A cryptic message

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On his way to office, Neil’s phone peeped, indicating that he had a message. Since he was driving, he did not look at it, but wondered if it might be from Mabel. He was planning to go on a four day trip into the southern Rockies, and had invited Mabel to join him. But she was not sure if she could get away on Friday.
Neil would not read messages while driving. He decided to wait till he was stopped at a traffic light.
He looked out at the white speckles in the sky to his left that he had noticed through his peripheral vision. They were snow geese – lots of them. As he looked, they flew in to land on the agricultural field at the side of the highway. Snow geese had been a part of Neil’s life ever since he came to the pacific coast of British Columbia. At certain times, their numbers grew as more of the migratory birds arrive from Siberia. Some would then stay back, while the bulk would move on south across the border and fan out into the United States. IN the summer, they would fly back to Siberia. But some of them came in the winter to settle around the Fraser valley and go no further.
Neil guessed it would soon be time for them to return home to their summer grounds to raise chicks. Soon, he would not be seeing any more of them.

Snow geese landing on a field in Delta, BC

He took an exit at Knight’s street and eventually came to a traffic light inside the city of Vancouver.
He remembered to check the message on his phone. It was from Mabel. The message was : HI 6TH OK CALL ME
The text vaguely reminded Neil of the old days when telegrams had to be abbreviated into cryptic sentences to pass important news to far off relatives. He had seen a lot of old telegrams that his parents received, all kept in a box. Most where typed on a thin strip of paper, which then were glued on a telegram form that was printed on pinkish paper. It contained such cryptic messages – announcing births, deaths, marriages, safe arrivals and other events of relatives and friends.
Neil had no trouble deciphering this message though. Since he had Mabel on his telephone’s list of contacts, the message already identified itself to have originated from her. His phone clubbed such messages going back and forth between him and Mabel on a single thread, which made reading through both practical, and interesting.
They were heading into a long Easter Weekend. IT comprised for for continuous holidays from Friday, the 6th of April through to Monday, the 9th.
Neil had been planning to use that period to visit the lower Rockies of British Columbia and Alberta. He was keen to see if Mabel too might join him.
This was a major change in his lifestyle of late.
A sort of a bachelor till this point, he was apt to either plan this trip all by himself, or perhaps with another like minded male friend.
Neil’s interests were not very commonplace among the Indian diaspora. And while he knew some of the local Canadians, he did not know too many that shared his interest exactly, either.
The thing is like this – a lot of Canadians liked to visit the mountains for recreation. Some where for skiing and going along powdery slopes on snow mobile. Neil was not keen on that. In fact he did now know how to ski and had not made a serious effort to learn.
Its not that he disliked the idea of skiing. But he found out, early on – that the industry was geared to generate a lot of money through these activities. So, going to ski was not easy, even in Canada, without spending a lot of money that eventually end up in the hands of corporations. Somehow, the notion of pristine spots on mountains being the property of businesses, and all the gear that one needs to own also costing far higher that they should, put him off this hobby.
He liked nature but liked the right to walk around in marshes and swamps and dry country and mountain slopes that were unspoiled and unmodified by man, as far as possible. Also, he could understand a nominal fee to visit some parks, where the money was used to maintain the area and prevent its degradation. But the spot of skiing, in Neil’s eyes – was a whole different thing that he did not wish to enter.
Hereabouts, near his own home, he liked to put on his hiking shoes and go walk along the Fraser riverbed or the dykes along the shoreline of the Pacific ocean, watching the lowland vegetation. He loved to look at the tireless rounds taken by the northern Harriers as it glided in slow circles above the reed bed in search of food.

A female Northern Harrier in search of food

It cost him virtually nothing to do that, and he felt closer to nature than in man made institutions to allow him to enjoy a sport that appeared to him to be also a fashion statement that required access to a measure of wealth in order to engage in it. Civilization was geared so one would constantly strive to earn more money, so one could spend it all away in order to make someone else rich.
Neil perhaps still had too much of his upbringing from rural landscapes of Bengal still in him. He had not yet fully merged with Canada. And so, skiing was out.
Snow shoeing was a different issue. It allowed one to walk on stretches of soft snow and usually in back country to see beautiful nature. Going in winter had an added protection in the sense that bears are likely to be hibernating or less active. This, to Neil was an academic and hypothetical issue. He knew Canada had bears and had seen enough black bears up close and Grizzly not so close, to appreciate that. However, he still could not mentally grasp the issue that he might encounter a bear suddenly at some remote spot, where the bear would be startled by him and might make a threatening charge.
Anyhow, snow shoe was something he might have gotten used to, especially since he liked nature.
But somehow, in his few years in Canada, he had not picked up this hobby, while still spending most of his time outdoors, just soaking in the new country. Perhaps he would try that out, along with snow hiking and outdoor living in tents this coming winter, perhaps with Mabel.
Meanwhile, there were still lots of things to see and places to visit, for him. One of them was the Yoho National park and the surroundings. And he was planning a trip there during the Easter holidays.

