Category Archives: General

India’s greedy social climbing brainy youths

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chirajyoti Deb, Chaitali Mitra and Nabanita Banerjee like this.

Ravi Dwivedi shared Debal Deb‘s status update.

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

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

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

Tony Mitra

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

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

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

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

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

Living in a ten percent world

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

The selfish gene – by Richard Dawkins

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jennifer Aniston wears leather leggings for Joe Leno – huh ?

So, where does one go?

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

Geology of British Columbia

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

Genome – by Matt Ridley

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

10,000 year explosion, by Cochran & Harpending

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

It balances out my other 90 percent.

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Suta at the edge of the grasslands

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

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

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

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

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

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

They were recuperating and regrouping.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She was ready.

—————————–

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

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

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

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

And he wanted that woman into the story.

Othello

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

The vanishing Y chromosome

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It was a cold day for Vancouver. He looked out of the window, past the drooping branches of the cedar trees. The sky was clear. He checked the clock. It was just before six in the morning. The alarm was set at six twenty. He got up and shuffled to the bathroom, preparing for the day. It was Monday, and the start of another week. He was back in Vancouver, after a week in Houston, Texas.
By the time he left home, it was seven in the morning. Temperature had dropped a few degrees below freezing. There was no snow. The car had gotten a bit cold in the garage overnight, so he switched the Air conditioner on, setting the internal temperature to 19 degrees. His thoughts veered to the issue of the speeding Y-chromosome.
He knew the last of the 23 pairs of chromosomes in his DNA was the sex determining one. He knew XY makes a male and XX makes a female. He knew the Y-chromosome comes down from father to son, but does not go to the daughter. Y-chromosome and its DNA trace could therefore be analyzed to track paternal ancestry of a person. He had actually gotten it done for his own genes, and was proceeding with more detailed tests on the same item, hoping to peer further into his ancestral footprints.
Females do not inherit this Y chromosome, and therefore, this method of paternal ancestry cannot be used on females.
But that was not what was bothering him. This Y-chromosome had apparently evolved rather fast for humans, and the difference in this area between humans and chimps are far greater than the average difference in the entire genome of man and chimp.
He sipped his cup of coffee, and lifted his camera to the eye. He was topped at a traffic light, and the view in front showed not only the street and the city, but also the mountain range in the distance, with its snow covered peaks and the floating traces of clouds against a low contrast blue-gray sky. It was pretty. He knew the scene would change minute to minute, as the sun prepared to emerge over the sky. He squeezed off a shot, and then another. Setting the camera down on the passenger seat, he eased the car forward again. The light had turned green.
What bothered him, was the gossip that the human Y-chromosome was rotting, and on its way to extinction. Some believed it because it had, over the millions of years since it became sex determining item for mammals, been losing sections of itself, thereby getting smaller and smaller, compared to its partner, the X chromosome. Today, the human Y-chromosome apparently had lost 97 percent of its original content The story was, according to papers coming out, started 300 million years ago, as the mammalian class separated itself from the others.
However, the monotremes, such as the platypus, apparently had a different system of sex determination, based on five pairs of chromosomes, and perhaps closer to the birds than the rest of the mammals. But when it came to placental mammals, the 23 chromosome was pretty much the sex determinant, out of which the X-chromosome remained healthy and able to repair itself from defects through recombination, while the Y apparently shut itself off from recombination hundreds of millions of years ago, and since then had been losing sections of itself continuously.
He had another sip of coffee. But, apparently, it was not all lost, and the male humans need not panic, yet. If the reports now coming out of MIT researchers are to be believed, the Y-chromosome went into a sort of free fall initially, but later more or less steadied itself, perhaps through process of natural selection. If someone had a miniscule and non functioning Y chromosome, he could not produce male off springs, and would therefore go extinct himself, leaving the field ripe for more successful holders of Y-chromosome.
Whatever the reason, a greatly shrunk liliputian Y-chromosome was stable, and here to stay.
He scratched his chin and turned the car into West Hastings street, within sight of his office. He wondered if and how he might insert that fact about the incredible shrinking Y-chromosome, into the story of Neil, as he dealt with his job, his Indian perspective on life in Canada, and his dealings with a burgeoning romance with Mabel, while the same time having to deal with the emergence of a second woman. He might write a few pages on it in the evening, he decided, as he pulled his car into the entrance driveway to the underground parking.
—————————
Neil was slightly self conscious. He had put on a clean shirt and a a red pullover. He had actually stood before the bathroom mirror and watched himself for a while, and combed his unruly hair once more. This was an activity he was normally not known to engage in. But today, he had taken some trouble to actually fish out a cologne and dab his face with it after shaving.
The thing was, he was taking Mabel out of a date. This was the first time he was taking anybody out on a date in Canada. And if one discounts the few more or less forgettable events during his last vacation in India, and the trip to Shanghai, China, this was the first time in many years that he was taking a girl out. He had felt mildly apprehensive.
The other problem he had was deciding where to take her. Dinner was easy. Though he was not a wine connoisseur, he had been around the world enough to get around in international cuisine. He was not much of a drinker and did not really enjoy spending hours in a pub. Also, he was not a good dancer and did avoided noisy night clubs. The collective din of the dim lit and crowded atmosphere gave him a headache, and he felt out of place. He identified  this to be a problem, since many of his colleagues and folks he knew did like hanging out in pubs and nightclubs.
So he had asked Mabel out for a movie and a dinner. They had a choice of movies that were running in the cineplex nearby. The movie about Edgar Hoover was one. But somehow, watching a movie about a power hungry ugly gay man that secretly kept tabs on senators did not seem to be the best choice for a first date with a pretty woman.
Then there was a documentary about the history of Detroit. Neil decided to discount that too. Also, an Indian hindi movie with English subtitles was on, but he did not want to push that one on Mabel. Besides, he was not fond of formula movies in Hindi. He did not know if the movie was formula or above average, but did not feel enthusiastic about finding out.
Finally, he had decided to ask Mabel if she might like to see a film about a trailer park teenage girl that had stolen a car and driven a few hundred miles to a city she had never been to before, to search for a father she had never seen before either. Mabel had agreed readily, on phone. In fact, she did not seem to care which movie he liked to see, and was equally agreeable to see any. And after the movie, he said he’d like to take her to dinner in a Vietnamese restaurant. Mabel had agreed to both. She even told him, jokingly, that she was still keen to learn about the incredibly shrinking Y-chromosome and what he had so far found from the report on the DNA analysis of his own Y-chromosomes.
And so, here he was, standing at her door, feeling slightly anxious and same time elated. He was fourteen years older than Mabel. He did not know if this was a wise thing to do. And yet, here he was.

