Monthly Archives: April 2012

Binayak revisited

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Today, I started searching through my old pictures from early last year, about the protest organized in Vancouver against the imprisonment of Binayak Sen for standing up for the rights of the indigenous tribal people of the jungle of Eastern India.

Why? Well, because Sanchaita asked for them.
Why did she want them, and who is she?
Well, she is preparing to make a page in Facebook about the Vancouver chapter of AID, and it is for that purpose she wanted the pictures.

Who is she? Well, she is a young woman that laughs a lot.
We were going to be touching base with each other every week, as far as possible.
Who are we? Just a half dozen folks willing to try to make a difference within our means, towards the general principle of AID – Association for India’s Development, by creating a Vancouver chapter of the AID Canada registered NGO, of which most likely Montreal, Toronto, Waterloo and a few other towns too will make chapters. As such, we have had a few conference calls pan-Canada already on it. Anyhow, we are just a handful of insignificant folks, really.

So, going back to the issue – I remembered that I was not too bad as a creator of rhyming slogans, both in English and Bengali, and had actually archived a small number of those created during the event last year.
So, while sending some of the pictures of that date of over a year ago, I looked at the pictures again, and they made me smile.
The thing is – rhythm and rhyme, comes naturally I guess, when it comes to some interesting work. Some of them are inside the pictures – but entered here separately:

Here are a few of them.

 

কারাদণ্ডের যুক্তি নাই
বিনায়কের মুক্তি চাই
—-
সাল্ওয়া জুদুম কলা খাও
বিনায়ককে ছেড়ে দাও
—-
Tribals too have their rights
Help Binayak in his fights
—-
শোনরে সবাই বনগাবাসী – হাঁসি হাঁসি চল্ UBC
বিনায়কের বন্দীদশা – তাই নিয়ে আজ হোক জলসা
কে কি ভাবে – কোথায় যাবে – কি যে হবে – হোক খোলসা
দেশ-বিদেশী, জগতবাসী, আয়রে দাদা, আয়রে মাসি
সবাই এলে আমরা খুসি – দল করে আজ চল্ UBC

Many of these poems appear to be not in English. What language is that?
Bengali.
What kind of gali is that?
Its not a gali, its Bengali. BENGALI. Its spoken by people of Bengal.
What kind of gall is that?
Not gall, Bengal. BENGAL. You are unbelievably thick !!
Well, I like Hamburgers.
No wonder ! Any more questions?
Yes, how about translating those poems with the bent gali?
Bengali, not bent gali, you hamburger eating moron. In fact there is a request from Sanchaita already, about translating the last poem.
Where is that?
What?
Well, I’ve been to San Francisco, San Jose, and even San Salvador and San Juan. But San Cheetah ? Is that in Africa? Why do they need your poems translated there ?

Forget it. You’d never understand. Here is some money, go have another hamburger and don’t come back to tell me how you liked it.
Hey, you are a pal. Cheers for the poems, bent or not.
OK, bye.

———

And here is my later addition to the movement.

Mukheno Maritong Jagat

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I am not sure if I could properly translate that sentence, or rather, that expression. Originally presumed to be in Sanskrit, but it came down to a Bengali idiom, and found itself in standard vocabulary relating to the Bengali propensity of entertaining intellectual debates, or what others might consider as light banter.
The translation of the Sanskrit meaning is not too difficult because Bengali and many other Indian languages derived from Sanskrit, and the roots of many of the contemporary words can be traced to their Sanskritic origin. This particular expression means something like – conquering the world by mere talk. Its a satirical expression. In English, the corresponding term could be – talk is cheap.
I had written a previous post, about my closing down the Khata blog site (http://web.me.com/tonu/Santiniketan_Papers/). I was closing it down. But, it contained some of my own musings and thoughts about life as I perceived it. It contained some years of my thoughts, and some of them came from observations that went back years into my conscience or perception of the world around, or my past.
And so, even while I decided to wind it down, I began a half hearted effort at archiving some of those writings, or rather – bringing them into a newer installment here in this blog, with my more recent views on the topic.
The thing is – I liked the heading, and the way I arranged the image at the top of the page, borrowing one line from Tagore’s poems, and placing my own question below it. To me, it appeared both humorous, and satirical, and in some ways followed Tagore’s own satire, coming out of frustration, at the people around him.

The line in that image is part of a Tagore poem. That came from the middle of one of Tagore’s satirical poem. The line itself stated that, instead of belonging to this useless group of Bengali society, the poet might have preferred to belong to the nomadic Beduin tribes of Arabia. They might not have showed outward traces of culture and civilization that the Bengali intelligentsia was so busy displaying, but they had self respect, and unlike the Bengali babu culture, the Beduin would stand up for their beliefs and confront danger to defend their lifestyle.
The poem started like this, with my own translation in brackets :

Title : দুরন্ত আশা (Unruly Hope)

মর্মে যবে মত্ত আশা সর্পসম ফোঁসে, (When injustice of the powerful hiss at us like a venomous snake)
অদৃষ্টের বন্ধনেতে দাপিয়া বৃথা রোষে, (False anger tied up invisibly by fate)
তখনো ভালোমানুষ সেজে (even then, being the good boys that we are)
বাঁধানো হুঁকা যতনে মেজে (we shall stack tobacco in our water pipe carefully)
মলিন তাস সজোরে ভেঁজে খেলিতে হবে কষে! (and shuffle our faded deck of cards and start our card game)
অন্নপায়ী বঙ্গবাসী স্তন্যপায়ী জীব ( we the rice eating and milk drinking species of Bengal)
জন-দশেকে জটলা করি  তক্তপোশে ব’সে। (can sit around on the mat and have our entertainment)

I had not copied that poem as such on that post, but merely borrowed one the lines from the later section of that poem. That line was IHAR CHEYE HOTEM JODI ARAB BEDUIN (meaning, I’d rather have been born a nomadic beduin in Arabia). Instead of copying that entire poem, I ended up writing one of my own in Bengali, along with a piece of English text. Here is what I had written.

Sunday, March 14, 2010
I had written a light hearted Bangla poem, of mediocre quality, just to lighten up the mood while bad things were being reported everywhere. There was this drip drip bad news about climate change, the new noth-south divide, the gloomy outlook of a world less controlled by nations and more controlled by a shadow group behind giant corporations, coupled with global conflicts raging everywhere, and not just in Iraq or Afghanistan, which are merely one sphere of American interst that seem to mesmerise the meida. Add to that the issues of the world food crisis, and to cap it off the continuous drip of bad news leaking out from Santiniketan.
So, I wrote that poem:

তনু এটা লিখেছিল

ভাবার কথা, কত ভাবার কথা,
গোলকধঁাধায় খাবি খাবার ব্যথা।
বিশ্বভারতী কিম্বা বিশ্ব রাজনীতি,
কোথায় হদিশ পাই তার মতিগতি
চঁেচামেচি, লাঠালাঠি অার হাতাহাতি,
Instant পণ্ডিতদের বানী যথা তথা।

বুলেটিন বোর্ডেতে লেখে কত লোক
প্রতিবাদ, মন্তব্য অার কত শোক।
লোকে কত কি না বলে, বড় বড় theory।
ঘরে বসে ভজ শুধু হরে কৃষ্ণ শ্রীহরি।
সবইতো ভাগ্যে লেখা – যা হবার হোক।

পিয়ালি পালিত তবু দিল্লী পালায়
তনু মাঝে মাঝে কিছু চিঠি লিখে যায়
তাপসদা বৈতালিকে রোজ ফিটফাট
টুকু চিকু push করে চন্দ্রের হাট
podcast’এ গান গায় তমোজিত রায়।

বসন্ত উৎসবেতে যত উপদ্রব
কালোবাড়ি ভাঙচোর, মারপিট, ক্ষোভ
রজত কান্ত বলে – যাব অামি কাশিতে
অানন্দরূপদা বলে যোগ দাও SASI’তে
পার্থের যুক্তিতে হারেন প্রণব।

এই করে কেটে যায় অারো এক মাস
প্রচুর সময় হাতে – খেলা যাক তাস
সমাজ উন্নয়ণ রাখো চিন্তার বাইরে
বাথরুমে গান গাও তাইরে নাইরে
তনু এটা লিখেছিল – কোরোনাকো ফাঁস!

And then, like most folks, I got back to the normal grind, going about my work, reading books and listening to interesting speeches by folks, watching a bit of the Winter Olympics highlights, and speaking with other exstudents of Santiniketan. I even ended up writing individual letters to a number of MPs of the Indian Parliament lower house, and got a response too, on the issue of the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Bill 2009.

Regarding Santiniketan, I ended up sending a few joint emails to Delhi, along with Piyali Palit, and searched out a few Rabindrasangeets by Partha da, from iTunes. I included one of them on a recent Podcast – ক্লান্তি আমার ক্ষমা করো প্রভু, and updated the খাতা web blog.

On the side, I was exchanging a few emails with folks. One topic under discussion was if Rabindranath should be separated from Santiniketan, thereby freeing Rabindranath and also Santiniketan – presumably because the two became incompatible with each other – like a marriage gone sour.

But, my thoughts actually turned away from that. I guess I shall never make a good marriage counsellor. The thoughts turned to something else – about ourselves – those of us that seem to engage in debates and discussions on what to do with Santiniketan.

I often get bogged with this dimension – or lack of dimension – in the debates. It appears to me, rightly or wrongly, that such debates have one fundamental flaw – they are conducted by the middle class, for the middle class and only the middle class.

The middle class, I often felt, might be ill-qualified to understand either Rabindranath, or indeed anything outside of the middle-class bubble. Also, I suspect, Rabindranath, while being inclusive and universal in his thought and action, did not rate the Bengali middle class too high on his list of priorities.

In other words, neither Santiniketan, nor Rabindranath, should have been restricted to the middle class world, It is perhaps a tragedy that the middle class Bengali community first kidnapped and then improsonned Rabindranath and all his dreams till this day.

So, perhaps Rabindranath needs to be released and set free. The question is – how does one free Rabindranath from the Bengali middle class? And how does one conduct a debate on these issues, when the only people engaged in such debates are the very middle class that Rabdinranath often had so low an opinion of? Gurudev’s comments come to mind – ইহার চেয়ে হতেম যদি অারব বেদুইন.
Another thing that often amazed me is how the middle class Bengali crowd seem so interested in having a debate but not interested in concluding that with any plan of action. It is as if debates should he held only for the sake of debates, and folks should never have to worry about actually working towards some goal. As if following the mantra of মুখেন মারিতং জগত is the only path worthy of them.

Well, food for thought, along with some coffee.

——————–

That was what I had written, merely two years ago. And how much things have changed since then. I was showing signs of frustration even then, as it appears, with the middle class mentality of not wanting to involve in any good community work, and invariably got drawn to Tagore’s frustrated or sarcastic musings on those issues.
And now, I am closing that site down altogeher, and moving on to the next chapter. It is not proving as easy as it should have been, but the movement is happening, I can see.
Take AID Vancouver chapter for example. It was within a few months of my writing that, when I attended the annual AID conference in Seattle and got so highly motivated with it and by the people there. That started a two year effort by some of us to start a Vancouver chapter of AIDS and a fresh set of frustration, this time aimed not at Santiniketanites, but the general diaspora of affluent immigrants from India for their own frog-in-the-well lifestyle, albeit in well decorated silver lined plastic coated  and electronically climate controlled well rather than the moss covered, close to the nature old wells of India. But, at the end of the day, I guess a frog is a frog is a frog. We have evolved from placental mammals to the simians to the homo lineage, only to revert back to the advanced frog-in-the-well type of comfortable humanoids of the twenty frist century.
But then, two years on, out of hundreds of thousands of expatriates Indians, we did manage to collect half a dozen dedicated people willing to do something more than chew pan and look at Shah Rukh Khan and sing bollywood songs in way of intellectual and spiritual sustenance. We found the necessary minimum to be able to think about – gasp – doing something constructive, starting with making a change in our own lifestyle, within our means, to represent the change we wish to see in others.
And we are going to be, slowly, steadily, be moving towards deeds and not just idle talks, towards making a tiny little difference, somewhere, somehow. The first few steps are already taken – that of meeting up once a week, either face to face, or over the wire.
And, with just a handful of folks, the world suddenly begins to look a lot brighter.

—

Returning from the pilgrimage

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It was time to close my Khata blog down. Like so many things, the Khata web site was one that was so exciting to start and open, and now, feels like a discarded old house.
I remember going through the Binoy Bhavan road, on the outskirts of Santiniketan, West Bengal, India, where the rows of brick houses stood in line before a narrow asphalt road that bent around a cemented well. We spent some of the growing up years there. Last time I saw it, it appeared dilapidated, as if no one lived there.


