winter ago, when he got progressively sick and could not keep up with them any more. Their clan left him to die on a hill top. She too had to leave him, or else she would not only die herself, but also cause the death of their child.

Suta had seen enough death to have a clear idea of what it was, and her sense of self preservation was less fierce than her sense to save her bright eyed child. She would do anything, even leave her sick man, or face death herself, just to make sure the child survives.

 She would have liked a son, since she lost her son five winters ago to a lion. But a son had not come so far. She got a daughter instead, bright eyed and always laughing. Suta loved the child. And now, she was without a man.

Moy liked her, but he had his own women, two of them. Suta did not feel like competing with those women. Besides, the two women had four kids between them. Too many. Suta preferred, for now, to stay by herself without a man, and help the clan in preparing food. She knew how to skin an animal and how to roast it without wasting fuel.

Suta had come back into the circle of her clan members, holding the child by her hand. She was five years old. Another five years and she would be grown up enough to fend for herself. Suta could count easily upto ten and more, mostly using one of her fingers  starting with right hand. All her fingers were used up by the time she reached ten. Any number more than that, and she used her toes, though it got difficult to keep track beyond ten. She knew that her child was five, and that in another five she will have grown up. Suta’s task was to see that she stayed alive and healthy till then.

They had skinned two rabbits, two dead birds, some worms and a few shrub berries. Since they still did not have much water, she had roasted the meat and left the worms and seeds to be eaten raw. They had eaten their meal just before dark. Half the clan was sleeping. The others kept guard.

Suta helped her child into her grass bed, and covered her up with the fox skin quilt. She had herself stitched the piece using mostly fox hide, but also pieces of a porcupine and a a river otter that they had found dead when they last crossed a river many moons ago.  She was not just a good cook skinner of animals and a good cook, but also good in stitching leather using a bone needle and rabbit sinew as chord. She was already teaching her child those essential skills.

Her thoughts were jolted by a sudden shrill scream. Everyone jumped up. Suta’s child cried out in terror. They had heard that sound before. Soon, it was accompanied by the thumping noises. Everyone scampered away from the camp and huddled behind the large boulders.

The thumping grew louder, along with the unearthly screams that tore into the night. A herd of Mastodons came charging down from the western highlands – either heading for the lake for a drink or for the lush vegetation on the lake shore. Their dark sloping shapes and the domed heads outlined against the glow on the western horizon. Huge beasts, many times the numbers that Suta could count quickly on the fingers of her hands thumped their way past the huddled clan. They had seen mastodons being hunted by men, but that was in different terrain and in different arrangements – many men against a single sick or old animal. This herd was so large, it would trample an entire clan if annoyed.

The herd thundered past them, screaming and squealing, ignoring the huddling group of less than a dozen humans. There was a commotion at the waters edge. And now it became clear

Moy, who was watching the scene and also the south eastern opening into the green lands farther afield, got an idea. This unearthly noise and intimidation was aimed at driving away other animals at the shallow end of the lake. The giant animals needed the waterfront theatre to itself.

However, this frightening scene is likely to drive away the roving bands of raiders at the mountain pass to the south east. Herd mastodons were known to be wary of humans holding spears – and are as apt to charge at them as other animals by the water.

So, Moy stood atop a boulder and peered into the darkening scene. Sure enough, the herd branched into two. One part fanned out towards the lake end. It was the smaller section of the herd. They scattered all the animals from the water.

The larger group, meanwhile turned southward and charged down the sloping mountain pass into the distant savannah. Moy was now sure. The intension was to clear the approaches to the lake of the spear wielding humans. This would be a good opportunity for sneaking into the grassy plains. It had to be done wile the Mastodons were still present, so the plainsmen would be missing. And it had to be done stealthily, so the Mastodons did not get annoyed by Moy and his team.

He turned to his gang and hissed softly under his breath, signaling an invitation for them to get closer. He would explain it to them, half in simple words and half is sign language. They would bid their time till it was a bit darker, and then slip out and sneak into the grasslands – crouching or slithering on their belly if need be, and they would get to the open grounds past the narrow mountain pass before dawn. Once into the endless open savannah, there would be ample space to lose themselves from attackers. They would also keep their eyes open and pick up any weapon they find on their way through the pass. They needed at least two more good stone tip wooden spears and a few hand axes.

Suta packed her small belongings into the leather pouch and kept her daughter sleeping. The child will be women up at the last moment and the quilt will be packed in. She had her stick, her cutting flint blade and her stone ball. She had the poison seeds in her pouch. She had the dried jerky and smoked rabbit wrapped in leaf, and she had half a gourd of water. She would have liked it full, but there was water, plenty of it, ahead and to the side of them. The lake itself was massive and one would take more than a summer and a winter to walk around it.

She was ready.

—————————–

 Tony sat back and contemplated the scene he had just created. He was not fully satisfied. Firstly, he was tempted to use the wooly mammoth instead of the mastodon. They were related, but the mammoth was, after all, a mammoth – the king of the land. But the problem was, Tony was not sure of its exact range, and the exact time when it went extinct in different parts of the world. It was the most cold adapted of the ice age pachyderms. He knew of the possibility that human hunters might have been at least partly or largely responsible for the extinction of these megafauna.

So, was it normal to expect a large herd of forty or fifty mammoths to be present so far south and out of the ice belt? They were essentially around the present day northern Iran near the southern shores of Caspian Sea. To the east and south of them was the immense stretch of grassy well watered savannah, and the land of a high biomass of vegetation and animals – all kinds of food source for humans. It was to be also a land of relatively high human population, part of which was beginning to experiment with marginal and seasonal agriculture here and there. The  Aurochs was about to be domesticated, into future cattle, as was jungle foul, into chicken.