Mabel opened the door and smiled. She had this wide smile that transformed her face. She exuded a natural radiance and lack of pretense, an ability to put people at ease. She was mostly casual in her dress. Neil remembered her mostly wearing blue jeans or pants, more often than not with a baseball cap on her head. But today, she had dressed herself. Her hair was shiny and free flowing. She had on a dress and a sweater. She had a scarf around her neck. She looked lovely. Neil was conscious again at her youth, and their age difference.
‘Hi’ he greeted her, slightly awkward. ‘You look lovely’.
Her smile widened. She stepped back and pirouetted. She was aware of his eyes on her. She did not dress for a party, and they were only going to a movie and a dinner. But she had taken the trouble of dressing herself enough for the occasion. She was thrilled that he finally asked her out for an evening. This had been a six year wait for her. She fell for him the first time they met, when she was a mere sixteen years old and still in school.
The last weekend was the watershed event finally, when she grabbed his face and kissed him, taking the initiative. That had lead to them spending the night together at his place. This was hopefully to be the beginning of an affair that would end in them staying together for life. She had not yet announced anything to anyone. She had already been planning on how they might spend some of their weekends. She was going to accompany him on his birding trips around Vancouver. She had already borrowed a field guide and was reading up on the flora and fauna of the area. She had been an outdoors woman and knew as much as the next person about the local plants and animals. But that was not going to be enough. She intended to develop a passion and a level of curiosity about the surroundings that would match Neil. His curiosity about the natural world around them had rubbed off on Mabel over the years. She had inadvertently started reading up on plate tectonics, continental drift, climatology, ice age glaciation and a whole lot of other things. It even influenced her decision on the part time college course she started taking.
She wanted a career in line with her uncle’s business, in construction, interior and landscape decoration and building of homes. But same time, she now had opened another horizon for herself, and was studying architecture on one side, and geology on another. Neil, without any conscious effort, had played a large part in her decisions to go for college, and in selection her subjects.
To her, the age difference did not count. Difference in their race was irrelevant, and would not matter to her, although she suspected Neil was bothered a bit about both issues.
She smiled and winked back at Neil, causing his eyebrows to go up. ‘I dressed up for you. Like ?’

Neil stepped into the room and gathered her in his arms.