Santiniketaner Khata was opened with some personal fanfare. The excitement was mine alone. Those days, the world of Santiniketanites was just getting smaller through internet. A new avenue was opening up for re-establishing contact with each other. Folks were rediscovering old friends. New friendships were blossoming. Times were great.

It would not be long however, before the frog-in-the-well mentality of the general masses, of which the Santiniketanites were no exception, would surface, irrespective of if the frog in question lived inside the well, or outside.


An aversion to doing anything together, constructively with a long term goal, was the signature trait of this group. The group would be recognized not for all it would do, but rather, for all it did not do. As a result, the atmosphere would follow slow atrophy and decay, leaving behind some folks engaged in reminiscence and trivia.


I had hoped that internet might provide a new and unique bridge allowing entry of fresh thoughts and a new sense of belonging and camaraderie. The new atmosphere might help glue together a disparate group of disconnected and remote number of ex-students with folks connected with Santiniketan. The new media might somehow usher in a meaningful transformation, inject new life into an otherwise moribund near non-existent entity, that of the ex-students and Ashramites of Santiniketan.


What eventually happened is, to me, rather less than meaningful. The world of Santiniketan turned out to be a two headed monster. One one side, there is this supreme apathy. This apathy is not just extended towards the legacy of Tagore, but covered every issue that was not of some direct benefit to the person. On the other side, the sheer lack of sincerity, extent of laziness and selfishness, compounded with dishonesty left me dumbfounded.

I was naive. I had not realized that they were in essence same as the rest of humanity, which too lacked humanity to deal with the issues of today. My fault was expecting these Rabindrik uber-culturists to be above average. They turned out to be actually much below average. What a let down!
And so, the Blog of Santiniketaner Khata, which in english might mean the notebook on Santiniketan, contained mostly my own writings, and almost no one else’s. I tried within my means to encourage others to contribute and engage in healthy debates and discussions. It would cost them nothing to post there. But I did not get much luck. Exercising one’s brain in constructive energy appeared to be counter to their concept of appreciating Tagore.

The very name, Santiniketaner Khata, began to lose its appeal. The web based blog-notebook contained its share of ideas and observations. But ultimately it turned out as useless as most anything that Tagoreans have done so far. It turned useless because few read its content, and even less would contribute any idea or add any value to the topics. The pages of that blog would wither away, and drift in the wind along the dusty grounds of Santiniketan. I could well imagine it.
And so, it was time to close it down. I wondered if Santiniketan too should just close itself down, and blend with the red earth of Birbhum. Perhaps one day it could rise from the ashes again, resurrected in a second coming.
I could imagine how Tagore ended up writing:

Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit

Tagore was describing, I felt certain at this point, what he had observed about the middle class around him, and how they were responsible for perpetuating the crippled society in India. He could see that removal of the British was not going to make things much difference to the rudderless Indian society.

চিত্ত যেথা ভয়শূন্য , উচ্চ যেথা শির ,
জ্ঞান যেথা মুক্ত , যেথা গৃহের প্রাচীর
আপন প্রাঙ্গণতলে দিবসশর্বরী
বসুধারে রাখে নাই খন্ড ক্ষুদ্র করি ,
যেথা বাক্য হৃদয়ের উৎসমুখ হতে
উচ্ছ্বসিয়া উঠে , যেথা নির্বারিত স্রোতে
দেশে দেশে দিশে দিশে কর্মধারা ধায়
অজস্র সহস্রবিধ চরিতার্থতায় —
যেথা তুচ্ছ আচারের মরুবালুরাশি
বিচারের স্রোতঃপথ ফেলে নাই গ্রাসি ,
পৌরুষেরে করে নি শতধা

The English translation was never as good as the original in my view, and so I copied the section from the original here. The translation was Tagore’s own, and he had changed the words around, perhaps out of concern for the western readership, who might not interpret the literal translation of the Bengali in the right spirit. I however find his original Bengali text a lot more forceful and direct.

I considered the sentence যেথা নির্বারিত স্রোতে দেশে দেশে দিশে দিশে কর্মধারা ধায় অজস্র সহস্রবিধ চরিতার্থতায়. Tagore changed the translation of this sentence. He talked here about that environment where folks will take great ideas to far flung lands and convert them into countless thousands of deeds in an endless stream of constructive endeavors. Tagore decided to change the expression when he said,  “Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection“ but I liked the Bengali text better. Either way, Bengali or English, his wish was not to be fulfilled by people that had the maximum exposure to his views – by a very long shot.

We, the Tagorians, did not carry any of the great ideas to any far flung land and did not convert anything into timeless deeds of human endeavor. There were no tireless striving or stretching of arms towards perfection. Only time the arms stretched were to line one’s own pocket, or to beat one’s own drum. We merely buttered our bread while providing a suitable lip service to Tagore’s grasp of beauty, language, rhythm, and rhyme – restricting him to the rank of a mere poet.
He also used the words পৌরুষেরে করেনি শতধা. He was still talking about that environment where the manhood of the Bengali bhadralok clan, and by extension to the Indian middle class had not been neutered by thousand year old layers of dead social customs, religious bigotry, ethnic shortsightedness and hollow status and caste segregations.
Fast forward a century, and some things are the same, while others have gone far worse. The babu still shows signs of being morally castrated.

So, I got disenchanted with the Tagorian diaspora, and stopped pushing the Santiniketaner Khata. Nobody cared. By closing down the Santiniketaner Khata, by diverting the direction of the Santiniketan Podcast, by deciding to close down the Uttarayan bulletin board, I was seeking freedom from the well, wishing to leave the fellow frogs to their devices. I was tired of the collective croaks.

Is that all?
Well, there is still this one thing. I was still alive, and having discarded the Achalayatan or the immovable unchangeable dead boulder of Santiniketanism, where I was spiritually cloistered for most of my life, I still have energy and exuberance and a wish to engage constructively on something, with someone, somehow, somewhere, on some cause. I was not quite the Rabindrik rebel-without-a-cause. I had a cause, but it did not sit well with the place-without-a-cause. Santiniketan represented a state of causelessness. And so did Santiniketaner Khata – a reflection of the real thing. Santiniketan was full of such rippling reflections from a myriad of angles – all of them gaunt and displaying signs of decay.
Meanwhile my wish to remain a sizable and recognizable contributor to the history of my own ramblings is still very much present. In other words, I was not yet dead.
 Khata can be closed, but Tonu was not yet burnt to ashes or buried under six feet of earth, or submerged at the bottom of the ocean. I was alive and kicking, and I wished to leave behind my views, my hopes, my aspirations and my frustrations, and how I felt about the whole situation with the Tagorians.

He had written himself – আমি ঢালিব করুণাধারা, আমি ভাঙিব পাষাণকারা, আমি জগৎ প্লাবিয়া বেড়াব গাহিয়া আকুল পাগল-পারা. He wrote in in his youth, and edited it later, and trimmed it a lot. But, as an early teenage lanky and tall boy, he had been to the Himalayan foothills and seen how the glaciers, locked up for years among the rocky peaks in high mountains, were slowly released by the warm rays of the sun. At that time he did not know that the warming of the sun was going  to be assisted and accelerated by man, and that the glaciers would vanish one day. To him, at that time, the release of the rock bound ice into the liquid flow of life supporting river was a sign of freedom, or release from imprisonment, a blossoming of life itself.

Those lines in Bengali meant, in my translation – I shall pour forth a river of compassion, I shall break out of the stone prison, I shall inundate the world in a deluge of exuberance, romping and singing as if one possessed.

Well, I was not the headwaters of the Ganges, but I too had some pent up energy still left in me. And so, even with the Blog site on Santiniketan closed, I would not only continue to write, I would even write about this very shutting down of my blog notebook. For anyone with an over-fertile imagination, my opening and then closing of the site, could well be taken for a cyclical story of a beginning leading to an ending which in turn triggers a new beginning. It follows a similar cycle to the story in that famous Tagore Poem, of moisture that rises off the ocean and gets trapped as snow on the Himalayas, only to be released by the warmth of the sun and come cascading down as life sustaining river, returning back to the ocean, only to be reborn into another cycle of being vapor, ice and water. One could think of this as creation and destruction locked in a conjugal dance  of the cosmos in the ever-dynamic world of Nataraja, the God of dances.

Anyhow, I became a disenchanted devotee returning disillusioned from a disappointing pilgrimage. I was a pilgrim that had gone to the holy land only to find that it was not quite so holy after all.

Milton had written that epic, over four centuries ago, about the Biblical tale of the fall of man to the lure of Satan, and expulsion from the Garden of Eden.

Satan, the antagonist of John Milton's Paradise Lost c. 1866

Well, I had neither seen nor been lured by Satan, the flying bad man. But then I was not Adam either. For me, the loss of paradise was not because man was banished from it. It was rather a case of there being no paradise to begin with. Man will make what he will of the place he lives in. And, once Tagore was gone, my holy land had degenerted eventually to a cultural wasteland. Worse, it was on its way to being a sewer.

I could not quite accept it as nobody’s fault. It was the fault of all, starting with the army of Rabindra-disciples that make a career out of squeezing the Tagorian lemon. They brought forth the greatest expansion of a new species of lemon squeezers.

My paradise had no place for lemon squeezers.

I had lost my paradise when I was confronted with its non-existence.
And thus, I went over to the opening page of the Khata, and copied the top section into an image, as a snap shot before the dead body could be placed in the morgue. My pilgrimages was over.

I looked at the partial image of the home page of the Khata blog. The image included a stooping man with wild beard and wearing a sort of an asian frock coat, armed with a spear on a gold coin with letterings I could not follow and did not remember which language it belonged to. Next to it was an artists rendition of the same man, perhaps a bit younger. He was Kanishka. The front page, like the cover of most magazines, was supposed to change with time. The last entry was about Kanishka and my question – if folks in India were at all curious about their own past. Whether Indians cared about their history or not, that was my last entry on that site, which itself had become part of history.

Moving on from the front page and the most recent article, I came upon a picture of Tan Lee da and his presentation in Bengali on the occasion of the 150th birth anniversary of Rabidnranath Tagore. I too had joined whole heartedly to participate and contribute to the global celebration of the event. But that was then. I have since lost considerable amount of steam for this endeavor, and have begun a serious introspection on the purpose and significance of these efforts.  Today, I do not feel convinced that such celebrations are worth much, and what purpose it at all serves.
But thats a different issue. Right now, I felt sad that Tan Lee da is no more as agile and alert as he used to be. Just last year he produced that beautiful writing and poem about his beloved গুরুদেব (gurudev Rabindranath Tagore). And I had put that up on the ASRAMIK section of the Khata blog.

Myself and Tan Lee da have some work to do. I also intend to coax him into taking the first step towards writing his book.
But we remain respectfully disagreed on the issue of helping to promote the vision of Tagore. The differences are subtle, and Tan Lee da and Leena di do not disagree with my view wholly. Nonetheless, we stand apart on this issue at this stage. To me, it seems both pointless and misdirected, to expend energy to promote Tagore to the outside world. To me, he should have been better understood by his own country men, starting with people of Eastern India.
Anyhow, the best way to promote his views, at least in my eyes, would have been to promote the kind of a world that he tried his best to create, inside India, and internationally.
I have come to realize that Tagore was an excellent writer and essayist in more than one language. There is really no need to translate his world view or socio-cultural views about India or the east for western consumption. Some of the best analysis on these have been done by people that do not know Bengali and have read as much material written by Tagore himself as written by others about Tagore.

India is not ready for Tagore. The great herds of Tagoreans are cultists without a grasp of the man. The East is not ready for him either. And neither is the west ready for his brand of Internationalism blurring the boundaries of national fervor. I do not see the point of running about everywhere, trying to force an uninterested world to think about universal humanism. We were not changing the world. We were not even promoting Tagore. We were promoting ourselves – selfishly at Tagore’s expense.

It was time to put Santiniketaner Khata into a mothball. I could have written about Tagore, the east and the west and his efforts at contemplation on what path laid ahead for mankind, but, why not write here in my new blog? At least it does not have the name of Santiniketan as a false promise. It is in my name.
The East is in a deplorable state of affairs, in a headlong and absurd rush to ape the West. Meanwhile, the West is busy hurtling towards a financial and civilizational wilderness. The world today is very very different from his times. The world actually has turned on its head, and yet folks are drugged into complacence and do not find it odd that the landscape appears upside down.