Tony thought that a Mastodon, even if less dramatic, might be more plausible in the ice free lands, or the early ancestors of todays Asiatic or African elephants. He chose the Mastodon because, again, it had the magic of an extinct animal, never to come back again.

The thing is, he had not studied the topography, geography, flora and fauna of the last phase of the last ice age enough to be able to describe the land, its people, its climate and ints animals well enough to weave a serious story. And yet, he knew, that his ancestors were there – he inherited their faint footsteps through those lands in those times.

And he wanted that woman into the story.

120 pages for a failed civilization

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Tonu had written nearly two hundred pages of the novel, when he got a block. It was less of a writers block, and more of a disenchantment with the lack of a plot. It had the same basic characters – Neil the expatriate Indian living in British Columbia, Mabel the teenage turned twenty something that still nursed a crush on Neil. Karen the neighborly single mother binging up a daughter. Added to this basic mix was Mabel’s relatives, and Neil’s sorrow at losing his parents back in India recently.

But he thought the story was going nowhere without a strong plot, and he could not think of a plot that had some drama.

Neighbourhood snowscape

So, Tonu stopped writing it and took a month to settle himself. That was in December. He spent most of it traveling around in British Columbia, Yukon, Northwest Territories, and south east in Washington state, Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. He covered a lot of land all by himself.

Returning back, he took an hour to select a domain for himself and install the package for a suitable blog software. By the end of the day, he was off and running.

This time, instead of writing continuously on a story, he wrote independent blogs, a few pages at a time. Some of them would relate to the story, or about the writing of the story. Others reflected his thoughts of the moment, about anything.

Within the story, he had brought in a ten thousand year old perceived ancestor, as well as prehistoric animals.

Outside his window, he could see a world that was dusted by snow. It felt good. Perhaps this was the last century one would see snow in these latitudes. Folks were talking about a general 2 degree rise in world temperature, but the change was not supposed to be uniform. Climate uncertainty is one of the suspected outcomes, the other being a rising sea level as more of the ice locked on land as glaciers melt and reach the ocean.

Plastic in the ocean and inside stomachs of dead baby albatrosses generated some discussion on Facebook. He initially suspected that the pictures might be doctored. But as it turned out, they were not. There was a dead zone in the pacific ocean where floating junk collected and turned the open ocean into a plastic garbage dump of humongous size.

He even had a sample of an eBook on his iPad called Plastic Ocean, by Capt Charles Moore with Cassandra Phillips. It described how a sea captain’s chance discovery launched a determined quest to save the oceans. The eBook cost $13.99 on the iTunes book store. Tonu had a free sample version that contained 47 pages only.

Places where floating junk collected are called ocean gyre. It is where surface ocean currents are circular, and may be combined with large wind movements. These seem to help concentrate floating debri. It is in one of these gyres that a plastic oceans is being born, collecting huge quantities of floating junk, thanks to man.

Five major gyres on the planets oceans are the North and South Atlantic, the north and south pacific and the Indian ocean gyre. And it is the north Pacific Gyre, between the American west coast and Asia, that the greatest and growing floating dump exists.

Madhusree had put up a picture of a dead albatross, which I mistook for a gull, with loads of plastic pieces in its stomach. But I had originally thought the picture was doctored. It did not look natural. However, I was mistaken.

The dead bird is a powerful symbol, but the root issue is far more relevant, and dangerous. Plastic has been invented more or less in our generation. And in one generation, it has succeeded it really screwing up the world.

That too, was just one symbol out of many that directly pointed to the unholy influence of man, the creature supposedly created by God after His own image, that turns out to be the destroyer of environment and habitation.

Tonu thought if man the destroyer of environment was a powerful enough theme to provide an angle in the story, with some relevance in the life and times of Neil, the thirty something bachelor from India coping with his hormones in Canada.

He had more sample eBooks on his iPad that awaited his decision if he wanted to purchase them. One such eBook was named “The 10,000 Year Explosion”. This was a book that explored how the last ten millennia might have accelerated human genetic evolution, and gave rise to lactose tolerance, blue eyes, and many other traits by which one could trace one’s ethnic footprints from the recent past, spanning the last ten thousand years when human civilization got off the ground. The book was written by Greg Cochran and Henry Harpending, and cost about 21 dollars. It was not cheap.

Sample eBooks on my iPad

Then there was a book by Robert Sapolsky that he was looking at as well. It was named A Primate’s Memoir.

But books aside, there was this situation with the world, where all news snippets could be woven into a pattern, a quilt with a patchwork, and a general picture would begin to emerge.

Tonu was not a bitter person by nature, neither apathetic. But he often felt that human civilization itself was a self fulfilling evil omen. The very thought of human endeavor, and his “god given” right or penchant for wanting to better his life perpetually, and seeking weekly forgiveness of his sins, was disastrous for the planet and its inhabitants, including fellow humans. Worse, he did not even know what sin was being committed.

This feeling got firmer and firmer in his mind, as time moved on. Even so as he saw that the world was not ready or interested to confront the issue at this level, or to dig deeper to find roots of any issue if that makes supporting their their difficult.

Claiming that there were far too many humans for the planet was a non-starter. Humans had a God given right to multiply, at whatever expense. They constituted the market size, for merchandise and for faith. Everyone wants a growing market, so every vendor can grow in it.

But, if issues reach a precipice, population might begin to adjust itself through series of mass catastrophe, before Gaia had her revenge and the animal kingdom and human civilization reach a sort of sustaining equilibrium with zero market growth year upon year.