Old woman sacrifices herself

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It was one of those days. First, Tony did not like the title of this blog. He toyed with a number of alternatives, including naming a few of the giant mammals that went extinct between ten and twenty thousand years ago.
This was the time frame that was to provide one of the threads in his story. Many remember this as the phase of the last ice age of the planet.  It may well be that the earth was losing some of its ice coverings, while at the same time early humans were getting more adept at exploring hitherto uninhabited regions of the world. His maternal lineage was probably moving along the Eurasian landmass at this time, as revealed by reports of the analysis done on his mitochondrial DNA.
And Tony was trying to write up on this imaginary trail of an ancestral female that morphed from generation to generation, moving from one era and landscape through to the next, till they come into historical times, and the scene gets fuzzy. Clarity was to come as the second thread of the story, of a young Indian engineer meets up with his past. The story is not supposed to end there. The mitochondria that he carried would not be passed to the next generation. Only females did that. But he had sisters, and the line would continue, at least in the foreseeable future, onto a few more generations.
But, meanwhile, he was to weld the past with the present, which involved a Canadian woman, or perhaps two. Tony scratched his head and went back to constructing a scene that involved either a mammoth, or a saber tooth cat, or perhaps a shivatherium, that would confront an elderly woman in the central asian steppes.

American Lion - wikipedia

The woman in question would likely be separated from her clan during a hunting expedition that went wrong. While her immediate clan remained two hundred yards away, a group of the giant mammals, angry and afraid, were preparing to make a last stand against the spear throwing humans, when they chanced upon the woman.
There were a few things that was special about this woman – who was called Suta by her clan. She had, on an earlier blog, represented as a small girl sleeping in a cave during a winter storm. Now she was old. She carried a piece of mitochondrial DNA that was to pass on its copies down thousands of years all the way to Sunil Dustidar, or Neil Dusty, of British Columbia, Canada, in the year 2012.
But she was not alone. She had with her a kid – a small daughter, huddling wide eyed behind her, as she crouched, holding a piece of stone, and hissing at the approaching animal.
In the story, she would end up sacrificing herself, and injuring the animal enough to let her small daughter dash for her life, to the security of the rest of her clan – running the gauntlet of hostile animals in the central asian steppes, her tiny feet making small tracks on the wet snow as she dashed between rocks and ran, crouching. She was barely five years old, but was an expert runner and tree climber. She was hoping to reach the line of young fir trees beyond the gully ahead of her, surprising a group of giant rodents that were a cross between rabbits and skunks.
Meanwhile, the old woman, Suta, had been gored, or bitten, by the animal that felt trapped by the hunting humans on one side, and the stone throwing woman on the other. Tony could not decide what animal it should be. A saber toothed cat would likely bite her somewhere. He remembered reading somewhere that a human skull bore puncture marks of a saber toothed cat. But biting a skull appeared to be a bad way or attaching a human. The puncture marks might have been after the human had died. Perhaps the skull had rolled out into a stream bed and the cat was trying to crack the skull to get as the rotting brain.
But in the cast of Suta, an attacking carnivore should use the most economical and efficient way to kill a prey. A bit at the neck? Or stomach ? In the story, the animal would attack the woman partially as self defense. And the woman would ensure that the animal’s attention remained on her, thus allowing her baby to escape to safety. And while all this was going on, her own clan were frantically yelling and grunting, and throwing spears. Tony did not know how good the clan would have been in handling fires. Could it be that they learned the tricks of wrapping dry reeds or wine around the spear handle, soaked in animal fat or bitumen, and light a fire before throwing those burning lances ?
Such a tactic might not be any better than throwing a spear with a sharp stone at the front designed to pierce the skin and embed deep into the prey. But it might have the psychological effect of panicking the animals into irrational behavior and coax them out of their corners and into the open. It might also scare them away from attacking Suta and her baby.
If not saber toothed cats, it would be mammoths. It could be cave lions of Eurasia. It could be a sivatherium. When it came to saber teethed cat or cave lions, Tony felt unsure than a hunting party of late pleistocene humans would attach a predator of that kind. Also, it was almost certain that predators did not move in large herds, and would more likely to ambush the humans rather than humans ambushing them. So, a predator could be accidentally caught in the cross fire between the hunting party, and the giant herbivores.