Tan Lee da’s case is different. He is mentally too attached to Tagore and Santiniketan. It is a faith for him, and not a matter of logic. Santiniketan represents a pilgrimage, and he will go there as long as his health holds up. To him Tagore is the ultimate balm for his soul and the image of Tagore in Santiniketan is indelibly etched in his mind. This image is his morning star, his sunset over the horizon. It would be cruel, as Leena di said, if one was to advise him against going there because of health reasons.
Tan Lee da remained a lifelong pilgrim. His spiritual horizon was illuminated with the glow of Tagore. He never lost his paradise. It stayed with him, wherever he went.
He had not lost it, but I had. I did not wish to keep returning to Santiniketan. It offered memories, but I wished to make new memories, watching the mountains the streams and the glaciers myself. I wanted to see the eternal dance of creation and destruction with my own eyes, and compare them with Tagores expressions. I wished to observe humanity with my own eyes, and apply myself to it. I was mindful of Tagore’s efforts in promoting an universal humanism, but I needed to experience it myself, and outside of Santiniketan. Santiniketan did not offer either universalism or humanism, or much anything else worthwhile, anymore.

I had lost my paradise, but was at peace with it. I was happy to let go of the symbol, while holding on to the real thing. Unlike Tan Lee da, or my parents, or uncles, or so many others, I had not seen Tagore with my own eyes. And yet, I had understood him enough to know that I did not need Santiniketan.

It was time to let go of a dead habit.
It was time to close my roadmap to and for Santiniketan.

Quantum mechanics or mass hysteria?

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Good things come in small doses, or don’t they ?
I was sitting at the waters edge, and thinking about it all. I do sit by the water at times. In Boundary bay, they have a few benches suitably located, facing the ocean. If the tide is low, you can see shore birds pecking at the mud and among the shells and pebbles. If the tide was in, you could see flocks of Brants or Canada Geese.
I have at times looked at the green winged teal and wondered about their lifestyle.

But that is not supposed to be the subject of this, this, this … I wonder what this is. It is a chapter in a story? Is it an essay? More likely it is one more rambling of mine, in an increasing series.
So, while good things might come in small doses, I wondered what kind of stuff I was dosing out in my blogs. It was like a mysterious double helix.
I, Tonu, was thinking about balancing out my ramblings between the novel and the diary. Could a diary-novel combination qualify as a double helix?
One one side, I had an expanding number of episodes on a blog that could loosely thread together as a basic theme of a novel or a mini series of soap opera that involves an opinionated immigrant from India in his thirties, and a young Canadian woman, Mabel Rechardsen, who is largely in awe of the man and contributes little if any individuality in the story line. Then there was the other series, a list of ramblings which were neither essays nor quite systematic in their arrangement, of my own ramblings, mostly about the state of the planet. In short, these were ramblings mostly about the state of my own mind – which was not in a state of equilibrium.
And while writing all that, I at times send out a number of mini-episodes of the basic story of Neil impressing Mabel. And then I get tired of it. Actually, I get more frustrated that tired, to be truthful. And the frustration comes from a lack of strong conviction on how that story should end, or if indeed it should ever end. From one point of view, considering the history of this universe, or the solar system, or this planet, or even the story of life on it, from what little we know, it is almost a never ending story that advances in small increments.
But, I am only writing a story. A written story cannot be compared with to the  story of the existence of the universe., or can it? In the greater scheme of things, is the universe, and the story that Tonu writes, are in essence comparable. If the universe as we know it had a beginning, or a birth, and if it is going to have an ending, or a death, then should the story too have a birth and a death. Come to think of it, one can hesitate to use terms like birth of a universe. Even today, scientists are arguing about the big bang and if that was a one time affair, or cyclical. They cannot likely agree on if the universe is going to expand forever and end into nothingness, or if it will run out of steam of expansion, and eventually begin to contract and end up into a an infinitesimally small vanishing point of nothingness. Either way, whether it vanishes into an expanded oblivion or a contracted one, is the whole story only a one-time one, or is it cyclically to be repeated ad infinitum?
If we are to believe the hindu philosophy, then we can bring in the art form of dancing into it, and get the God of dances, Nataraja, perform his dance or creation, and then, when the universe is bubbling over with creative energy, he may tire of it and change it to a dance of destruction, only to reverse back again. It involves a lot of dancing, but, the side effect is, we get a lot of creation and destruction.
We have seen through nature as be understand it on the planet earth, there is cyclical creation and destruction. Once season often wipes out changes brought forward in the previous season, but only to lay the groundwork for more changes to come as a result. We have seen rivers destroy the land on one bank and create more land on the other.

So, creation and destructions at one level are flip sides of a same coin. One cannot have creation, unless there is also some destruction. This is self evident when it comes to many things that are finite. Land may not be created indefinitely, and can only be balanced by land disappearing elsewhere. Oceans cannot rise or fall indefinitely, without a corresponding amount of water being locked, or released from land bound icecaps and glaciers.
But, how about a story?
Tonu was not Nataraj. In fact, I have no training or knowledge of the kind of dance Nataraja might have engaged in. Anycase, he had multiple hands, if I remember right. That could well be untrue and an expression of an over-exuberant devotee of the past that decided to add limbs to the god while creating an image of his dance of creation-destruction.
The last time I had any kind of training in dancing, was at the age of sixteen. I was in college in Bombay and we had a college social coming up. I was a newbie from Bengal, but wanted to come up equal to the local boys. To do that, I had to accomplish two things. The first was to have a girl come to the party in the college. The second was to take her up to the dance floor and dance with her, as well as be allowed to dance with others in exchange.
The college seniors thought, correctly, that many of the students from out of town would not be able to get a girl to come, and that this would overly skew the male-female ratio and cause a mad scramble of too many males trying to dance with too few females. Therefore, those male students that had a girl partner, were to sit segregated from those without a partner. The unattached males were not allowed to come to the dance floor, and could only watch the proceedings, or move on for the dinner or coffee or chit chat.


And so, I had decided, newbie or not, from the other end of India or not, I was not going to be sitting out and looking in. I had solved the first problem by asking my uncle, who lived in Bombay and was a journalist, to help me find a suitable girl. As it happened, it was the aunt that helped out.
But then there was the second issue. The girl in question, the daughter of my aunts friend, new how to dance, for sure. But I did not. And I had only two weeks to learn. There were some dance schools, but there wasn’t enough time, and I did not have enough money in my pocket, for a crash course.
And so, I solved in another way. When I asked the girl to come to the social, I told her I did not know how to dance and needed some training. I was hoping that she might teach me. But she thought her mother is a much better teacher. And thus, for two weeks, I went to her house every evening, and my aunts friend, the mother of the girl, taught me how to do fox-trot, waltz and cha cha cha – only to the extent an opinionated Bengali boy of sixteen could pick up in two weeks.
I don’t even know why I wrote all this – except to impress upon any chance reader, that there is no way in hell my dancing should be considered even remotely comparable to what the god of dance, Nataraja might be doing up in the cosmos somewhere. And to make things more complex, I do not really believe in creationism or of existence of a god as described in various institutionalized religions. Come to think of it, I am not even sure if Hinduism qualifies as an institutionalized religion. Instead of being an organized religion with a hierarchy and a line of control, Hinduism often appears like a loosely defined description of human behavior that is halfway between mass hysteria and quantum mechanics. And I can live with quantum mechanics, though I can do without mass hysteria.
See, this is one of the basic issues of my writings. I end up occupying four or five pages of text without actually saying anything – not a damned thing.
There is absolutely no good reason to compare me with Nataraja. He does not exist, and I do, at least according to Tonu. Besides, he has many hands and I type with just two. He knows how to dance, while I barely managed to get a girl in the college social in my first year, in Bombay.
And my story of Neil has not moved much, even if the characters in the story have covered a lot of ground, both in time and space. As far as time goes, I think they went back more than five hundred million years. As to space, they had driven close to a thousand kilometers east from Vancouver, and had spent some time in the Yoho and the Kootenay national parts on the Rocky mountains.
But, when it comes to proceeding according to plan, the characters were doing better than the writer. I was moving them around without any definite plan, and was just enjoying the ever evolving chapters.
Was Nataraj doing whatever he did, for the same reason – joy of bringing change in an otherwise unchanging and boring existence ? Hmm, whether he was real or not, he might have had something there. Or rather, the fertile minds that created Nataraja, had really something there. I wish I could .. Well, here I go rambling again.
I had thought of writing a lot of stuff, inside or outside of the story. There was this disenchantment with the middle class mindset. More I thought of it, more I got convinced that the ills of the world were either because the middle class brought in on, or because the middle class did not stop it. Either way, in my eyes, the buck stops at the feet of the middle class. It is not the politicians who are to be blamed. It is not the corporate raiders, or the mafia, or the dictatorial goons or the war mongering governments. It is the middle class, the only entity that is powerful enough to bring change, that is responsible for all the shit that is happening everywhere.
And what makes it worse, is that I am part of that middle class. This is where things could begin to get bad, and I try to grasp at the spring grass at the ledge, to prevent sliding into the slippery slope of self loathing. Is there a way to mix all that with the mass hysteria on one side, and quantum mechanics of the other ?
That got me to thinking. Recently, I met an interesting young man that was doing post-doctoral work at the University of British Columbia and his subject was, simply, condensation. No, it is not quite the kind of condensation that results in dew drops forming on blades of grass on a cool morning, pleasing as the sight may be. And it is not the kind of droplets that you sometimes will find on the windscreen of your vehicle, to be swept away quickly by the wiper.
It has something to do with the state of matter at near absolute zero level of energy, or temperature. Bose and Einstein wrote about it way back in the early parts of last century. Some folks even coined a new term – God particle, as something vaguely related to it. Incidentally, no machine has so far been invented by man that could capture god and prove to us of his existence. There is some sort of a machine built recently in Europe which is supposed to do many things, including prove the presence of the god particle. But so far, God is proving to be elusive, either whole or in particle.
And so, six pages into this episode, I am still contemplating if I should be writing a piece of my rambling on anything at all, or just about mass hysteria or quantum mechanics. Meanwhile, what about that young man I met, who is researching condensation ? Well, at this point of time, I shall hazard a guess that, the young man most certainly displays signs of being alive and talking, Schrodinger’s cat Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle notwithstanding. There may be a time and place, along with a set of conditions, where the young man might be perceived as both dead and alive at the same time, and the uncertainty may never be properly resolved, but I am not in that time and place and have not agreed to those conditions as yet.
So then, what happens to my story, and about my rambling? Can the story and the ramble merge and overlap and be present and not present the same time? Can the story be of Neil the young immigrant and of Tonu the opinionated writer at the same time? Can I avoid the mass hysteria and alternate between multiple realities of a quantum writer? Could I, for example dance both Foxtrot and Waltz the same time, but only as perceived by two different persons. To one I was dancing, badly, a waltz, and to the other, who might have actually been ogling my six year old date, I was dancing foxtrot, also badly?
I had thought of writing about the story of organising a Vancouver chapter for Association for India’s Development, or AID. It has been a subject of some conviction for me for some years now. But instead, I ended up writing of a hypothetical cat that might have been both dead and alive the same time, as presented as a thought experiment by Erwin Schrodinger a few years after getting the Nobel prize in Physics in the 1930s.
If this was not yet the time for writing about an AID chapter for Vancouver, perhaps I could talk about Ms Loretta Napoleoni’s book on Rogue economics, and discuss how alarming the situation was regarding nasty people with the help of bad money getting into good institutions and thus turning the lives of normal people on their head. I was going to analyze what one even means by normal people.
I do not know if Napoleoni had Italian ancestry, or if the name had other roots. For that matter, I had also read a book named “Bad money”, by Kevin Philips. For all you know, any idiom or expression I use here, might turn out to be the name of a legitimate book by someone, somewhere, unless I was thinking of writing a book with name such as “I sat on the head of Nebuchadnezzar”. But then I did not sit on his head, or anybody else’s and do not have a good idea about the Biblical man. I don’t even know if he wore a turban or not, and if it was at all practical to conceive about sitting on his head. And finally, who knows, perhaps some nut case had already written a book about sitting even on that man’s head. You can never tell.
Leaving Nebuchadnezzar on his Biblical throne, I could move sideways to the world of genetic evolution and the writings of Dawkins – such as The Selfish Gene. But, as soon as you mention the world Selfish, the first image that seems to come to me is that of the middle class. Could there be such a thing as the Middle class gene ?
There should be, don’t you think ?
ON that thought, I decided to get up from the bench by the water, and head home.
Tide was in.