That equilibrium, to Tonu, appeared elusive in the short term. There appeared insufficient incentive for man to restrict his greed. And since Man was not homogenous, and one segment was willing to expand its lifestyle at the cost of another, one could in some limited measure, find himself progressing, and thus be interested to continue the status quo, except it was not a status quo but a steady downward slide.

Long term, he had no illusion that he did not have the vision. Looking back into history and comparing the past with the present, he could easily see that people have mostly not been able to predict the future, even short term, that accurately. Every theory is considered ironclad, till it fails. After that, the theory is bust, and another new one replaces it, again based on that failed philosophy of perpetual growth machine.

Most glaring failure of man was to form a global Governance system, even after realizing that the planet was one and humans, despite their differences, were now more a global community that ideally should be subject to the same rule, and same governance across itself. This had not happened, allowing exploitation of one group by another – the same story that started many civilizations ago, and continues to date.

Tonu checked up the page count.

Hmm.. It was past 120 already.

He had typed almost four pages of nothing – not a damn thing. At the end of it, he came back to square one – a fundamental question of where he came from, how, and why. This was a question, he had no doubt, people before him have asked, all the way back to where man had a brain and thought capacity complex enough to ask that question. That ice age ancestor of his likely asked the same question to an un-responsive gray sky over central Asian steppes.

Add to that the realization that not just Tonu, or his ice age ancestor, but the entire human species was wasting time as well as wasting the planet.

So much for writing about a notional Indian trying to settle in Canada.

Where pronghorns meet trilobites

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I looked at list of items before me. There were the pronghorns, feisty little pseudo-antelopes from Montana.
——————————————
“Pronghorns are interesting animals. I heard they do not like jumping fences”, Neil observed. “Instead, they prefer to crouch and go under the lowest opening, the lowest line of a wire fence.”
“Really?”
“Well, I did not see them crossing a fence myself. But I heard from our tour guide in Yellowstone.”
They were glancing through pictures on his iPad, clicked just a few months ago, at the turn of the year, mostly in Montana and British Columbia. A group of pronghorns were browsing the brownish grass on a field lightly covered in snow by the side of the highway. Neil was driving east towards Yellowstone and stopped by the roadside, clicking off a few shots through his window. He usually kept one digital camera with a long lens on the passenger seat beside him, and another smaller pocket type camera in hanging off his neck.
——————————————
The story was moving in fits. I wondered if it was right to engage Neil speaking with Mabel about pronghorns. He had barely managed one scene with a second woman, a single mother named Karen. Her child still did not have a name, partly because I could not think of one. Without developing that side of the story and giving it some shape and texture, I had instead brought Mabel back, and tossed a group of pronghorns on her lap – pronghorns that did not like jumping fences.
They were not true antelopes, these pronghorns. Antelopes were essentially grazing mammals from the old world. In the new world, pronghorns were artiodactyls that look similar to antelopes due to convergent evolution. Now, if he was to explain convergence in evolution to Mabel, through Neil, or let both of them search it out, there was going to be several pages written about that animal. Besides, the term ‘old world’ and ‘new world’ was wrong. The north and south American continents were discovered by modern Anglo Saxon men only five hundred years ago, while indigenous Asians had already walked into them some twelve thousand years back. The continents themselves have been around, in different forms and arrangements, as long as other continents. Calling the American continents as ‘new world’ based on todays knowledge, felt a bit stupid.
I decided to be careful in future, in using the established but wrong terminology of old and new world. Perhaps we owed it to ourselves to use better representative adjectives for such issues. But, the question was the direction of the story.
As it is, pronghorns were the sole surviving species of a larger family of Ruminant Artiodactyls that were present when man first stepped onto the savannah. I had no doubt that arrival of man, the ultimate hunter, was at least partially responsible for the extinction of all those species, except for the pronghorns. That goes to show that early man was as destructive as modern man, in annihilating and eating through entire genera of the animal kingdom if he cold. The only difference is, being hunter gatherers, their numbers were small, and they did not possess the technology to speed up their activity. Modern man does everything super fast – including denegration of this planet’s ecosystem and causing mass extinction of species.
But, again, the story was supposed to focus on a few people and not on the whole biosphere and the future of mankind ! I wondered if discussions of this kind should deserve a number of pages in a story that was essentially about Neil and his search for a root in Canada.
There were three women and one man in the story already – a story that was still searching for a theme.  Two of the women lived in the present, both in Canada. That was because the main character in the story, Neil, was sort of an alter ego of myself, who, like myself, also lived in Canada, but was of Indian descent. Indian descent might mean different things to different people. Hereabouts, Indians can mean people from West Indies. Down south in the US, Indian can mean American Indian tribes. Anyhow, if was after I arrived in Canada, that I learned a new name for my kind – east Indian. This distinguishes me from a west Indian. The original inhabitants of the land here are not called Indians or American Indians, but first nation.
I felt a bit odd about being called East Indian. After all, the term Indian, when applied to either American tribals or people from West Indies, was due to a gargantuan mistake in geography by Christopher Columbus. India, or the land I was born in, was the one and only India, and all others were mistakenly linked to it. Therefore, I should be an Indian – end of story. All others may be called new Indian, green Indian or, preferably by their own names, such as Apache or Blackfoot or Maya etc. Being called an East Indian was, I found, odd, and again, perpetuating that greatest mistake of geography by Columbus.
Anyhow, back to the story.
I glanced at my notebook. I had jotted a few places and things on it, as potential sub-topics for the story. Next to the pronghorns, I had written two words – Burgess Shale. And next to it I had also jotted a few words that related to the human genome, and that of the living creatures of this planet. There were RNA, DNA, gene, chromosome etc there. I had also jotted items such as evolution, and geology. There was a bewildering mix of topics, none of which seemed directly linked to Neil’s effort to blend in his adopted country – Canada.
I went to the bathroom and prepared to take a shower, still thinking about it all. Perhaps I should leave the genetics but touch upon Burgess Shale.
A pronghorn and Burgess shale had little to do with each other, except for a proximity in the map of north America. I saw most of the pronghorns in northern Montana, not far from the Canadian border. And Burgess Shale was only a bit to the north across the border in British Columbia.
Apart from that, there was no similarity. Burgess shale was famous not because of animals that roam there right now, but because animals that lived over five hundred million years ago in a shallow tropical ocean. These sea animals were the products of the Cambrian explosion – the first of the Cambrian multi cellular large creatures of the sea that were to give rise of all living animals of the world today, including the first of the known chordata, or animals with a central backbone. There were foot long trilobites and other creatures with an exoskeleton, as well as worm like creatures that showed signs of rudimentary central column, or a spine.
The planet at the time did not have animals, or plants of insects on the land or in the air. Life only existed in the sea, and there was an explosion of new species coming up at an incredibly fast rate. That was why scientists call it the Cambrian explosion.
These marine creatures sometimes got buried by mud due to the special underwater cliff like arrangement of the continental shelf of the time. These soft bodied creatures buried in fine silt and mud eventually got fossilized. The continent was at the time right angle and horizontal over the equator. But over time turned itself ninety degree around and travelled north to its current location. Different blocks of it got clubbed together or torn apart. What is southern British Columbia today, was that shallow ocean with buried earliest of creatures. Tectonic forces engaged in mountain building, and the fossilized creatures ended up high on the mountains of the Rockies, in British Columbia in Burgess Shale. Today, it is recognized as one of the best locations for fossils of the earliest of the animal kingdom.
It was about ten hours drive from my home.
But, should there be pronghorns and fossils of Burgess Shale in the conversation with Mabel? What would be relevant for the story?
I sighed as I dried myself off in the shower stand. I did not know what should be relevant for a reader. I knew I liked all those multi directional threads, and snippets, from the past and the present, that, together made up what this planet and this land is all about. It is natural for me to watch life at the surface and let my thoughts drift below that surface to pry out what took place in the past and what might happen in the future. The present was just a point in the space-time coordinate, and my banging the keyboard was a collection of events that played only a marginal role in the game of dice that propelled existence as we know it – towards its unknown destiny.