Straight-tusked Elephant - wikipedia

If not mammoths, a sivatherium provided an attractive alternative. A giant giraffe like animal with multiple horns on its head and a mouth that might have resembled a modern tepir – this animal carried the improbable name of a hindu God. Why it carried shiva in its name, Tony was not sure – but such a name and an animal might add variety. Cornered and injured, it was massive enough to attack and gore a single wild haired human, especially an elderly woman wearing animal skin and brandishing small stones.
In the other half of the story – Neil was trying to piece together the thread of his ancestral lineage. Since the last blog, several things had happened. He had ended up sleeping with Mabel a few times a week, and stopped feeling awkward about it. His initial hesitation, because of the difference in age, as well as the perception of race, had not completely vanished, but were no more troubling him. Man was a creature of habit, and had a habit of getting used to things. Mabel certainly brought a degree of thrill and happiness that was missing in his life. She looked positively radiant some of the time, and very pleased with herself in general.
Neil guessed they were sort of dating each other, and were kind of paired up. His idea of dating normally involved taking a woman out for an evening of eating, or drinking, or watching a movie or something. But Neil had done none of those. If they went out together, more often than not in involved walking around in sandy shores or among thick vegetation in some nature park. Neil would normally be hauling a heavy camera and lens mounted on a tripod – the whole contraption balanced on his shoulder as he moved. Mabel would also have a backpack with additional photography gear of Neil. But lately she started adding sandwiches, fruit juice, water, and even a birders field guide to her pack. Neil did not like carrying field guides, but refer to them later, back in his car, or back home. But Mabel wanted to catch up on the general identification of birds. She was soon to learn the difference between different kinds of swifts, martins and swallows, or gulls, or birds of prey, and waders.
She loved spending time with Neil, and Neil was getting used to having another person with him on his days of bird watching.
There was going to be complications coming into the cozy relationship developing between Neil and Mabel. They were not aware of it yet.

———————————-

Cave bear worship - wikipedia

Cave Paintings of ice age eurasian animals - wikipedia

The story was soon going to have some sort of a triangle. There needed to be either another woman, or another man or both. Tony was more inclined to create another woman, a single mother with a child. He even named her Karen.
Two months ago, Tony did not have a clue on the plot for the story. But that was two months ago.
Tony stopped typing and put away the laptop for a while. He was hungry. He spent the last few hours walking about in the Galleria mall in Houston and move through the stores of Macy, Sacks fifth avenue, Sony, Apple, and a number of others, without finding a single thing he wanted to buy. The closest he came to purchasing anything was a half sleeve white sweater in Macy. But they had small sizes and extra large but no Large size, which was the right size for him. Just as well, he really did not need a white half sleeve sweater, even if it looked nice.
Why he was there? Well, he had finished his work ahead of time, and instead of returning home to Vancouver on Sunday, he tried to rebook his flight a day earlier, but failed. So, he essentially had a day to spare. He decided against going out to the art galleries, or the nature parks, or search out some friends there. The walk in the mall was more to do with stretching his legs and getting some exercise.
Sitting near the fountain inside the mall, he had read up two newspapers, the Financial Time, and Houston Chronicle. He was unimpressed by the trivia but liked a few articles, especially in the pink Financial Times.
Papers had their share of news about the fighting republican candidates that wishes to challenge Obama in the coming presidential election. He found the news mostly boring, and also silly.
Nobody discussed real politics, or real economics, or real anything anymore.He had left the papers and moved on. Perhaps another shopper would find a better use for them.
He had stopped at a spot where baby dogs were on sale for potential pet owners. The dog pups were a hit among young children. There were no price tags, so Tony did not know how much they cost.
Back to the hotel, which was across the street from the entrance to the mall, Tony had sat at the bar and had a beer, trying to watch a basketball game on the wide flatscreen TV there. Unimpressed, he came up and started writing about Suta and her sacrifice.
The item had a link with his own immediate ancestry, going back a few hundred years. He had learned, from his father and his uncle, that their ancestors had one deformed male that actually grew to adulthood and produced off springs that made it possible for the lineage to continue.
But the deformation was not from birth. As a child, he was apparently attacked by a tiger in what is today Bangladesh. His mother, a tiny sari clad woman, had chased and attacked the tiger holding a sort of machete. The tiger, or perhaps it was a tigress, got furious, dropped the bleeding child and grabbed the mother, killing and dragging her off to the marshes. She had sacrificed herself for the sake of her baby. That baby, now deformed for life, survived. Tony had heard of that story, from his own father and his fathers elder brother.
That was linked to his paternal ancestry. But in the story he was writing, he decided to attach a similar incidence, pushing it back to the Pleistocene-Holocene boundary, and moved it from his paternal, to his maternal ancestry.
But now, it was time for a hearty meal. Tony decided to walk back into the mall. He had seen a nice restaurant and bar that was better than the coffee shop in the hotel. He was planning to have a glass of wine, a very large salad, and perhaps a cheese cake.
He put put on his wind cheater, took his iPad, and walked out of the hotel, mulling about a saber toothed tiger, a four tusked mammoth, and a shivatherium, and how a tiny woman might sacrifice herself to save her daughter, thus allowing her mitochondrial DNA to survive through another ten thousand years all the way to the present.