An universe for an anchor

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“They have remained invisible throughout history. But in my life, their absence have been a heavy weigh on my mind” Neil observed.
They had crossed the 100th Avenue, the main artery of the town, and walking north towards the bend in the Kicking horse river.
Less than a mile to the north-west of them, the kicking horse river met with the Columbia river. These were historically important rivers of southern British Columbia. The province got its name from one. But it was the kicking horse that also fascinated Neil. These rivers and the history attached to them, represented fascinating chapters in the recent past – the formative years that would eventually define modern British Columbia, or indeed Canada.
They approached the bend of the Kicking horse a football field away, over a small grassy park. The park ended at the river bank. Across the small mountain river flowing westward to its end of journey to meet up with the Columbia river, were the tall peaks of the Rockies in the north and northwest, the beginning of Yoho National park.

They could see the rising line of the national highway, Trans Canada Highway, across the river, snaking its way along the valley of the kicking horse, heading east and north. They were going to be on that road tomorrow, heading towards the even smaller town of Field, which was the base camp of Mr. Walcott a century ago, when he discovered the unprecedented fossils of the soft bodied creatures of the Cambrian explosion at the Burgess Shale fossil bed.
Mabel wrapped her arm around his waist. They were by now standing at the bank of the river, which had cut a channel for itself through a frozen river bed.
“What was invisible, in the Paleozoic? And how is Canada both rich and poor with regard to the invisible?”
Mabel had a good memory of things Neil said in bits and pieces which did not always connect up to complete the jog saw puzzle. And she liked working with jig saw puzzles. He was talking, as they crossed the main road heading north, about the invisible explosion of the Paleozoic which left a silent trace in the records of an expanding life form on this planet, and how Canada was both rich and poor in preservation of that history.
Neil lifted his cap and ran his fingers through his hair. The temperature was above freezing. There was no perceptible wind. It was the beginning of April and the air was just fine, with a tinge of cold. It felt good on his face and it felt good to be standing by the water’s edge at the western border of Yoho National Park and the Rockies.
Mountains were all around them. To the west should be the Cascade mountains. To the east, were the Rocky mountains. Not being a geologist, or a geographer, he did not know where exactly the Cascade mountains ended and the Rockies began, but he could make a guess. The Cascade mountains, he knew, were essentially volcanic, and came up relatively recently through tectonic forces that were still actively pushing the oceanic plate under the land of the west coast, and had been the cause of seismic and volcanic activity all along the western shores of North America in the recent centuries, from California all the way to British Columbia. The Rockies on the other hand had been thrust up gradually over hundreds of millions of years, representing changes in the planets arrangement of its landmass over eons of time, that had resulted in pushing up the shallow ocean bed of a tropical sea, inch by inch and millennium by millennium, from under the sea near the equator, to high above the ground, in the northern latitudes of present day British Columbia.
In short, one might find basaltic formations in the Cascade mountains, while at the Rockies one should find sandstone, shale and rocks formed through accumulation of sedimentation in the watery depths of the past.
And it was here, in those shallow sediments, where the invisible part of early life lefts its ghostly traces that was a story of both comedy and a bittersweet tragedy for Canada. This is how Neil perceived it anyhow.
“Paleozoic stood for the ancient era of single cell primordial creatures that evolved in the murky past, the early billions of years of earth’s history.”
Mabel nodded, watching a dipper applying its trade in the shallow but fast flowing water of the Kicking Horse. The bird, the size of a robin but having an all over darker shade, had special claws that allowed it to grasp the algae and moss on rocks under flowing water and hunt for insects underwater. It could apparently swim under water too. It would dip under the surface at one point, and often emerge at another. Neil had mentioned that this apparently terrestrial perching bird has specialized itself into being an insect eater of the fast flowing cold rivers of this land, thus occupying a niche left vacant by the water birds of North America. She had since developed a fondness for this small tireless worker of the shallow, fast flowing cold white water rivers of Canada and the US.
“I think paleo means old, in Greek or Latin. When did this era end and what was the explosion about? And what is invisible and why is the story bittersweet for Canada?”
“Ohh, that” Neil observed. “I was coming to that. Do you feel like sitting down on that boulder by the water? It is so nice here, and so quiet.”
Mabel nodded. As they sat on a large but cold stone, there was a mechanical noise behind them. They turned to look, and saw two teenagers going over dry grassy ground driving their tracked snow mobile, heading for what looked like a barn or a shed in the distance. The sound was unpleasant. It left a faint smell of engine exhaust in the air.
“I think the season for winter sport is coming to an end” She observed. “Soon, as the snow melts, we shall have the season of the summer activities – hiking, rock climbing, and such.”
Neil nodded, “The ‘and such’ should also include exploration of what is left of the fossil bed of the Cambrian explosion, at the Burgess Shale. And there lies the bittersweet history of another aspect of Canada.”
“Explain.”
Neil watched a second dipper arrive at the water. He pointed at it and smiled at Mabel.
“Yes, I saw the first one. Amazing bird.”
“Yes indeed. Had Charles Darwin seen it, he would have gotten one more beautiful living example of evolution at work. Throughout history we have seen species cross over from their original habitat and enter a world they were perceived not to be suited for. Land mammals entered the water and became whales and dolphins. Birds entered the southern ocean and became penguins. Small animals went burrowing underground and lost their eyes. Large bears got to the northern ice covered ocean to hunt seals, went totally white with their fur and evolved webs on their toes to swim better, and here we have a tiny bird, the dipper, that dips under fast flowing cold waters and does not get swept away. It insulates itself from the cold and the wet, and is agile enough to grab insects underwater in fast flowing rivers in that condition. Nature working its magic here.”
Mabel smiled. She just loved to hear Neil speak. It had been thus for the last six years, ever since she first met him. She was a sixteen year old teenager at the time. She had never met anybody like Neil before. That first day, at her uncle’s place, he had mentioned the controversy of the origin and spread of Maize, and its fascinating link with the stone carvings of a west Indian temple that showed corn. She was fascinated by the story of that temple, built centuries before maize was supposed to have been discovered by the European early explorers of the Americas.
She had developed a teenage crush on him at the time. She was no more a teenager, but the crush had endured. She was going through a high right now, since the feeling was finally being reciprocated.
She still needed to nudge him, to get him back on track. “So what is bittersweet about the Paleozoic explosion, for Canada?”
Neil pulled her closer. “Paleo may mean old, but each of the eras had a trigger that destroyed and yet created. It shut out one kind of creatures and opened the door for another. The Cambrian explosion was such a remarkable event. It did not destroy, but did the opposite. It triggered an unprecedented explosion of new life forms. It coaxed the slow engine of evolution on to the fast lane for some unknown reason. Suddenly, out of simple small unicellular animals and tiny multiple celled arrangements rose a vast marine world of a myriad kids of larger creatures. Most of these were soft bodied, but not all. The first of the marine creatures with hard external shell, the trilobites, too emerged, as a new family of now familiar early marine creatures of the Cambrian.”
“Wow”
Neil nodded and leaned back on the rock, stretching his legs on the cold stone.
“And you feel strongly connected to about that period, and how the mountains of Yoho link to it. Yes?”
Neil nodded again.
“I feel related. That is one part. I feel sorry that many of the best fossils of the Burgess Shale might no more be in Canada any more, having been transported to the Smithsonian by Walcott, a century ago. That is the bittersweet part of it from my point of view.”

“How did that happen? I mean the fossils ending up outside of Canada? All the fossils or only some of them?”

“I shall tell you the story as I know it. The best of the fossils found at the time by Walcott, to searched and located the main vein of the fossil bed, which was merely seven or eight feet wide and a few hundred feet long, into the mountain slope. He dynamited it till the vein was exhausted, and chose the best of the best fossils to take to the Smithsonian. Sixty thousand of them in fact.”

“What?”

Neil nodded. “Yeah. Its true. I read about it. There are still fossils coming up there, but unless Canadians found another vein like that one, we are never going to find another fifty or sixty thousand unique fossils of that unique time again. Walcott did that. Great work indeed, but – you have to go to the Smithsonian to see it.”

Mabel thought about it. “Perhaps we should visit the Smithsonian together.”

“Perhaps.”
Mabel stretched her legs too. It was perhaps just as good that the fossils survived, even if it was across the border. She did not consider Americans to be too different than Canadians. Being a liberal at heart, she wished the Americans would be less involved with wars in remote places and more concerned about their own poor. But other than that, Americans were fine people, in general. Everyone in every land was fine, more or less, in her book.

It was also fine, to be sitting with Neil right now. In fact, it was more than that. It felt wonderful, to be able to spend a few days away from work, away from Vancouver, and away from the rest of mankind, just spending time with Neil. It was the first time they were doing this together. Some years ago they had gone with a bunch of others to a fishing trip in the lakes, but at that time, Mabel was a sort of silent observer of Neil, who hanged around more with her cousin brothers. He shared a log cabin with them, while she was with her folks in another cabin.
This time, they were an item. It was established, more or less. She did not know if Neil was seeing other women. She could not come around to ask Neil about it. Neil rarely spoke of women anyway. But as far as she knew, and she did know Neil a bit, he never went out with another woman for a four day trip into the mountains, or any place else, in British Columbia. She had no idea what he might have done while living in the US, or back in Hong Kong or India.
Besides, they were sort of seeing each other now. They slept together often. Actually, it was only about four times in the past two months. But, that was a start – a great start.
Mabel wondered when he might ask her to move in. Unfortunately, Neil was not known to talk about personal matters much. She wondered if she should sort of coax him on to the subject. She did not wish to rush him though. She knew he found it still a bit odd that she was so much younger than him. He still felt she deserved someone younger. That was rubbish, but Neil was old fashioned, she guessed.
“What are you thinking?” Neil glanced at her.
Mabel thought of telling him she was thinking of him, as much as what he was talking about. But she could not find the right words. “I was thinking about those sixty thousand fossils, but more than that – how you might be related to all that.”
“Well, the Cambrian explosion apparently produced all the families of living creatures of today, as well as a few more that are no more with us. It also had the first rudimentary vertebrate, could well be my likely direct ancestor going back half a billion years.”
Neil laid back on the cold stone, and cupped the back of his head in his hands. Above him swayed the near nude branches of a tree that was just now deciding to sprout new leaves of spring. The sky was partially exposed and free of clouds. It contained the signature deep and clear blue of the British Columbia skies, free of air bound particles of pollution and haze. His thoughts wandered back on his favorite topic – his relationship with the cosmos.
“You see, I feel related not just with those creatures of the Cambrian explosion, that Walcott discovered north of the town of Field here in the Yoho national park of today. I feel related also to the silent people that traversed the landmass of this planet long before modern man started etching his footprint more firmly on the landscape, thus turning his presence more into a scar than a track. Animals leave tracks. Early humans left tracks. Modern man leaves scars. Anyhow, I feel related, to those early humans. More than feel, I now know I am related.”
Mabel laid back on the stone next to him and turned on her side, reaching out to move a strand of hair out of his eyes. Neil was different than other men she met. He had the least worry about his appearance. He was about the only man she knew who tried cutting his own hair. The reason he preferred to cut his own hair, or have a friend do it for him at home, was itself unique. He considered going to the saloon and sitting before the barber for twenty minutes when he could not read a book or listen to music or glance at his iPad or do anything other than close his eyes and listen to the snip of the scissors or the electric hair trimmer – a torture. He did not care that the barber might do a lot better job of making him look good. As long as hair grows constantly, whatever the barber does is momentary. In a few days, the hair would continue to grow and assume a natural appearance that was his own. Anyhow, Mabel knew about this little secret of Neil because she had once seem him do a bad job of trimming his hair at the back of his head, and she did it for him. He even thought she’d make a good barber.
“And how do you know you are related to the early people?”
Neil’s face broke into a cheeky grin. “I got a note from the Gene lab recently. My second set of DNA analysis on my mitochondria is over. The result confirms the earlier test, that I most certainly contain two key haplogroups, “M” and “D”. These are sure signatures that on my mothers side, I am very closely related to the indigenous people of Indochina, Australasia as well as the entire north and south American continents and its First Nation people.”
“Really ? Wow. What does those Hapless groups mean anyway ?” Mabel purposely teased him a bit about the terms he used, which might be technically right, but far away from normal folks daily conversation.
“Haplogroup. Nothing hapless about them. I shall one day tell you, or perhaps show you the tree of life when it comes to the evolution of the mitochondrial DNA. But trust me, I might not be an aboriginal person myself, and neither was my mother, or my grand mother, or her grand mother. But, we share a genetic mutation that happened just before a group split away from the rest of the still nomadic population, somewhere in Asia, and went migrating as the first great explorers, generation by generation, hopping island after island, occupying the known lands of Australasia. Once they were there, in those remote islands and jungles, they were cut off from the main gene pool and evolved separately, eventually occupying a separated branch of humanity. They are known today as the indigenous tribes of various places. But they carried that mutation, haplogroup M with them, so that its prevalence in those communities today is very high.