I had seen the pronghorns, but had not been to Yoho National park yet, though I drove past it a few times. Ir was in that park that Burgess Shale was located. There was also the Burgess Shale Geoscience Foundation nearby, in the town of Field, BC.’ It would be a whole days drive through serpentine mountain roads. I had done it before. The journey would be as pleasing as the destination might be thrilling. Add a 22 Km round trip through mountain slopes and a climb of perhaps over two thousand feet, to reach some of the fossil beds there. The place was out of bounds except by guided tours of less than a dozen individual at a time. I was not sure I could do the 22 Km hilly trek a day and still have time to check the fossil beds. One would need to start at around 7 in the morning and be back before dark.
Pronghorns were easier.
—————————–

Pronghorns in Montana – 30th Dec 2011

“They look so cute. I have never seen these deers.”
“Well, I am not sure these should be called deers, Mabel. Of course, there are lots of deers in America and Canada. But these are not among them. Some call them antelopes, because they have sort of permanent horns, like old world antelopes. But this animal is not a true antelope, and the horns themselves are different – actually they are projected bones from their skull. The animal just looks like the antelopes of the old world – I mean from Eurasia and Africa. It is a Ruminant Artiodactyl, and the last surviving species in its family.”
“Wow. Whats a Ruminant whatever ?”
“Artiodactyl. That means a hoofed animal that has even number of hooves on its feet. It has to be either two or four. It is classed differently than hoofed animals that have odd number of hoofs. The difference is in the way weight is distributed through their legs. An even hoofed animal has multiple hooves that sort of shares the load and the centre of gravity runs through the middle of its feet with the hooves arranged on each side of it. But for an animal with odd number of hoofs, the centre of gravity runs through the central hoof”.
Mabel watched him. “And give me an example of each type, Mr. Neil Dusty, if you will”, she said with mock seriousness. She was both fascinated by the topic and equally fascinated by the way he described these issues.
“Well, pretty much most of the hoofed animals you know are even-toed angulates, or  artiodactyla. This includes all domesticated hoofed mammals. A cow, a buffalo, a lamb, a goat, a pig, as well as deers and antelopes are all examples of it”, Neil said. He picked up a cream cracker from the plastic box before them. They were sitting on a woven mat on a field near the river mouth. It was a sunny clear skied afternoon. A gentle breeze was blowing. It was still cold in March, and both of them kept their Parka on. Neil had taken his shoe off and stretched his feet forward, leaning back on his arms.
“Hmm, ok. And how about the other kind?’
“Odd toed ungulates are called Perissodactyla. There are a few rather famous animals in it – a horse, a donkey, a rhinoceros.”
“Ohh cool. A rhino! They all have a single hoof?”
“Nope. A horse and a donkey does. But a rhino has three hoofs. So, a Rhino is a closer relative of a horse than a moose or a cow.”
—————————————–
I stepped off the shower and watched myself on the mirror and tried to see a similarity between myself, a pronghorn a trilobite, a rhinoceros and a scavenging anthropoid from Burgess Shale.
Similarity of not, I got them into the story already, not to mention an ice age nomadic woman from central Asia for good measure. Neil an Mabel were just talking about animals and soon might also talk about mitochondria and ice age women. What they did not seem to do, was the most normal things that two humans might do when in a sort of relationship – talk about each other. More than talk, they needed to relate to each other, act on and about each other and try to overlap each others sphere a bit. That was what relationship was all about, was it not?
I looked at myself in the mirror, and focussed on the nails on my fingers. Come to think of it, a hoof was only a modified nail. And a nail was only a modified scale from our reptilian common ancestry, I thought. This was just a guess from me. I had not read it anywhere, but it seemed logical to me. The scales came from fishes, onto the first of the animals that got on land and needed a water tight body, unlike the amphibians. This allowed them to venture far from water. But, development of water tight skin made scales somewhat unnecessary. Hair was evolved down the line, I suppose, as a result of finding natural insulation for the body, in cases where body fat for the same purpose was not desirable.