Cult of Tagore

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Lately, I have been changing my interface with social networking sites on internet – by reducing my presence in Facebook and increasing it in google plus.
Facebook was getting to be a bit addictive and I decided to cut the addiction. It was also taking more of my shrinking slice of personal time. I concluded that the time spent on Facebook was more wasteful than productive. And after having quit smoking, I felt confident of kicking any bad habit.
We are creatures of habit, and develop attachments through our lives. Our growing years have a lot of influence over our thinking and world view. It is without a doubt, that Rabindranath Tagore played a very big role in my world view, even more than Gandhi or anybody else did, barring my own parents.

Tagore Bust at UBC, Vancouver

But – I grew up. I matured. I acquired the ability to attempt to think independently and to step outside the proverbial box in order to do so. And as I matured, rather late in my life, I realized the need to divorce myself from some preconceived wrong notions. These included keeping Tagore welded to junk heaps of of sentimental dead matter.
Tagore needed to be freed from Santiniketan. He needed to be set free from Bengal. He needed to be unshackled from the cult of Tagore.
Tagore was many things, but not a cult figure whose mantra needed to be chanted mindlessly by the masses in the hope of achieving some fictitious nirvana. But, the masses will do what it will. I needed to set myself free from that grotesque caricature.
Tagore had written “Tasher Desh”, the land of cards. It was a great social parody with a serious underlying message. The land of cards needed to rid itself from millennial accumulation of dead habits and debris. Fresh air needed to course through their land and their lives. A prince charming came from a far off land and set them free. Rules that no more served a purpose other than mindless copying of meaningless tradition, needed to be broken. Habits that were locked in stone and unable to evolve needed to be changed so creative freedom could again express itself.
Ironically, Santiniketan had turned itself into another Tasher Desh – a land of cards. It had become moribund, devoid of new ideas or creativity. The cult had barricaded itself with mindless copy of Tagore’s words, like the parrot in Tagore’s own  satire – “Tota Kahini” the Story of the parrot. Santiniketan took to repeating ceremonially repeating Tagore’s words without understanding or believing in them. They did not promote Tagore’s vision by application of it in their actions and endeavors. Instead, they killed Tagore by parroting him incessantly, by turning him into a framed picture on the wall, a figurine to sell in Poush Mela. They ended up reducing his legacy to a mere creator of some music and dance for the weekend amusement of a group of hapless Bengali babus.
The cult represented a slow degeneration of ideals and values. Tagore the universal man was unrecognizable if one limits himself to watching Santiniketan, and the hordes of Tagore lovers sprinting all across the globe busy promoting themselves.
Santiniketan became a den for misfit leftists, dimwit academics, useless nincompoops that had no love for either the land or the people, and were merely there to fatten their pockets and live a lazy life without working. They ensured more and more useless folks accumulated there, supporting each other – so that the place was thence unsuitable and hostile for anyone with a wish to break the deadlock and inject some life into the comatose patient.
Outside of Santiniketan, the greater Bengal, in its own path of slow decay, provided a suitable backdrop. The culture and the cult has now gone virtually underground. It is not underground in a legal sense. It is not hiding from law. Its only crime is uselessness and failing to to display sign of life, energy, honesty or vitality. Thus, it has sunk below the radar of the living world.

Santiniketan does not exist for the rest of the world, and for good reason. It is hardly a place for bright, honest, free thinking, progressive hard working representative of humankind whose vision goes further than the tip of his nose. Shyamali Khastgir might have been the last free spirit to percolate through the dead leaves heaped at the bottom of that decaying forest.
It took me a lifetime to realize I was getting  supersaturated in this foul broth. My parents provided a buffer. They carried with them a breath of the past long vanished on the ground, but still surviving in the minds of the older generation – of simple living and high thinking.

But my parents are no more.
Today, we have a lifestyle of high living, dishonestly at the taxpayers expense, giving nothing in return. And instead of high thinking – there is no thinking. Cognitive activity is too taxing for the brain. It has been sleeping for two generations. It has lost the will to wake up and get to work. ঘুমে জাগরণে মিশি একাকার নিশিদিবসে।