But those that did not go to those remove places, did not evolve separately, and continued to mingle with the rest of the mainland crowd, thus evolved with the main branch. They eventually ended up looking and behaving a bit differently than those isolated populations. Eventually agriculture and animal husbandry reached them first and along with it, a change in lifestyle from hunter gatherer to pastoral and farmer. That brought a rapid change of diet and a rapid rise of population, eventually also leading to rapid rise of a new lifestyle, a civilization, complex language with a larger vocabulary etc. But a smaller slice of these people were part of that group that had the mutation in their genes, the “M” haplogoup. But they were mixed with the larger group that included many others that did not contain that M marker. So, the present non-tribal population has much less people with this particular mutation. These small number of people that carry the same mutation evolved and mixed with the general population, and hence look, feel and behave the same as the rest of the large body of humans. But, they carry in them the tell tale signature of being the most recent cousins of the Australasian and Indonesian and Andamanese aboriginal people and the Indian, Chinese and other Eurasian tribal groups, among the first people of Eurasia.”
“Wow”.
“Yes. Indeed. But that’s not all.”
“No?”
Neil shook his head. “Nope. After the ‘M’, another mutation came up in the same group of people, leading to the ‘D’ haplogroup.”
He turned to Mabel and assumed a mysterious look on his face. “And do you know what happened to this new group of people with the’M’ and ‘D’ in their gene ?”
“What ?” Mabel could feel the sense of adventure, tracing the early footsteps of man through the world map, through the voice and personal observations of Neil. There was just nobody she knew that was even remotely similar to Neil. He was a unique mutation all by himself, she felt. But she did not interrupt him.
“This ‘D’ holding group also split. And the wandering spirit remained in them. One branch of them went on to cross more land bridges and ended up in North America, and then to South America, colonizing the Americas as well. IN the US, they are called American Indian. Here, you call them first nation. And I, my dear Ms Richardsen, contain both the ‘M’ and the ‘D’ haplogroups in my mitochondria, inherited in a direct maternal ancestral line going from my mother, to grandmother, all the way to fifty, sixty or eighty thousand years ago when all this was happening.”
“Double wow”
“Yes. Therefore, I have genetic proof to substantiate my feeling of closeness, that I am related, to the first explorers of our species, people that left those invisible tracks on the ground in all the landmasses that could be reached by early man, including in Canada. And they did it very long before Columbus. Very long indeed.”
Mabel could not help being amazed. He had explained part of it to her before, though it had not fully filtered in for her. She was still unsure of mitochondria and tracing of ancestral movements through DNA mutations. But she was beginning to understand.
“It must feel great, to be related to the whole world” She mused.
Niel considered the statement. “You know, those few markers in my DNA that I inherited from my maternal side, as well as the details I have so far found from my father’s side, helps me understand my roots and my anchors better. It has essentially freed me from narrow boundaries. Its like that poem about the two Bigha Zameen.”
“What ?”
“Well, you know about Tagore, right ?”
“Right”
“Well, he did many things. Among them, he also wrote a few poems. One of the early ones was this poem about a small slice of land that a poor man of Bengal once owned as his ancestral plot. He lost it through false accusations of debt to a rich landlord, who wanted that land. So, he was rendered essentially homeless, and became a sort of wandering holy man, traveling from place to place. In that poem, when the man lost ownership of his his ancestral home, Tagore penned a paragraph, that goes like this – I’ll show you.”
Neil got up, and fished out the notebook he always kept in his right hip pocket. “I am never without a notebook, you know?”
Mabel nodded. “I have noticed that, yes.”
“Its a habit I picked up from my teenage years. I have gone through a fair amount of notebooks this way” he smiled, and fished out his pen from his breast pocket, another thing he was always never to be found without.
Then, in the fading light of the evening, keeping his notebook on his thigh, he concentrated and wrote a few lines, which Mabel could not follow, but understood he was writing in his own language. She had come to appreciate the handwriting, although he claimed it was not good enough. The thing is, folks did not write much in long hand any more, even in English. She did not have any relative of friend that had a real neat handwriting. Writing by hand was going extinct, as Neil often said – like the Dodo.
Neil finished writing and showed the notebook to her. She took it and tried to make sense of it.
“What does it mean?”

Neil took the notebook back, and slowly repeated what he wrote, apparently in Bengali.
“Money Bhabilam Moray Bhagaban, Rakhibay nah Moha Gortay
Tai Likhee Dilow Bishwa Likhilow, Thu Bighaar Poribortay”
He looked at her and smiled.
She compressed her lips and thought about it.
“Well, it does have some rhyme.”
Neil laughed, pocketed his notebook, and laid back, resting his head again on his palms. He looked up at the emerging stars and translated the few lines in English
“I believed that the almighty did not wish me to have useless attachments to frivolous earthly possessions.
And so, he released me from that sliver of ancestral land, and in exchange presented before me the entire universe.”
“Thats wonderful. What a beautiful expression!” She was genuinely impressed. “I think I should read Tagore sometime.”
Neil nodded. “The problem of reading Tagore might be that if the reader judges them as a work of literature alone, then he or she might miss the underlying tidal current that tugged at the heart of the man, who was, in my eye, more than a poet. That is the basic difficulty of reading Tagore. Most folks might read him as a poet, and that would be a mistake.”
“Well, you can help me, can you not?”
Neil got up again and sat upright. “I am no expert. But those two lines resonates for me. I did not lose any ancestral land, in the sense that I did not have any in the first place. My parents came from stock that were rendered essentially as landless refugees through religious strife fermenting in India for a long time. Their stock moved westward from the waterlogged delta of Eastern Bengal to the drier lands of Western Bengal. IN the east they were religious minority but held most of the land. In the west they ended up among the majority, but without the land. So I grew up without any sense of deep roots. But, thinking back, my growing up all over India, my exposure to Tagore’s writings, my working life all around the world, and now the analysis reports of my genes, they all tend to help me identify with that landless man of that poem of Tagore.”
Mabel snaked her hand in his and looked watched his darkened face in the fading light.
“I have lost my anchor, but gained the universe in exchange” Neil mused aloud.
“And also gained the girl lying on the stone next to you.” She mentally said to herself.
She tried to imagine a time, fifty, or a hundred thousand years ago, and imagine a small band of hunter gathers that might have included a woman that carried a piece of genetic code that was to come down, generation by generation, all the way to Neil’s mother, and then down to him.
“Its amazing. And you being a male, still have that gene from your mother, but cannot pass it on?”
Neil nodded. “This is of course just one way of tracking ancestral lineage through maternal line. All of us, males and females, get the mitochondria from our mother. It was thought to play no direct role in deciding our sex or our traits, since it was not part of the DNA in the nucleus of the cell. I have read papers that claims that mutation in this non-nuclear code of DNA might still affect health of people. For all I know, there may be other ways to track genetic footprints and ancestry through the maternal line. But for now and for me, the links are the M and D type haplogroups in my mitochondrial DNA that makes me related to the first explorers, the tribal and indigenous people of the world – those silent travelers that left a near invisible track on the ground, but a heavy imprint on the trail of human evolution. They were the invisible first explorers, whose descendants today face a dire existential threat, thanks to modern humans need to take their land, their resources and what is underneath their feet. These people with little demands and the faintest of footprints. And we are asking them to move on, and they have nowhere else to go. They are at the end of their rope.”
They lay there, on the stone, and watched the sky get darker and the paler tinge of the slice of sky across the western hills disappear behind the dark outline of the mountains. Somehow, the whole story, Mabel felt, was bittersweet and sad, and somehow leading to a tearful ending, just like those creatures trapped in those sixty thousand fossils that Walcott found a century ago.
A few stars appeared in the fading blue of the sky. The dipper was no more visible in the river. Behind them, the town of Golden had put on their artificial lights, which glowed against the southern sky. It was going to be eight.
She sat up. “Perhaps we should walk that way to the junction of the rivers, before it gets more dark.”
Neil got up too. “Okay, lets do that. We might not get much time tomorrow, as we intend to try to look around the area covered by Walcott a century ago in the Burgess shale tomorrow morning, just a few miles to the east and north of here.”
They walked, arms around each others waist, a new style for them, heading northeast along the bank of the river. They could hear the water, where it joined the Columbia river, perhaps a mile ahead, by the side of the small airstrip that went by the name of ‘Golden Airport’. They crossed what was an unnamed and unpaved road onto another that paralleled ran between the runway and the river, and headed towards the confluence of the two rivers.
It took them a few minutes to reach the point where they could not go further. The Kicking Horse had joined up with the larger Columbia river, and together, the waters turned southwest and downhill. They stood by the shore and watched. A man was walking along the edge of the water with his dog. The night sky still had some light that reflected off the water. They could see the dark shape of the man and the dog in silhouette against the rippling reflection off the water. The breeze was both stronger and colder. They automatically huddled closer, and watched the scene before them as the sky continued to darken by the minute.
Mabel watched the dancing light on the river water, and signed in contentment. Neil heard it and turned to watch her in the dimmed light, bending to kiss her nose. She turned her face and they got into a deep kiss, holding each other.
The dog’s bark got fainter as it and its owner moved further away. The air strip behind them was silent and dark.
An air whistle blew behind them somewhere, from a train.
Neil broke the kiss and looked at her, her eyes looking more black than blue.
He cleared his throat. “We need to find a restaurant”
She nodded imperceptible, and kissed him again. “I love you Neil.”
Neil pulled her closer and chuckled, teasing her. “Is that love, or an infatuation for an opinionated Bengali babu, that talks a lot about nothing?”
“Shut up”. She knew what made a Bengali. But she decided to check up what a babu was. This was not the time though. Whatever it meant, she felt confident the guy next to her was not quite an ordinary man, babu or otherwise. “You were talking about the invisible people and their weight on the history of mankind. You are one that is far from invisible for me, and you will do, Bengali or not.” She linked her fingers in his and strode along the western end of the air strip, back towards the town.
The lights of Golden brightened ahead of them.

Golden

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They arrived at Golden in the late evening, following the Kicking Horse river, a high plains stream that often broke into multiple paths only to go join up again at a bend or a narrow. The name, Kicking Horse, had a historical anecdote to the early explorers of the place. A series of snow capped mountain peaks arranged in a straight line greeted them. It was a magical hill town surrounded by half a dozen of the most picturesque national parks in Canada – Banff, Glacier, Jasper, Kootenay, Mount Revelstoke and Yoho. They had seen most of those parks in different years and in different times. On this trip, Neil had planned to cover Yoho, Kootenay and a bit of Banff National Parks. To their west lay Yoho, and the small town of Field, north of which was the famous stone quarries at the slopes of the Burgess mound, known as the Burges Shale fossil deposit sites.

They had checked into an Inn with their room overlooking the gorgeous mountain range to the south-west. Neil did not know or remember the names of all the hills and did not carry any backpack map, but the view facing their room was spectacular. It comprised of a mountain range whose slope westward, towards the town of Golden was carved into several deep and parallel ravines. What forces created that landscape, Neil did not fully understand, but these features made him think. He could see, clearly, that men had made mountain roads leading half way up some of that slope, the steepness causing them to zig zag the unpaved road that was dusted in snow cover that was clearly melting away in April. There were tell tale signs of landslide and avalanche, where soil and small rocks had tumbled down and landed in a heap at the base of the steep hills. The roads were likely out of bounds at this season, but might have been open for the right vehicles when the snow was firm, so folks to ski or skate or use snow mobiles. In the summer, those roads should be navigable with all terrain or all wheel drive vehicles, for some spectacular landscape viewing. Right now, they were in a transition season, not cold enough and the snow gone soft but heavy for the unmaintained mountain road. According to the girl at the reception, the show on those roads can be more than a meter deep and would bury most vehicles, hence the road was closed now.