I had a bathrobe that came in handy. Stepping into my shorts and the bathrobe, I shuffled bare feet to the kitchen downstairs to make a coffee.
I might think about it some more. There was a four day vacation coming – Good Friday and Easter Monday. That was in April. I wondered if that might be a good time to drive to Yoho National Park and take a look at the fossils of the time.
—————————————–
Mabel liked flipping through the pictures by brushing her fingers across the face of the iPad screen. She liked how the images moved sideways. But more importantly, he took wonderful pictures. There was a landscape in stark black and white world with rising steam and hot water across a snow covered landscape – of Yellowstone national park in winter. Neil had not told Mabel about going there, alone. Had be offered, she would have gone with him. It would have been so romantic.
She turned and watched him a moment, as Neil spoke about how close to the surface the hot mantle of the planet was at Yellowstone and how thin the crust was.
She took his face in her hands and kissed his mouth.
“I love you.”
That shut him up.

Of time, space and a barred owl

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Neil stepped by the unpaved road and tried to focus his lens on a purple martin. He liked how the sun brightened its glossy dark purple plumage against the faded blue of the sky. The bird was sitting at a high branch of a shrub. He was half an hour into the Bog, walking, taking pictures, and listening to an audio book through his iPod. This was the first time he got a clear shot at a purple martin inside the bog at reasonably close range. This bird seemed to be resting, so Neil took time to take a number of shots, using his newfound zoon lens attached to his camera. He had taken the trouble of carrying his tripod. This made his gear more cumbersome, but ensured that a higher percentage of his pictures will be sharp.

He was alone. Mabel, his almost constant companion for the past few weeks, had left for the weekend, to spend with her folks up north.

Things were happening in Neil’s personal life at an accelerated pace. For many years, he had been a lone ranger. He had been living an isolated life, segregated from the community around him. His involvement was with the land, and its flora and fauna. But when it came to humans, Neil was more at ease by himself. At work, he was friendly and popular. But he separated his work from his personal life.

And now, his personal life was undergoing change. And Mabel had been the primary cause.

Neil balanced his tripod mounted camera on is shoulder and moved on. He had never ween a green heron in these parts. When he moved to British Columbia from Florida, he did not know much about bogs. But he learned how unique bogs were, and how unique Burns Bog was even among bogs. He had learned that the bog had been drained by main, and its vegetation and character had changed since then.

Stepping off the gravel road, he knelt at a shiny leaf on the ground – pond lilly growing among moss. He took his second camera, mounted with a 100mm macro lens, and focussed on the round leaf of the lilly, and the radially spreading veins. Sun reflected off its shiny surface. It was lovely.

Neil did not have any specific plans on what to do with the pictures he took. He was an amateur admirer of nature and wild life, and liked taking pictures. But he did not publish them anywhere and was not planning to.

His thoughts drifted to Mabel and at what phase their relationship was. Was it an affair ?

Neither of them had called it an affair as such. They had not engaged in any serious talk about going steady or moving in together. But, they had slept together on two weekends in the past month. The first time, it had been somewhat spontaneous. But ha planned it the next time. They went for a movie, a dinner, and then she spent the night at his place.

He was still a bit bothered about the fact that she was fourteen years his junior. Also, he was technically a Hindu, although he did not believe in it much. She was a Christian, a protestant, and from the Anglican Church of Canada. He had little idea what that meant. But she too was not serious about religion. They did not talk much about differences in their faith. But Neil had told her about his doubts about all organized religions. He considered them as a kind of a business  and and gave a lot of power to a few men, but otherwise had little to do with either God or spirituality. She knew his views from casual comments he made in the past on the topic, in bits and pieces. But he was a tolerant person and got along well with religious folks. He did not try to impose his views on others, and did not judge folks that felt otherwise.

Thus, just as Neil was trying to adjust to this new situation in his life with regard to Mabel, and wondering if things were not moving a bit fast – they had sort of decided to give each other some space.

Mabel had perhaps sensed that their differences were still bothering Neil a bit. She suggested giving each other space, and not allowing the relationship to become stifling to either. Neil, at thirty four, was pretty well set by now in leading a solitary life in his personal space.

So, Mabel had planned to be away in the next two weekends. She also mentioned she might go out with other friends for movies and parties time to time, where he might not like to come. Same time, she hinted that he might like to mix with other womenfolk. This might give him time to settle his thoughts and sort his feelings out.

Neil got the impression that Mabel was doing it for him. She was happy as it is, having an affair with him and settling down to a steady relationship. At least that is what she seemed to imply. She still needed her own life and her own circle of friends. However, she understood that this was sudden for Neil and he was still not sure about hitching up with a woman so much younger.