With my parents passing, I was, late in my life, forced to peer outside the cocoon and look at the Tagorean world as it exists now. My extended childhood was over. I had to now confront the legacy of Tagore from my own perspective and look at it through clear glass of reality. I had to confront the unenviable influence of the cult of Tagore in denigrating the image of one of the greatest social thinkers and universal philosopher that the world had seen.
I could see I was soaked with this unhealthy odor emanating from the gathering mass of pseudo devotees of this new cult of Tagore. I was surrounded by mindless cult followers, stifling my air and blotting my sky. Half of these devotees wanted only to further their own little careers while using what was left of Tagore’s carcass as a stepping stone, while the other half lacked cognitive ability to think through anything, let alone analyze the intricacies of life, real value of Tagore’s visions or how these could be applied to an ever changing humanity and planet.
My social networking environment had been filling up a this slow stench of decay and a large crowd of nonplussed groupies under a Tagorean banner, that did not really share any of my views on anything. I was surrounded by people in denial.
This is not an uncommon state. Americans are in a state of denial about their decline. Western economic model is in a state of denial about its un-sustainability. The petrochemical industry and the governments they support are in denial about the end of cheap oil, religious nuts and the public in general are in denial about the threat of overpopulation. Everybody is in denial about the great mass extinction of species going on right now. Bengalis are in denial of the existential threat to their language and culture and the steady decline of Bengali thinking. So I guess Tagore cultists are no exception. My mistake was in expecting them to be any different.
Soon after the death of my parents, I started getting increasingly skeptical about the intention and the ability of hordes of ladder climbing Tagore worshipers sprinkled around the world. I needed to synchronize my views to match reality. In reality, Tagore and Santiniketan had already divorced each other a long time ago. It was therefore unfair to continue to keep Tagore’s coffin buried in the desert sands of Santiniketan. Santiniketan has to either stand on its own, or be buried by the sands of time. It had been conceived and nurtured by Tagore in its infancy. But that was a long time ago. Santiniketan had long since grown up as an adult, and has been charting its own course for a few generations. It needed to face the world on its own terms and on its own two feet, without support. If it was top heavy with weak legs, unable to support itself, it would need exercise. Giving it a pair of crutches bearing Tagore’s name would only lengthen its misery.
It took me a while to realize that in this new scenario, I needed neither Santiniketan’s residents, nor its ex-students to expand my understanding of Tagore. There was nobody left there that could add anything other than their own little agenda. Remembering the life and times of Leonard Elmhirst, I recalled how he, later in his life and much after Tagore’s death, appeared to be thoroughly disenchanted with Santiniketan. Was there a common link in all this ? I know my uncle Salil Ghosh had a long association and correspondence with Elmhirst, but the content is unknown to me. Unfortunately, I did not think of all this while Salil Ghosh was still alive.
Anyhow, looking around for a hangout, I concluded that there was no need for me to even contemplate a hangout on Tagore. The kind of folks that might drop in are the very group Tagore needed distance from.
There was of course another reason for tilting towards Google plus. It had its advantages. My first impression of the place was, I was able to find more folks that followed my line of thinking.
Say – wild life watching. There were not many that shared my hobby and interest within Facebook. Perhaps that could be amended. But here in Google, I found it easy.
Then – archaeology, anthropology, geology, sustainability, climate change, nature and wildlife preservation, globalization, financial crisis, plight of the aboriginal people, over-mechanization of industry and exploitation of the rural environment. I could hang out in specific hangouts, or create my own.
Are these things related to Tagore? Well, ask a Santiniketanite that is busy singing ‘Amader Santiniketan’ noon and night, and he might not find any relation. That’s because the cult of Tagore only learn to chant mindlessly and without comprehension, but not the application of the formulae in real life – which was the primary goal of Tagore for creating those verses, music, function and events in the first place.

In Tagore’s own mind, there was more life that needed living outside of sanctified temple-altars than inside. Of course there is elements of the Tagore’s vision in Universalism, in climate conservation, in activism to protect our forests and the lands, watching and appreciation of nature, sustainability, tribal life or the exploitation of our villages. These are the issues with which a younger Tagore would have loved to get his hands dirty, and an older Tagore would have pushed and cajoled the younger generation to get their hands dirty. Tagore’s visions were to be fulfilled in the outside world through appropriate karma yoga, and for a continuous re-thinking and striving for betterment of an equitable society in harmony with its natural environment. His vision was not to be fulfilled in walled zoos packed with robotic people programmed to parrot out Tagore music and functions periodically for paying tourists.
As I think through the life of Tagore and his efforts with humankind, both in India, and in the easter civilizations as well as the west, I can conclude with some hope, that Tagore would survive because he represented a path that was universal culturally, ecologically, economically, sustainably and equitably. It was vision that never claimed to be perfect, but always encouraged questioning minds to forever strive to tweak and fine tune. It was a vision and a blueprint that is as relevant today as was in his time. Santiniketan, meanwhile, stopped representing Tagore, or sustainability, sociocultural creativity, or universalism or anything at all that could be worthwhile for humanity. In Tagore’s original blueprint, the place and the institution, along with its ever increasing number of ex-students were to spearhead in a lot of directions to find creative and unique solutions to new challenges that faced humanity – solutions that were not a mindless copy of either the west or the eastern past. Solutions that promoted an equitable relationship between the city and the village, between the affluent and the not so affluent, and between people of different race, cast, religion and cultures.