Mabel had gone into the bathroom to freshen up. They had planned to go walkabout in the small hill town, and eventually find a place to have a bite before settling for the night. They planned to head straight into the Yoho National park hills early in the morning after a hefty breakfast. Most of the days, they would skip lunch but carry a fruit and some snacks with them, and a jug of coffee.
Neil relaxed in the settee overlooking the large window and put his feet up on the low table. He tried out the TV, but did not like the shows and switched it off. The room was cool but not cold, so they kept the air conditioning off.
He watched as the light began to fade and the horizontal strips of cloud in the eastern sky turned from orange tinged to gray and then to grayish blue. The sun had set behind them in the west, and it reflected in the eastern sky before him.
“I like the pensive look on you”.
Neil turned his head away from the window. Mabel had emerged, and was drying her hair in a towel. She had another big bath towel wrapped around her. She had pale skin. Neil had noticed through his years of traveling around and meeting folks, that the so called white people, were actually more colored, than the so called colored people, or the Africans.
The issue of race, he now understood, was a non-science. Genetically, most people were quite mixed up, and the racial distinction of features, skin color, shape of nose and eyes, type of hair etc were very recent adaptation of the anatomically modern man, most likely to suit their surroundings. It could also be a certain kind of dominant gene pushed certain populations towards adopting some specific features more strongly.
Anyhow, he had learned that the so called white people could come in different shades, and none of them really white. In his mind, the Mongoloid race, or people of China and surroundings, were perhaps more uniformly pale skinned, and should have been the “white race” instead of the yellow. And the white people should have been the “colored race”. A white man from southern Italy was darker than is own father, from Bengal, India. But a real pale skinned northerner, or a red haired Irish person or a freckled European with colorless eyelashes were the other extreme.
Mabel was not quite that extreme. She did not have freckles, but her skin was paler, her hair was light and her eyes were different shades of green, gray or light blue, depending on the light.
“I like the fresh pinkish look on you” he ended up saying.
Mabel acknowledged the compliment. “What were you pensive about ?”
“Ohh, this and that. I am often pulled by two opposing feelings. One is a sense of joy and pleasure from seeing beautiful landscapes, rivers, animals, birds or stories of the people and animals that once lived here.”
He stopped, and considered his feelings.
“And the other ?” Mabel started drying her hair using a dryer that the Inn had provided.
“The other – is a sense of dissatisfaction, a sense of betrayal. Human civilization as we know it, has let us down, and we are destroying the planet and pushing our species towards doom.”
Mabel watched him somberly. “I can clearly see your positive side. It is a pleasure to just hear you talk about your wonder on this or that item about Canada, about other lands, about the flora and fauna, and about evolution and stuff.”
“And the other side is not a pleasure ?”
Mabel sat down on the bed, still tending to her hair and looking over at him.
“The other side is shows a lot more deeper and darker feelings, justifiable and well thought out, but pickled with a tinge of resignation and fatalism.”
“Fatalism?”
“Well, you do believe that man will bring his own world down. Right ?”
Neil nodded, and got up. “Yes, I do believe that, but it is not a matter of faith or premonition. Man has left tell tale signs of destruction on his path every since he evolved into a being separate from others. Even in our collective genetic history, we share traits with other animals that would, if possible, overdo things till life became unsustainable. But as our ancestors, we were incapable, more or less, to cause maximum damage to the ecology that the modern man can. Do not forget, many of the mega-fauna of the world at the end of the last ice age perished when they came into contact with their first humans. Today they find fossils and permafrost remains of mastodons and wooly mammoth, with clear sign of them being killed or butchered by humans. Same for giant ground sloths, giant flightless birds etc. And we know what happened to the American passenger pigeon or the bison.
“Buffalo ?”
Neil nodded – “Bison”.
Mabel brushed her hair, put on lipstick, and slipped into a fresh set of clothes. Neil got up and moved into the bathroom, to clean up himself. He left the door open, so they could discuss.
“You were talking about the flightless cormorant?” Mabel said.
“I was? When?”
“Earlier today. You know – comparing humans with lemmings or the flightless cormorants?”
“Ahh, yes. The Flightless Cormorants of the Galapagos islands show a curious behavior when faced with the danger of marine iguanas coming to steal their eggs.”
“Really ? What do they do ?”
“Well, we have not fully understood how much of an animals behavior is instinctive in its genes and how much is from rational analysis of situations using their brains etc. We know however, that man is a relatively very brainy creature, but we still have instincts that prompt us to reflexively do things without thinking, when we perceive danger, or example. The same goes for birds. Somethings many of their behavior is coded into their genes and their brains might be incapable of handling situations that they have no program for.”
“Explain please”
Neil adjusted the water in the shower and stepped into the warm stream of water. A soft envelope of steam gathered around him. It felt good to just stand in the warm shower.
“Marine iguanas are not the swiftest of land animals. They come up the rocky slopes ponderously, towards the nest of these birds. The birds themselves are not exactly tiny and they have a beak that could be considered sharp. They could, I think, easily try to fight the iguanas, snapping at their tails and even drawing blood. Usually a female will go to any length to protect its babies, even face great danger.”
“Yes, or course”
“But, not the flightless cormorants of the Galapagos”
“No ?”
“No”
“Why not?”
“I don’t have the answer, but I can guess. Living on an island that had no natural predator, the cormorants eventually lost the ability to fly. That same evolutionary adaptation might have also removed the genes that are inherent in cormorants and most other creatures elsewhere – to fierce protect its eggs, chicks and babies.”
“Ohh. So what do they do, when the iguanas come?”
They stand next to the nest, watch the iguanas slowly eat the eggs, and tuck their beaks into their own feather – a sign of confusion, I think.”
“How terrible”.
“Well, thats actually evolution. Given sufficient time, lie a thousand generations more of evolution, if the cormorants do not go extinct, and are not overly protected by man, and if the iguanas too do not go extinct, then it is likely that the Galapagos cormorants of the future would show ability to deal with this new threat to their survival.”
Neil stepped out of the shower, and grabbed a second large towel.
“Hmm, and why did you compare us with them ?”
“What ?”
“You know, lemmings and the flightless cormorants ?”
“Ahh” Neil chuckled. “I was mentioning how people know we are heading in the wrong direction and still ignore it, hoping that the real bad times may come after they are already dead, so the next generation may deal with it. A vast number of others are simply ignorant. Others do not wish to know, since there is no good solution to it. In short, the world remains in denial, and is unable to deal with an impending crisis. In that, I thought their behavior resembles that of the flightless cormorants of Galapagos, when faced with the danger of seeing their future babies killed by a slow moving menace. We too are sacrificing our children’s future to a slow moving menace. But in our case, the menace is our own creation.”
“And this bothers you?”
Neil nodded, stepping out of the bathroom naked. He fished around in his bag and pulled on a fresh set of clothes, and stood before the mirror, combing his hair.
“Ready?” Mabel asked.
“Yes – lets forget the pensive mood, the lemmings, the cormorants, the iguanas and the disbelievers. We shall enjoy the town of Golden on foot.” Neil took her hand, and they walked out towards the elevator.

Missing the world of his father’s paintings

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“There was a movie, in Bengali, with that name – Storm Warning” Neil mused.
“Really ? What did it say about the climate? Was it in English?”
They were sitting on a large boulder by the side of a small river fighting its way through an iced up landscape, early in the afternoon on the Easter Friday, in among the Cascade mountains. They had a few hundred kilometers still to go to reach their destination for the night – in the town of Golden.
They had been discussing climate change, and what might be in store for the planet, for the continent, for Canada and for British Columbia, a very loaded subject. They did not have depth of comprehension – but both knew things were reaching a crisis point, and information was not easy to get because the authorities seem to be either in denial, or unwilling to alarm the public. They were not calling a spade a spade.

Neil picked up a pebble and tossed it down the slope to the edge of the water. He wondered about the high concentration of sharp stone fragments below them. These were not pebbles that were pushed a long distance by a fast flowing river, helping to grind and polish them into smooth spheroids. He briefly wondered if these were crushed from the nearby peaks through past seismic tremors, or broken from the rocks by an ancient glacier and left at the current location. They were not exactly at the foothill of a sliding slope, so they did not get here from a recent rock fall or an avalanche.
He sometimes wished he was a geologist, or at least knew a bit more about geology.
His thoughts returned to Mabel’s question.
He had been talking about tell tale signs of impending trouble, and used the term Storm warning to drive a point. It was then that he remembered the Bengali movie. It wasn’t about Climate change. It was a different time, and the warning was of something else equally menacing for the people of Bengal – an impending famine that would kill millions, in the middle of the second world war. It was now acknowledged that the famine was man made, and not by natural calamity. The world war had something to do with it. The British Empire’s handling of the situation which perhaps indicated less regard for life of Indians than lives of the British, also were likely factors.

Anyhow, the name of the movie – by Satyajit Ray, came to him.
“It was not about climate change, but about an impending famine. It was in Bengali, and the name of the film in Bengali was Asani Sanket, which means storm warning. Somehow, the situation now reminded me of that movie. Villagers at the front line of the worsening situation did not have a good grasp of what was happening and why, since there was no draught and drastic drop of food grain production. Things appeared to go on as it always had. But there were tell tale signs, some folks were beginning to starve for no good reason. News was difficult to come by. Folks did not know things were slowly reaching a crisis point, till the crisis actually hit them in the face.”
Mabel was listening, tilting her head as if cocking an ear in a typical way that only she could do. She was also poking at a bit of snow tucked at the corner of a boulder near her feet.
“I’d like to see that movie, if you will explain the scenes to me. And also explain why and how the famine came by.”
“Hmmm… I have to see if its available on line, or if I can get a DVD” Neil nodded.
“Situation with the coming Climate Uncertainty is not too different. We are living in the information age – with the world wired up and news traveling around at the speed of light. And yet, the silence about the impending storm is mind boggling.”
“And you like Mukherjee and Dyer.” Mabel observed.
Neil chuckled. He had told her about another book, by Madhusree Mukherjee, on Churchill’s actions, or lack of it, with regard to the ill-famed Bengal famine of 1943. And Gwynne Dyer had written a book that he had in the eBook format, and often referred to, called Climate Wars. Dyer’s book was written more like a science fiction, written based on a future date. It did not predict what might happen in the future. Rather, the book pretends that it is already in the future, and is talking about historical things that has happened in the past. But the past involves the future for the current Calendar.
“You gotta read Dyer. He predicts what happens to Canada, but more importantly, what happens to the US-Mexico border and what happens to Mexico, when the world runs short of food and more or less stops selling excess grain in the world market. Mexico descends into anarchy and its population shrinks by thirty or forty million people.”
“My God !”
“Well, you should read it. It is not designed as a science fiction, but a very likely scenario with a lot of supporting comments and explanations. Things do not end up well for a whole lot of countries – and not just Mexico.”
Mabel signed. “What is one to do?”
Neil stretched his legs. “Singularly, there may be nothing one can do. Collectively, surely there are things one can do. But I have a feeling even the strongest of the Climate Change believers and sustainable living proponents are not coming clean and not calling a spade a spade. And that, for me, is a bit frustrating. However, I can understand some of the reasoning. One can compare the public with lemmings on one side, or the flightless cormorants of the Galapagos, on the other.”
It occurred to Mabel that Neil probably had a vivid imagination.
“Lemmings ?”