Mabel was even willing to introduce him in the single’s circuit, whatever that meant. Mabel laughed about it, and said there were a whole list of females she knew that’d love to settle down with a nice boy with a good job and a serious attitude to life. But good guys were hard to find. She told him that he had charm he did not even know about, even if he did not understand hockey and could not ski, and did not get roaring drunk in new year.

Neil smiled, thinking about it, and then stopped. He was a barred owl on a pine tree at the road side ahead of him. The owl was watching him. He sensed that if he took a few more steps forward, it would fly away. He stood still for a moment, then slowly eased his tripod off his shoulder and on the ground. He switched the camera on and removed the lens cap, turning it to point at the bird. Looking through the view finder, he squeezed off a shot at the bird. The bird continued to watch him. It was large, and clear bars on its chest and belly. He knew barred owls were not common in British Columbia a generation ago, and had move up from the US only in the last few decades. He did not know if that was due to climate change or global warming.

He changed to setting of the camera to continuous rapid shots, rechecked the bird, and pressed the shutter button, taking a series of five or six rapid shots.

A barred owl watches him from a low branch

The bird leaned forward and tensed itself. Neil sensed it was going to fly away. He pressed the shutter just as the bird launched itself into the air and flew silently, taking a turn around the trunk of the tree and seeking a higher branch of a tree not too far away. It settled itself, facing away from him, and stopped paying him any attention.

Well, the lighting was okay. Neil thought he had perhaps a couple of good shots of the bird. He was happy not to have stressed the bird unduly. It was too low on a branch for a passing human. But now, a bit higher up, it did not need to feel as if the man was violating its personal space.

We all need our personal space – Neil thought. But same time, he was sort of missing Mabel already. It would have been so much nicer if she was with him today. She had a charming way about her.

Time and space. Neil remembered the science books he read in his school days – ‘Of time, space, and other things’ by Isaac Asimov, and 1-2-3 infinity, by George Gamow. Those were likely the first set of books that, other than Einstein’s relativity, helped him understand how the universe worked.

And here he was, almost twenty years down the line – protecting time and space around himself, and providing same around Mabel, but on a different context.

He walked past the tree with the owl on it. It watched him, but did not budge. He had seen this owl on different locations around Vancouver. Often, crows would gang up on it and attempt to drive it away. He had even seen a crow execute mock attacks and dive bombing on hawks, to drive them away from nesting grounds for itself, thereby also saving other smaller passerines. He had been lucky to catch a few of those moments on his camera.

He was underneath 72nd Avenue and moved towards the river end, stopping to watch a rabbit vanish in the undergrowth ahead of him. He knew there were deer and black bears in the bog area, but had never seen any up close. He had noticed a group of white tailed deers from the road once, driving to work alongside the bog. The traffic had slowed down and everyone was taking a look at the animals, who seemed happy browsing on the lush grass by the road side.

HE thought of sending a message to Mabel. She was not on internet that much, but used her phone for messaging. He considered sending her a short ‘whats up’ note, then thought against it. Let her enjoy herself with her folks.

He had not told any of his folks about Mabel. There were not many folks left, for that matter, back in India. And he did not have any relative close enough in North America or any place else. IN short, he had nobody to send any note to. He had no elder left among his relatives. No uncle, no aunt and no parents. It was a terrible feeling. He did have elder cousins back in India. But he was not that intimate with them to share his personal life with.

Neil often felt all alone, but not necessarily in a bad way. His mother, in her late years, used to contemplate on the purpose of life, and the fact that, at the end of the day, every one was alone. She had a gift of writing penetrating thoughts, and maintained a diary. Neil had gotten hold of it after his mother passed away. There, in the late years of her life, she often questions why a human comes to life, and why he or she goes, and what is the ultimate purpose of existence, for the individual and the species. She even wrote poems that reflected an introspective mind. She was not necessarily bitter, but more importantly, contemplative and introspective. Perhaps Neil had inherited a bit of that.

And here he was, walking among pebbles and pieces of concrete broken from a floor of some construction a long time ago. The construction is no more, but the bricks and cement has remained here and there. People used to mine the peat as fuel. Effort was on to let the bog recover from that.

Burns bog was a very large raised or dome bog, unique on the planet by its unusual construction as well as huge size. It was four or five times the size of Stanley Park. It originated from shallow depressions on the ground where water was trapped and could not escape. Into it certain plants and more importantly certain kinds of moss lived and died, and the stagnant water helped create the peat bog over time. It was also the source of a lot of fires, from the stored fuel as well as methane. The water turned acidic and anaerobic, not supporting much fish, but it did support a huge number of plants, birds and animals. Scientists believed that the bog also played an important role in climate control of the area.

Neil had stood at some spots and tried to jump, feeling under his feet how the ground compressed and expanded. It was as if he was standing on several feet of rubber.

He did not know how long it took for nature to build the peat bog, but suspected it would be a few thousand years and perhaps no more. That was because much of the land in Delta was under a shallow edge of pacific ocean at the time, and the shoreline more of less ended at Surrvey to the east and Vancouver to the north. The towns of Richmond and Delta were more or less submerged at the time.

Neil stopped and sat on a fallen trunk of a small tree. It was a cool morning, but he was slightly sweating with the exercise. He decided to sit, and soak in the atmosphere a bit.

He had placed the tripod upright on the ground with his first camera mounted on it with a big lens. He sat with the second camera, with a smaller macro lens and looked through it around him. IN his viewfinder, there was movement of bright flashing colors from behind the brush. He kept watching as a pair of humans emerged, speaking with each other. He could hear their soft voices, as well as the sound of their feet on the gravel. A small girl was accompanied by an adult female. The girl had golden hair in a pony tail. The women was peaking a bright parka, and had dark hair curled around her ears. Sun reflected of her hair.