Today, Santiniketan is so far behind on all the sociocultural issues of today, that nobody looks up to the place to provide any answer to anything anymore. Santiniketan therefore, needs to engage in fresh soul searching to identify a reason for its existence.

Rabindranath Tagore meanwhile deserves to survive outside of Santiniketan, outside of tepid academic debates, and power-point presentations on the screen in quiet auditoriums. He needs sunshine. He needs freedom from the clutches the Tagorean cultists. He deserves to be among the people of this planet, and not sterilized, myopic pundits and blind groupies.

And so – be well, Cult of Tagore.  It was nice knowing you.

Why write this book ?

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Well, for a start, this is not a book, but a blog. So, you might expect me to change that heading. However, I shall let it slide for now, because the text in the following paragraphs were largely penned a month ago with a view of creating an e-Book., and not necessarily a serialized blog. Anyhow, the question is still valid – why write this. The honest answer of it might either be – I don’t know why, or – I write this just because the idea came to my head. There is also an urge, I guess a natural one for an evolved animal such as a human living in the 21st Century, to express himself, and have some of those expressions available for passersby to glance at.

Animals mark the boundary of their territory. Perhaps these musings are similar to territorial markings of a new kind, by an animal that has gotten past urinating at tree trunks. In fact, he is moving into urban jungles where trees might be missing, or real trees are replaced by plastic ones – made in China. Attempt to urinate there might provoke unpleasant reactions, such as getting arrested.
The Freuds of this world might identify this urge to write as a hidden carnal urge, following an oedipus complex or something, perhaps an unfulfilled fantasy that prompts a person not known to be a writer, to start writing something, something that is not even addressed to a specific reader. For whatever reason, non-writers will sometimes pick up a pencil, or in this case, sit before a keyboard and type with eight fingers, producing material for a WordPress blog, or even an iBook, or on a web host, even using free software from Apple or WordPress.

If one is of a kinder disposition, one might see here a very human desire for social recognition, and an exchange that is more than a one-sided silent observation of players on the field, like bing a spectator in a sport event. He plays solo for a while, does his “talking” and gets off the podium. He or she hopes a few others might do the “listening” and perhaps even react to it by leaving a comment, or writing something in return. Its not mass communication, not Pope passing a sermon to millions of listeners and telling them what God wants out of them, and not Obama telling listeners why it is someone else’s fault that the US is having a bit of trouble.

This is a kind of one-to-one communication with a difference. It is initiated without knowing who the other party might be that responds, or if there indeed will be another person.

Most of us like to be appreciated – for our looks, or our deeds, or just because someone loves us. It feels good to be appreciated. This feeling might even be a genetic code linked to an urge to climb social pecking order, inherited from a distant and faded past when we were still attempting to master new modes of locomotion based on crawling around in watery muds of a primordial world.
Think about it – would writers write, if the world had no reader? Would poets exist if poetry was not liked by folks?

But, this is a new world, a new century has not only dawned, but has passed its first decade already. Stories have changed, formats have evolved, and the message is no more the same.

Consider moving picture. Among English movies, two of the very best I have ever seen are ‘To kill a mockingbird’ and ‘Doctor Zivago’, followed by a few more, such as ‘A patch of blue’. But, those movies belonged to a different era. Todays film makers are likely unable to reproduce similar movies even if they could, because the public today might want absurdities such as the Harry Potter, or Star Wars, or Rambo stuff.

Perception of reality has changed. Blood and gore is in. Moral values are in transit, and the shape and color of our culture, spirituality, realization and perception of the planet and its sustainability are very different today among different strata of humanity. The definition of ‘civilization’ can be questioned.

The same goes for regional movies. At least I can make a comment about Indian movies.

And then comes the books, the essays, and the articles. Newspapers have evolved and changed form. Ownership of papers have moved from small town flavor to mega-corporation globalized standards. The transformation is so great that it can hardly be called news any more. Its manufactured factoids that are doled out in measured doses to a global pool of mass patients.
Freedom of expression has turned to represent freedom to own and manipulate what expressions are “expressed” in popular media. The popular media is now a place to make money for savvy investors.

Ohh well.