Neil was watching the reflection of the white patches of cloud on calm waters of the river below them.
“You know what they say. True or not, they explode in population till they are so many that they have eaten through the food source and there is nothing left to eat, and the land cannot sustain such large numbers. A big chunk of them must die in one shot. Story goes that they go shoulder to shoulder and jump in the ocean to drown and die. Some folks say this is not correct, and that lemmings are not stupid. They do not commit mass suicide, but are forced to die in large numbers when their super fast reproduction system goes out of control and the populations shoots well past the sustainability level for a lean year. Anyhow, I have never seen a lemming in the wild, suicidal or otherwise.”
Mabel tossed another pebble towards the water, but it landed short, in the snow. Her folks were not too religious. She had a girlfriend whose mom was a liberal activist and passionate about individual rights and human rights, anti-war, feminism, open borders and so on. But Mabel could not remember her talking about any impending doom with relation to climate or human population, or about the constant degradation of the environment, a move from a sustainable plane to an unsustainable one.
“I do not have relatives or friends that talk or think the way you do, about the declining quality of our environment to the extent that it is an existential threat to all higher order animals.”
———-
At this point, Tonu stopped and looked up at the cream painted ceiling of his study. It was quarter to six in the morning of Saturday, a week after his trip to the mountains. It was going to be a sunny day, and he was planning to check out the Squamish estuary area in the morning. It would be a hundred kilometer northward drive along the sea-to-sky highway. The ocean, a tiny finger of the pacific, pokes into the land with towering mountains on both sides. The Squamish river meets the ocean at that point, creating a narrow strip of sea level estuary, rich with its own eco-system and wild life.
Meanwhile, he had woken up at his usual early hour and contemplated writing a few more pages. There was no important emails waiting for him, and the earth had spun a few more degrees without further incidence other than the general degradation of things.
He wondered if Neil, his creation, should be influenced by the paintings of his, Tonu’s, father. Tonu remembered the sketches and paintings his father worked on, mostly following the general theme of simple rural life and landscape that were captured on board. He was a student of Nandalal Bose, the esteemed Indian artist of the first half of last century, who himself was a student of Abanindranath Tagore and was influenced by Rabindranath Tagore during his days in Santiniketan. Depiction of rural landscape and rural lifestyle had priority in their view. He, Tonu, thought of this movement as a theme that had two objectives. One was a recognition that rural background was where India was culturally, aesthetically, artistically, economically and spiritually anchored and rooted. Therefore this back to the village artistic movement was not a backward motion against modernism, but a realization that modernism in India had missed the sustainability bus.
The second part of the movement was to create an appreciation in the collective psyche of the Bengali and Indian middle class, of the timelessness and beauty of things simple and rural. India was fast creating an additional layer of a caste system, between the city dwellers and the villagers. This psychological as well as economic and cultural division, over and above all the other divisions that man had created for himself in the Indian subcontinent, was a further humanitarian blow to the evolving social order in India. Rabindranath Tagore, the poet with a vision, realized that this needed to be eradicated. That vision showed up everywhere, including in the art created in his time and in the immediate aftermath of his demise.
Modernism, however, was going to come to India, and it would ultimately muddy the water about rural and urban divide as well as take the focus away from the village so much, that future artists would be, Tonu felt, hanging in suspended animation, attempting to give their art a somewhat “ethnic” Indian flavor, while same time pandering to the western world for recognition, and take advantage of the recent western accommodation for appreciation of non-western art forms.
The whole thing, Tonu felt, was bizarre. Art was supposed to imitate life. But life itself had gotten so artificial, that this falseness was bound to be reflected in art, especially of the second and third generation of artists that come out of the same school as founded by Tagore and now spread across the globe. And those that still remained anchored to the original theme of rural India, faded in the backwaters in the world of Indian art. Artists that cannot draw a tail on a donkey, but can make false copies of western cubism or impressionism, where the hot topics in the drawing rooms of the new rich. Industrialists that have come into money, and feel the urge to promote art – define art in their own myopic view of India and the world, and the rest, Tonu felt sadly, is history.
However, this sad story too needed to be told, in his own tiny way, as the world, including India, were busy recklessly following a false modernism and sliding down the ever steepening slope of an existential crisis with regard to squeezing the planetary lemon dry.
He was hesitant about jotting down his feelings openly, as he personally knew a lot of people that came out of the art school. Besides, he was no expert in art. In fact, he was no expert on anything. And yet, he was tired of pseudo artists and pseudo writers and false intellectuals, unscrupulous industrialists and phony political ideologues who unnecessarily muddy up any issue till there is no clear perspective left on any topic. He was also tired, in a way, at the hapless public dancing at the end of the trivia string.
But his comments were not directed towards people he knew. It was at the general direction where mankind of taking itself and the rest of existence as humans could perceive it. To him, these are connected. He could relate to the changing scene in Canada, to that in India, or USA or Africa. And most of it was man made. Most of it was unsustainable. Most of it was a direct result of man’s increasing level of interference with the planet’s health.
One of the earliest visionaries to have realized the imbalance, at least partially, was perhaps Rabindranath himself. He saw it as a grotesque takeover of india’s cultural, spiritual and aesthetic steering wheel by a newly emerging urban class that lacked a depth of perception, or willingness to investigate long term effects of their presumed lifestyle goals, and a blind intoxication with a western definition of development that was itself bankrupt as a perpetual formula.
Tagore instinctively understood that the urban class may turn out to be the agent of destruction for India, unless it could be made to appreciate the need for a healthy balance between the rural and the urban. The western societies understood it. But a modernizing India did not. Tagore spoke about it and wrote about it. But it is doubtful if his countless admirers and hangers on actually understood the cause of the poet’s anxiety.
Tonu’s father used pastel and earth colors on boards more than water or oil color on canvas. Tonu had spend hours with his father, grinding hollow rocks on a grinding stone, extracting earth colors, which would be solved in water and kept in glass jars, to be used on future paintings on boards as well as in murals on walls. Collecting earth colors from the earth was a big adventure for him in his youth, and likely played a big role in his love for undisturbed nature and how it trumped man-made alterations of the landscape.
The thought of his father’s sketches and paintings were not a random intrusion into the flow of the story where Neil and Mabel were traveling into the Cascade mountains of British Columbia. There was a connection here.
His father drew and sketched scenes that, in Tonu’s own life, had slowly vanished from those very spots where his dad had observed them. Those open lands had now been concretized,  asphalted, civilized, crammed with people, turned into a filthy near slum urban sprawl.
This, to him, indicated two things that were inter-related and going on, generation to generation, perhaps all over the world. One of them was the destructiveness of an over-producing, over-consuming, over-altering, over-mechanizing civilization. The other was an ever greater expansion of the human population.
So, on one side, each human in progressive generations was demanding a greater and greater footprint for himself on this planet. Then, on top of it, people have brought more people and even more people, on the planet, each striving his best to increase his own size of footprint. This was another kind of an out of control snowball – a positive feedback loop gone wild. This was, in Tonu’s mind, not too different from what is happening in Europe, in the Americas, or even in the Antarctica. The difference should not be measured between regions. Rather, the change is within. Greenland might appear remote and cold compared to Singapore. But Greenland is less remote, less cold and less pristine, than Greenland was a century ago.
And so, Tonu decided to include his own fathers painting into the story, but pretending that to be Neil’s recollection of his own father. Tonu had, in that way, converted his own dad from a real to a fictional personality. One that was, just like the scenes he painted of, slowing fading from the planet.
————
Neil nodded. “Its not that I have a lot of relatives that scream about the changing world in any realistic way. My grandmother used to talk about times when things were very cheap and how everything costs so much more these days. My cousins might talk about how it was easier and more relaxing to be in school and college in our times and how things have gotten so stressful in India for a student. The pressure to perform is so great, the stakes are so high, that sometimes a student is pushed into committing suicide because she or she scored 95 out of a hundred instead of 99.”
He thought for a while, constructing the views and images swirling around in his head.
Mabel took a sip of coffee from the cover of the flask, which also served as a cup. Neil took the cup and took a sip himself. They had gotten to the point of sharing their coffee. He liked it with milk and sugar. She liked it without. They had met halfway – with a dash of milk that barely turned the color lighter, and a spoon of sugar for the entire flask of coffee. Life was a compromise. Neil was getting used to it. So was Mabel.
“But no one”, Neil continued, “actually spoke about the inexorable push of human civilization that engulfs the planet as we know it. But, generation by generation, the change is happening, I feel somewhat certain. Take life ten generation ago. I cannot name folks ten generations back in my line, but I can guess how things were, a couple of centuries ago, just as the British, for example, and the French and the Dutch, were increasing their trading with eastern India, and how the repressive society of religious orthodoxy, social taboo and enlightenment were slowly permeating through the village life. I can imagine how a high caste Hindu or a Muslim would have multiple wives and how poverty drove people to do things he would not otherwise do. How a woman had to adjust to the lifestyle dominated by men at all levels. How surviving from day to day involved not only eating enough and not getting sick with cholera or typhoid, but also not getting bitten by a cobra or taken by a crocodile in the water or attacked by a tiger in the field.”
He paused for a moment, looking at Mabel. She watched him, wide eyed. “And then, I can guess how, even in their times, things would change, generation upon generation. How jungles will be cleared, wood would be sold, tigers would retreat further away. Extra housing and population would bring safety on one side and more sickness and infection on another. Life would be changing, generation by generation, even in their times. And if one was to look at it from afar, it would have been possible for them to use those changes they saw in a small scale, to project on the planet and on mankind, on a larger scale for future. Those that did contemplate these issues, and made predictions, right or wrong, where considered either mystics, or God men, or pundits, or mad men. But, change was happening then, and it is happening now. MY own dad made paintings and sketches of rural Bengal not five miles from his home. Today, that scene is no more there. It has retreated, just like the tigers of a few centuries back. Things are constantly retreating into the background, and getting smaller in the distance, till they become a point on the horizon. Finally a day comes when it is no more there. It has retreated into extinction. And this change is not for the better.”

Mabel had seen a handful of Neil’s dad’s paintings that Neil had mounted on his wall.
She thought of telling him how she loved those paintings. But somehow, that seemed not an appropriate thing to say. The scenes he drew were gone now, according to Neil.
“Some day, you have to take me to Bengal and show me where you grew up, and where your dad made those paintings.”

A vanishing world

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They were the only travelers on the mountain road, as far as he could see ahead or behind. The road climbed, turned, and snaked in between towering hills, and then sloped down and would at times upon up to valleys and lakes. The sky remained partially clear and bright. Temperature continued to drop. Snow piled up on the side of roads as well as on the hills. The mountain peaks were white.

He thought about writing, about his travels, about the mountains, the lakes, the birds. He could write about Mabel. He didn’t know if his writing was any good. He thought about what and how, he might write.
Someone had made an interesting comment, on a social network that he visited at times, about writers. It stated that the writer needs to feel disappointed. He needs to experience a deeply unsatisfactory situation where he found no recourse at hand.
Only then, may he create good literature.
He had read similar comments elsewhere too. It was a somewhat known idea – that human suffering is the main source of creative zeal.
He did not feel that certain. Perhaps frustration can create a mental state that helps write certain kind of literature. He had also heard the same thing about painters. IT was perhaps a convenient way to explain why and how so many painters and writers were poor and hungry in their own lifetime, but end us getting famous posthumously.
He doubted, however, that this kind of depression was mandatory for all creative artists of all kinds.
He did not know enough about his brain. He doubted anybody else knew either. But the human brain was behind most things a human does, including creating something silly, or beautiful. In fact, even the definition of what should be silly and what beautiful can be argued. In fact, they are often argued. There are many that consider the cubism of Picasso, as silly rather than outstanding. Out of politeness, they would not say so to others.
Sometimes, a handful of folks would try to create a heightened appreciation of certain kind of creative art, not necessarily driven by altruistic motives, but to create a ‘fad’ or a fashion. The motive is to see high demand for that kind of products, so that the promoter can make money by selling those stuff at a high cost.
He did not consider himself to be a famous art critic, or one that claimed to know too much. But he would not pay his own good money, to acquire a Picasso – even a reprint, to be hanged on his walls.
On the other hand, he was biased towards liking the kind of painting his father did in his formative years, often using subdued earth tones, recording simple rural scenes of the arid country of Birbhum district of Bengal. Those scenes spoke to him not just of art – but of a vanishing world that might not return again. Physically, those scenes were fading away, as progress and modernization turned the landscape. That landscape was etched in his mind, as a dirt road lead them towards distant quiet small agricultural plots lined by date and palm trees, and mud-walled thatched roof village dwelling surrounded by heavier leafy trees like Mango, Bombax ceiba, Breadfruit, Rose apple and the like.