He inadvertently pressed the shutter, and heard the click of the camera. Conscious that he might have done something unethical, he lowered the camera from his eyes, and looked down. He contemplated deleting the image. The sound was getting louder. He looked up. The small girl was watching him somberly. The woman was also looking at him, but had a pleasant expression in her face.

He raised his hand and waved. “Good morning”.

The woman waved back. “Good morning”.

“My name is Neil”, he said, somewhat self consciously.

“Hello Neil”, the woman said. She did not offer her name. The child kept watching him, holding the woman’s hand.

Neil pointed at his camera. “I was looking through the viewfinder when you suddenly emerged from behind that bush. I made a mistake, and clicked. I think I have both of you on it. Did not want to invade your privacy. So, if you like, I shall delete that image”, he smiled apologetically at them.

The woman stopped and watched him for a moment. “I have seen you before. Do you live hear?”

“Yes I do. Barely two hundred yards from the western entrance at westview drive”, he responded. He tried to recollect if he had seen her, and thought he might have. She walked with her daughter on Lyon road at times.

“I think we might be neighbors” the woman nodded. “My name is Karen.”

“Hello Karen”. Neil got up. It appeared impolite for him to be sitting while they stood. “And hello young lady” He waved at the little girl. The child did not reply but smiled faintly at him.

“Can we see the picture? If it is good, perhaps you can email it to me.”

Neil nodded and checked bringing the picture to the display screen at the back of the camera. The picture came out sharp and with a fair contrast with the dark foliage behind them. He walked a few steps to them and showed them the picture. The small girl tugged at his pants. She wanted to see it too. He kneeled down to show her. Karen kneeled too.

The girl wanted to hold the camera, which was a bit heavy. Neil let her hold it, but supported it with his hand.

“Thats a nice picture. Would you like it? “ Karen asked the child. The girl nodded positively.

“Okay, I shall email it if you give me the address.”

“I want to see more pictures”, the girl said.

“No darling. Those are his personal pictures. Its not polite to see them.”

The girl pouted and returned the camera to him. “I have an owl’s picture in the other camera. I saw it a few minutes ago. I can show it in this camera if you like.”

The turned to watch the other camera, still on its tripod. “I want to see the owl”

Karen smiled. “Are you sure its OK?”

“Of course it is ok”.

Neil turned to his tripod mounted camera, and flipped through the images. Karen picked up the girl and came closer. He got to the series where the owl was about to launch into a flight. He cropped the view slightly, enlarging the bird on the screen and showed it to them.

They exclaimed, as he flipped through the series of five pictures, till the bird was fully airborne and turning in the air.

“These are marvellous pictures. Are you a professional photographer ?” Karen asked.

“Naah. Just a hobby”

“Well, its a wonderful hobby.”

Neil smiled and thanked her, pulling out the notebook that he always kept at his hip pocket, and a pencil. Karen gave him her email address.

The girl, down on the ground again, asked ‘Do you have many birds of the camera?”

Neil considered the question. “Well, I have a purple martin from today. I have many more birds and animals pictures, but not in this camera any more. I have them at home in my computer.” He was tempted to say he would be glad to show her the pictures, but refrained from mentioning it. Karen, who was likely her mother, might not approve.

Karen smiled, and surprisingly, extended her hand for a shake. “Well, time to move on. Thanks for the show and for offering to send that picture.”

“Dont mention. Hope to see you again sometime, and especially you, young lady” He turned and smiled at the child. He still did not know her name.

They waved at him, and turned, walking on. Neil got the tripod on his shoulder, his other camera hanging from his neck and started walking in the opposite direction.

He guessed Karen to be closer to thirty. Perhaps a single mother. There were many single mothers in British Columbia, perhaps in Canada. Marriage, as an institution, was not what it used to be a few generations ago. Also, women were often financially independent. He wondered about it all, as he walked on. He intended to spend the next two hours in the bog, before returning home.

Mabel had suggested that he might meet some womenfolk other than herself. Well, he just did, and at least got an email address if not a phone number. Well, that was a start, was it not ?

Othello

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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.

Who is an Aryan?