For many of us non-cave dwellers of this planet, there is also this need to earn this fictitious and almost virtual commodity called money, in order to spend it so we can acquire food to eat and keep body and soul together. So, for some, writing is the means to sustenance – an existential issue.
But not for me. I do not earn a living from such writings. I am not even a good writer, either in English, or in Bengali, as far as I can judge.
Recognition is good, and often catalyses a person’s efforts to create more content that is appreciated. Being born in Santiniketan, West Bengal when I did, and growing up there with the ancestry that I have, an influence by Tagore and his thoughts were unavoidable for me. He was the first ever non-European to have been awarded with a Nobel prize, which he got for literature that was mostly written in Bengali, and a small section of it was translated by Tagore himself, in English.
In my book, if the world was a fair and equitable place, the first non-European to be awarded a Nobel Prize should have been the Bengali scientist J.C. Bose, Tagore’s friend that actually did the most work in inventing Radio. He should have gotten the award in Physics a few years before Tagore did. But, colonial India and racial prejudice being what it was those days, Bose did not get the award, which years later landed in the lap of Marcony from Italy.
So, Tagore, a few years down the line, broke another important glass ceiling – and got the Nobel committee to award him the prize in literature, and Tagore’s fortunes transformed itself, and he became the best Ambassador to explain the spirituality of the east, to the western world. His personality helped open a lot of doors worldwide in most continents of the world. But, as he got more and more famous outside of India, his homeland elites showed a perplexing mix of jealousy and resentment, proving that the Bengali and Indian intelligentsia, or the educated elite, were as small minded as any in the world.
Tagore often felt hurt by the lack or appreciation and even ridicule of the average Bengali intelligentsia (if there ever is such a thing), regarding his writings and efforts. The concept of Santiniketan was ridiculed, the language used by him, the songs, both spiritual and romantic, were misunderstood and/or often criticized by people who probably did not have the mental span to understand him. I personally have often suspected that people in Santiniketan today do not have that span, and do not understand Rabindranath. Even those ex-student community and sworn Santiniketanites that claim to be boiled into ripeness in the Rabindrik broth, rarely show an understanding of anything other than a zeal towards parroting his songs, dances and meaningless preachings in a pristine and almost holy ambience.
So, yes, recognition is a strange and double edged sword. People do not often want to recognize anything, unless it is some sort of a fashion statement, even a statement on cultural-fashion.
So, I do not know if that should be the prime reason for my effort here to write something. I am no Tagore, and have not his endless capacity of shock-absorption and forgiveness. besides, I sometimes question the very need for recognition by my contemporaries – what is the point?
Unlike Ravindranath Tagore, I have not yet cemented any unshaken faith in Man, over and above human institutions. I have a somewhat negative impression of both Man and his institutions, covered in a Darwinian layer of evolution which both attempts to improve a species and same time push it towards an ultimate extinction, to be replaced by something else. The new replacement may not be considered superior in your yardstick, but it would be more fit for survival, the only thing that really counts in the end.
And so – I am not particularly keen on mass recognition.
So the question expands to include my own efforts – why bother writing a book of this kind, even electronically on iBook?

I do not have an answer – except that, perhaps my genes are behind it, somehow.
How is that for a non-writer with an un-planned write up that was done in 20 minutes flat without a plot ?

Tonu

Hello world!

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OK. I have way too much loose stuff floating around on the web. I am going to close them down one by one, and transport them to a central container.

I created the site just today. It only has a transient front page right now and an address I can live with – www.tonu.org. I shall hopefully be able to use an email address soon, such as tonu@tonu.org.

I shall wind down the MAC iWeb blog/web site. I shall also wind down the Uttarayan blog site. I shall likely redesign the Santiniketan Podcast, and try to change its name if possible. Have little to do with Santiniketan any more.

And then comes the google blogotherium. I shall wind that down too.
Next – Facebook. It used to be an interesting place. But as I can see, it is perhaps ready to hand over your personal life to the US Govt,a nd is busy setting itself up as a investor driven corporation just like the rest of them. It already encroaches into my personal space by bombarding me with unwanted information of who is doing what, and beginning to bring in annoying number of phony sites and advertisements – slowly turning into an addicting rubbish heap. Also, far too many of my pictures and associated free form text is loosely hanging out in Facebook.

I guess I deserve a less intrusive space where there is NO ADVERTISING, period. Where people will only come if they wish to interact with me, or read my posts or see my pictures. Nothing else. If 99 percent of the people that know of my existence right now with Facebook stop knowing me – that would be just great. I am not Obama, and do not need silent observers anyway.

Yes, its hard to give up on an addiction. But, I gave up on smoking. I gave up on Santiniketan. I can give up on Facebook too. Addictions are not only useless – they are dangerous and destroy your moral fibre.

We can all turn a new leaf, sometime.