He remembered walking through the low land on the dirt road packed with hard soil and lined with the gravels stones, where he could see the distant villages, while on both sides there were first the landscape of soil eroded by running water, exposing semi arid fallow lands that the locals called “Khoai”, with its signature red earth and small irregular shaped red gravel stones covering a hard undulating soil surface. There would be palm trees here and there, and an occasional man made pond with high earth embankments on all four sides, the embankments themselves augmented by a line of palm trees.
Palm trees lining the high banks of a pond was a common feature of the land.
But today, the road was of asphalt, and the sides had a continuous stream of brick and mortar shops and houses. The area had turned into a small crowded suburb full of noise, filth and trash. The air stank of fumes from the exhaust of countless two wheelers and small trucks and cars that continuously moved about, each trying to out-honk the other in an effort to terrorize foot walkers off the road.
He did not wish to go that rout any more. He did not care about that kind of development.
However, he still doubted that one needs to see such degradation of pristine beauty before one can be coaxed to create good art or writing. His father saw the original beauty in his early years and did create what he considered one of the best arts that he liked. He was fortunate enough to have many of them hang off his walls.
A generation down the line, he himself had witnessed the degrading transformation of that landscape. But he was not creating any art out of it. That was not wholly because he could not create art. He refused to believe conventional wisdom, that art is to be evaluated by third party experts before it can influence him. He was not part of the positive feedback generation and did not intend to tread on the positive feedback loop. He had already mentioned in earlier in his musings.
Looking around, he found a similarity, however much different they might seem to a casual observer, between the khoai that his father had painted in his youth, and the high slops of the Cascade mountains around him in the middle of British Columbia. Both were, to him pristine. He knew this was relative. Man had altered the land of his fathers youth a long time ago, but particularly after the place began to grow with an eradication of dacoits and a rise of settlements.
He knew that the landscape around him once had the last generation of virgin forests, with conifers so large that their trunk were as thick as two tall men lying head to toe could not cover. Trees that could have been a thousand year old, even two thousand. All that, and the kind of biodiversity that kind of a forest supported, was gone forever. In its place, were trees that were tiny, and barely fifty to eighty year old. Slow growing, these new trees where called the second, and third generation forests, continuously felled to feed human need for lumber.
He was aware of it and conscious of it. And yet, it was still better than the landscape converted into a manicured golf course fenced off to prevent wild animals, or not so wild humans, from encroaching.
He did not like man made clearings where townships are planned to come up. Even if they are planned and designed better than the way they came up back in Birbhum district in Bengal, they would still be an eyesore to him. A manicured and pedicured one, sure, but none the less an eyesore. Nothing man could conceivably create, could equal what nature did, naturally. That is how he saw it.
He came to realize that he himself belonged to the tribe that was the principal agent of destruction of nature.
That could be a source of major depression.
He thought about it, but did not feel depressed per se. Sad, yes, but perhaps resigned to the fact that evolution could work that way, enhancing a winning trait in a species to an extreme when the trait represented too much of a good thing, and began to have a snowballing effect of a destructive positive feedback loop. Things go out of control and out of hand in a big way, resulting in a crash.
In the past, such events might have caused mega – extinctions. The reason might or might not have been the works of a single species of animal, or even multiple groups of living creatures. It could have been triggered by external unanticipated events.
But one way or another, change in circumstances have happened that the highly specialized creatures were no longer able to deal with. Thus, whole swaths of creatures die out in sudden mass extinctions, leaving the field open for the survivors to occupy and expand, carrying a different set of traits.

He thought he might write about these feelings, along with the views he was enjoying, of the drive through the Cascade mountains and its third generation conifer forests.
“where are we ?” Mabel opened her eyes and asked, as he swerved the car to avoid a dark patch on the asphalt.

“Thats the Coldwater river on our right. We are going down to the Nicola Valley and the town of Merritt.” He said and reached out to caress her cheek.

Through the Cascade Mountains

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“I love the Cascades.” Neil observed.
They were by now a hundred kilometers from home, with another six hundred to cross before they would stop for the day. They were leaving the flood plains and slowly moving into the foothills of the Rockies. The great Fraser rive was turning from a meandering river of the plains of British Columbia, to a narrower, faster and fiercer stream of the slopes. The valley that was once cut by glaciers and now landscaped further by a hundred thousand years of work by the river, had extensive farmlands to the west. But as they moved further east and north, habitation stated thinning, and agricultural farm lands of the lower valleys started giving way to farmlands raising livestock and grass. Once they passed through the initial cascade mountains.
The Fraser rive essentially separated the Cascade Mountains from the Coast mountains of British Columbia. But they were moving east. Soon they would leave Trans Canada highway and turn north into the hills towards the Coquihalla mountain.
Mabel had been driving for the past half hour. Neil sat in the passenger seat and munched some snacks, and enjoyed a mug of coffee, while tinkering with his cameras and clicking off shots of the surrounding scenery, generally enjoying himself.

“Tell me about the Cascades, Mr. Dusty” She said, half in jest, while extending her right arm to him, palm upward, for a few potato chips.
Neil passed her some chips and considered her request.
“I am no geologist, but, from what I know, this range of mountains starts from California and moves north all the way to british Columbia, and always just inland of the pacific shore – the Cascade mountain range. The origin of this mountain range is more or less the same tectonic forces that caused the great earth quake of San Francisco a century ago and which causes similar events in British Columbia too, every few centuries.”
“Explain, please”

Neil scratched his head, and took another sip of coffee. The highway was no more arrow straight, and would constantly swerve this way or that, and slope upward or downward. The nature of the hills too were changing. The vegetation were going to get more intense on the western slopes than the eastern. Being so close to the Pacific ocean, and because of the natural westerly winds, these mountains got as much precipitation, perhaps, as the Himalayas got from the Indian ocean. And the high latitude of the place, combined with the altitude, resulted in a lot of the rain actually falling as snow. Some of the snowiest parts of the world belonged to the western slopes and peaks of the Canadian Cascade mountains.
He tried to think of talking about some of it to Mabel, without sounding stupid. Mabel had grown up here, and Neil himself was only a resident for a few years, and he was no geologist.
Mabel slowed down, following the road sign, and negotiated a downhill sloping sharp turn. She was a stickler of proper driving and following speed limits. She was, therefore, perhaps a better driver than Neil, though less adventurous than him. She glanced sideways at him.
“Well” She asked, arching an eyebrow.
“There is a thin and long ocean plate just to the west of the shore line, going from California and up along the western shore of Vancouver island of British Columbia. That plate is moving east relative to North America, and is essentially colliding with the American and Canadian shore line. That tectonic movement is the cause of a lot of seismic activity all along the west coast of USA and Canada.”
Neil said it, and sipped some coffee. The statement appeared disjointed and did not explain what was its link with the Cascade mountains.

Mabel listened, but did not say anything. She concentrated on the next turn on the hills. The sun was bright and the puffs of cloud only created relief to the otherwise a gorgeous blue sky. The conifer trees lining the road side slopes created the dark contrast to the lighter warm hues of the soil. There were very few cars on the road. Most of the people were heading south into USA for the vacations, according to the radio.
Neil was observing the scenery through his viewfinder, and clicking shots time to time. He continued to do so, one eye shut and the other lined up with the view finder of his camera, holding it up with one hand and supporting the heavy lens with the other. He continued to talk, while snapping off a few shots of the road ahead, with the hills and the sky and the clouds, and the beginning of the snow along the western slopes.

“This collision – click – is the result of not only earth quakes, but also a lot of volcanic activity, – click click – and the rise of a series of volcanic mounts. In Canada, these mountain range is called the Cascade mountains.” Click.
He lowered the camera on his lap, and started fidgetign with it again. They were moving at around a hundred kilometers and hour. The road was not super smooth, and the vehicle suspension was firm and not soft. A certain amount of vibration worked its way through the vehicle and through the cushions of the seat only his body and the camera. He was conscious of holding the camera away from his body and let his arms soften the effect of the swaying and the vibration, to get clear shots using high telephoto focal lengths. But, just to be safe, he set the ISO rather hight and subsequent shutter speed to two thousandth of a second, while also keeping the aperture smaller than f11, ensuring an acceptable depth of field. He lifted the camera again, and tried to look through the viewfinder at the surrounding mountain scape.
“So why are the volcanoes not on the beaches or in the shallow seas? Why have them hundreds of kilometers inland from the shore , if the collision is at the edge of the continent with an ocean plate?”
Neil lowered his camera and looked at Mabel. That question was quite sharp. He felt impressed, and also suspicious that she might actually know more of the Cascades than he did, and might be playing with him.
“What ?” Mabel sensed him looking keenly at her.
“Well, that was a rather clever question, and I wondered if you did not already know all the answers, and were merely egging me on for fun.”
“No no… I cannot remember anyone actually speaking about it the way you do. I love to hear it. I don’t know why the mountains are so inland.”
Neil nodded, satisfied. “You are quite clever and a thinking person. Pretty smart.” He observed. “There is a subduction, at the coast line” he said, lifting the camera to his eye again.
“Subduction ?” Mabel asked.
“Subduction” Neil confirmed. Click.
“What is subduction?”
“ONe of the plates is subducting, or sinking under the second plate as they collide. And it is the oceanic plate that is going under the continental plate. As a result, the submerged plate, going at an angle into the earth towards the hot mantle. Hence, by the time it gets too hot and begins to create volcanoes, the tip of the downward slanting plate has already travelled some distance inland, albeit under the Continental crust. And thus, the volcanoes happen inland. That is what I think. Actually, I read up on it and saw a diagram somewhere.”
They emerged from between two hills and the road turned sharply to the right, with a view opening up on the left. The surface of the road was dusted with powdery snow and black ice. A sudden spate of snowfall greeted them as they emerged in the open. Before them to the right, was the Coquihalla Lakes, and its surface was still frozen, but beginning to thaw out.

There was a designated view point at the side ahead of them and a place to park the car off road. Mabel stopped over at the view point and opened the door to step out and stretch her legs. They had agreed that he would do the bulk of the driving from this point, as the road gets more icy.
Neil stepped out too, and carried his long lens camera on to the edge of the viewpoint, looking down at the frozen waters of the lake below. There were animal tracks on the snow, along with tracks of people on skates. The edge of the snow were melting, exposing clear water that reflected the evergreen conifers of the slopes.
The air was chilly. Neil went back to the car and pulled on his wind breaker, returning back to the edge.
Mabel used her video camera to take a clip of the scene and concentrated on the snow covered hillside before them.
“So, can you name some of the famous volcanoes of the Cascade range? Or are they all dead.” She asked.
She had not taken her eye off the view finder of her video camera as she asked the question. Neil suspected that she was perhaps wanting to catch his voice and his comment on the movie. He considered the question and decided on a safe answer.
“There is a famous volcano in California, but its name eludes me right now. There are a few more volcanic mounts in California. Then, on to Oregon, there are three or four volcanic mounts of the same range – Three Sisters and the Hood being two of them. Then, moving further north to Washington state, you have the famous St. Helens, Rainier and Baker. Many of them are active in the US. Many have spewed within the last two hundred years. Some have done so multiple times in that period. St. Helens is a good example. However, the Cascade mountains in Canada are not live Volcano any more” He completed.
“Wow. And any names from Canada ?”
“All of them are from Canada.” Neil took a few shots of the scene and got back in the car. They still had a long way to go today. He started adjusting the seat, the side mirrors and the rearview.
Mabel followed him back into the car, this time taking the passengers seat. “What do you mean, all from Canada? Those mountains are all in the US.”
Neil eased the car back on the highway.
“Yes, but they are all named by a Canadian, and named after mostly British Explorers that worked on Canada. For one thing, these names were, I think, given by none other than George Vancouver, the British Navigator, who charted the Puget Sound area. The city of Vancouver as well as the island next to it is named after him. He also used other british luminaries to name Baker, Reinier, St. Helens, Hood and perhaps more.”
“Wow”.
“Yes. And then there were the Lewis and Clark expedition of the early 1800s through the Columbia river, to be followed by David Thompson and then Simon Fraser. All of them except Lewis and Clark are connected to Canada and British Columbia, methinks. Lewis and Clark, I think, were sponsored by the then president of the US, Thomas Jefferson.”
They drove on for a while, soaking in the country. They were heading almost direct north through mountain passes, the semi frozen Clearwater river running alongside but flowing in the opposite direction of their travel. Merritt and Kamloops lay ahead of them. The interior of the car began to get colder as the temperature of the outside air dropped.
Mabel switched on the climate control and waited till warmer air started filtering into the vehicle.
Neil settled down in his seat and changed the display on his GPS so it would indicate their elevation instead of direction of travel. They were eleven hundred meters above sea, and climbing. Temperature outside was minus three according to the display on his dashboard.
“The area really opened up during the Klondike gold rush years. Canadian Pacific Railway managed to connect the west coast with the rest of Canada through the Coquihalla river pass after facing a lot of difficulty in making a workable rail line through high mountain country. Logging became a very big industry, with huge virgin forest trees being felled and carted to serve the industrializing world. The rest is history. But the Cascade mountains were part of it all the way.”
Mabel put her hand on his leg and reclined back, pulling the peak of her baseball cap down on her eyes, and reclined in her seat.
Neil settled down for a stretch of driving when Mabel might take a shut eye. He kept his lighter camera on his lap, picking it up time to time single handed to squeeze off a shot. There was powder snow dust on the road and patches of black ice. He kept the vehicle on four wheel drive mode and was careful not to take sudden turns.
“Where do you want to stop for lunch?” Mabel asked.

Neil glanced across at her. She was not sleeping, but watching the scene quietly. The steep hills were typical of the cascades. The shaded slopes that were dusted with snow appeared faintly bluish. Small strands of trees gave the hills a hairy look. In the crevasses there would be heavy accumulation of snow, that would be coming down to the base, gradually gaining girth in the lower ranges. The nearby trees broke the image with their dark outline.
“We could stop over at Merritt for a bite, since we shall be going through it.”
Mabel nodded and squeezed his thigh in agreement.
They still had several hundred kilometers to go. But Neil felt happy to be here, moving along the mountain passes, with Mabel at his side on a long Easter weekend holiday.
A body could do a lot worse.