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“This question has been with me ever since my childhood. Am I an Aryan ? Till date, a clear answer has eluded me.” Neil told Mabel. They were walking towards a coffee shop next to the movie theater. It was Friday. The weekend was ahead of them. They had just seen a movie. Later, he was going to take her to a Chinese restaurant. Meanwhile, they were going to have a coffee and yap a bit. It was still early for dinner.
Neil was enjoying her company, and her keen interest on things that Neil liked. He knew he was a bit different, and shared hobbies that were not particularly popular among folks he met or went out with. Among the expatriate Indian community, the issue of the Indus Valley Civilization, and the origin of the so called Aryans, was one such issue. The current debate in the academic circles on this issue, raging for a good generation now, was of intense interest to Neil. He had even tried to befriend a few experts on this topic.
But he never found another person among his friends, either of Indian descent or Canadian, or even American from his time in Florida, that was aware or interested, in this topic. This was a source of some frustration, for Neil.
Mabel was walking with her arm around his waist. She turned and smiled at him. Mabel was about the same height as Neil, five ft ten inches. The only thing was, she was wearing a few inches of heels, while he was not. Anyhow, this was something he had to get used to – finding her eyes at the same horizontal plane as himself. “So, are you an Aryan ?” She asked.
Neil smiled back and pulled her closer, still walking along the pavement, heading for the coffee shop. “The thing is, what exactly is an Aryan has not been properly settled yet. Conversional wisdom says that an Aryan was an invader in India, an ethnically different man than the locals. However, this view is getting a lot of scrutiny these days, and the answer is likely a lot more complicated. But, my interest in it is more to do with finding the facts. I am tending to lean towards the view that Aryans were part of the indigenous population, although a small trickle of outsiders might have come, mingled, and settled there, adding some flavor to the local culture, a long time ago.”
“Hmm ? How long ago?”
“Well, the time period under question relates to the dating of the Vedas, the original compositions of huge verses, that are often considered the original pillars of Hinduism. The dating itself is under debate. Conventional wisdom says 1,500 BC. But new thoughts appear to push that back by another thousand to 1,500 years, going back 2,500 or 3,000 BC, say five thousand years from now.”
They turned and walked into the coffee shop.
“Wow. You have to tell me about all this. I want to know. To me, sadly, Aryans only mean blue eyed blond crew cut soldiers that marched for Hitler and devastated half the world during the last world war.”
They took two cups of coffee and sat at a table. The coffee shop was almost full. It was attached to a large book store. People could take a book or a magazine, without paying for it, and sit down in the coffee shop to read.
Since the age of internet and eBooks, as well as online ordering of books through Amazon, local book stores have taken a major hit in their business, and are going through a continuous process of change, trying to stay in business and expanding the range of merchandise on sale.
Their table was near the magazine stack. Neil could see some of the magazines nearest to him. At least two of them were on tattooed women. It showed women with pierced nose, pierced eyebrow and pierced lower lips, not to mention ear lobes. They sported extraordinary multicolored tattoo on themselves, on their back, shoulder, arm, legs, and even on the back of their necks.
Neil disliked the idea of permanently disfiguring the body in the name of beauty. But, he was careful not to impose his opinion on others. To each his own. Thankfully, Mabel wasn’t one of them.
Mabel watched him glancing across the Magazine covers, his face displaying a tiny inadvertent frown. She chuckled. “I can see you are not too fond of full body tattoo.”
Neil turned back to her and smiled. “Well, no, I am not. Anyhow, about Aryans, I shall tell you little by little, so as not to overwhelm you with too much information. Suffice it to say that India is a very old civilization, and it has been in the cross roads of human movements ever since anatomically modern humans walked out of Africa. For me, the prime interest is to know a bit more about my ancestry. Therefore, the issue of who were the Aryans and what was the range and lifestyle of the Indus Valley civilization and how they interacted with each other and what influenced the later evolution of the faith system known as Hinduism, and its brother religions the Jainism and Buddhism, and other smaller sects, is of interest to me on an academic level. I am otherwise not too religions, you know.”
“Yes, I know. You were the first and the only person that told me the origin of the Aryan people were not Germany, and that Hitler borrowed the term from ancient Hindus, and likely unjustifiably. That is something I am unlikely to forget.”
Neil finished his coffee. He pulled her hand and watched her palm and her fingers carefully. He was not a palmist, but knew the basics from his childhood. She had a longish and smoothly semicircular lifeline, which did not quite connect with her head line. The line of destiny, or the fate line, was moderate and not as long as his own fate line from his right hand.
Mabel watched him. “Don’t tell me you can read palm too.”
“Well, I can see you are attracted to an older man from India.”
Mabel laughed out loud and cuffed him playfully. She too had finished her coffee. “One does not need to read my palm for that.”
They got up and left the coffee shop, heading for his car that was parked nearer to the movie theater.”
——————————————
I wrote this much and leaned back.
Should the ice age lady appear at their Chinese restaurant and share a Won Ton soup or something ? Or was I going to be spending more time with the non-Germanic Aryans that might have been brown skinned Indians wearing a loin cloth and bathing by the bank of the now vanished Saraswati river?
Or perhaps I was going to coax Neil into talking about his Y-chromosome ?
More I thought about it, more I felt that any sensible Canadian girl should by now get up and leave. These were likely taboo items for a date – essentially a first date between a young attractive woman and her boy friend.
But, I was not writing a book that would fit conventionality. I was writing it for my own pleasure, and for improving my unconventional writing style. Besides, I was writing on things that I liked.
I spent some time thinking about the difference between conventionality and conventionalism. Eventually I ended up scratching my head and looking up at the ceiling.
I had not yet been able to make up my mind on who the writer of the story should be. After all, this was not just a story of the present time about an expatriate Indian living in Canada. It was a story about writing a story, and that story was to have multiple centuries, millennia, spanned across it, with participants from different historical era and regions.
And yet, who was writing the story, itself was not yet clear in my mind. I could make myself the writer, and write this part in first person, like now.
Or, I could write in third person, describing the writer as Tony. Tony was, of course, the westernized version of my own pet name, which was Tonu.
Or, the writer could be Tonu.
I had used all three versions in different chapters by now. And yet, I could not decide.
Meanwhile, Mabel and Neil had gotten off the starting point, without achieving much of a plot. The ice age woman of central Asia was hovering at the periphery, mysteriously appearing and disappearing. She had a child with her. In one of the episodes, she is supposed to have sacrificed herself while in danger of attack from wild animals, in order to let the child survive. They carried the mitochondria, that was to come down copy by copy and generation by generation, all the way to me, or rather, to Neil. How they would eventually fit into the plot, I was not yet sure. The writer could keep hallucinating about the ice age woman, but how does one connect her with Neil?
Could it be that Neil too can see her in his minds eye? Could it be that she was a figment of not just my imagination, but also of Neil’s? Neil himself was a product of my imagination, as was Mabel.

Ohh well. I decided to slice an English cucumber and eat it with salt. Dinner is still an hour away. My wife had prepared some lasagna.