He had a specific attraction for the Yoho national park. It contained the Burgess mount and the famous fossil beds of Burgess Shale.
Some half a billion years ago – that is over five hundred million years in the past, North America was far from its current location. Neither were all the pieces of the present North America in one pice. But most of the parts lay on its side, at right angle to its current orientation. Further, the central portions of Canada was a shallow sea instead of the current high Rocky mountains. And the time frame was the Cambrian.
This was a period when life had evolved in the ocean, but had not yet invaded land. There was an explosion of diversity among the sea creatures, some of which left no descendant. Most were soft shell creatures. Backbone, or spinal column, had not yet evolved properly. The only hard bodied creature of high population were the trilobites.
And, the soil of the shallow sea bed was a very fine silt. Underwater land slides to deeper depths would occasionally bury some of these soft shelled creatures and the fine silt would preserve their shape. The depth would prevent their bodies rotting fast or being consumed by bacteria. Time and geologic forces would then convert the soft clay into shale and the remnants of the soft shell creatures into very rare fossils. So rare that the Burgess Shale deposit is recognized as one of the best sites for the Cambrian era fossils in the entire planet.


And Neil was interested to go there and check the area, out of curiosity. He knew the fossil beds were not open to public. Also, at this time, snow still covered the slopes. But he still wanted to look around the area.
Mabel had thought she might need to be in town on Friday for something relating to her work in her uncle’s construction business. Therefore, she could not confirm if she was able to go with him.
And now, the cryptic text message on his phone confirmed she was good to go with him on the 6th.

The light turned green. Neil concentrated on the road, and let the iPod read out a book while he navigated the roads from Knight Street on to the downtown area of Vancouver.
He was onto the eighth chapter of Bernard Wood’s book on evolution and came to the issue of multi-regional against our of Africa theories about the evolution of modern humans. The issue of how to define a modern human was being talked about, along with the issue of possible Euro-centrism in the view that not only modern civilization evolved in Europe, but also modern man.
The fact that ancient cave paintings, a sign of advancement in human evolution, was there in Europe and not in Africa, was being used as evidence that Africa did not evolve modern humans.
But, as the book was careful to mention – there were other scientists, some of them from Europe itself, that pointed out two major faults in this theory. The first was – there were cave paintings in Africa. It is just that people were not searching for them in context of human evolution, and these cave paintings were not exactly where human evolution was thought to have originated, in Africa. The second problem was – in order to have cave paintings, a region should have caves in the first place. The region were the species evolved into a more modern form, did not have much caves.
Neil was absorbed in the book and thought back on the issue of the first humans in North America. People were still debating on this. Originally, the notion was that the folks came across the Bering strait at a time when the ice age locked up so much of the water on land glaciers that the corresponding low sea levels exposed vast tracts of land thus providing a land bridge between Siberia and Alaska. Humans might have inadvertently crossed over to North America while following the Wooly Mammoth.
Alternately, they could have island hopped over the Aleutian island range. Or, if Asia was not the best candidate, the could have come from Europe.
Some believe that the ancient stone tools in Spain resemble the early stone tools of humans in North America. Therefore, they say the origin of the first humans in North America could have been Iberian rather than Siberian.
Clovis point stone tools, supposed to be of Asian origin and carried by the early humans – is also under scrutiny. One recent view is that the Clovis point technology might be wholly home grown in North America. This means, humans might have come even earlier, to the continent, and then lived long enough to evolve a new kind of stone technology.
Some recent archaeological finds seem to point signs of the first arrivals to around 50,000 years in the past. This can essentially turn conventional wisdom about the origin and propagation of modern humans on its head.
Neil pulled his car into the underground parking lot.
Modern humans of thirty, forty or fifty thousand years in the past will have to wait. For now, he was heading into the Rockies to have a look at the places that gave rise to the grand parents of modern humans, the first of the multi-cellular ocean creatures of the Cambrian period – over five hundred million years old.
And, Mabel was likely to be with him.

An Eagle in the heronry

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He was fast asleep when the phone rang. It was not normal for Neil to be in bed till past 8 AM, even on a holiday. Besides, this was to be a bright and sunny day, according to the weather forecast online. It had been overcast and raining up to Saturday, and it would be raining against Monday onwards.
So, his plan was to make the most of it, by rising early, and heading out first to the heronry at the base of the route 17 as it headed out into the ocean for the ferry terminal at Tsawwassen. He often wondered who decided to name it, and spell it, that way. It was one of the more difficult names he had come across. It could easily have been spelled Tuasen or something.
Anyhow, the natural heronry at that location had come into prominence only recently. It was reported that a mass nesting site across the border at Point Roberts, USA, was the chosen site for many of the herons. But then an increasing number of bald eagles started nesting there too, with the aim of grabbing the large heron eggs as food for their own growing eagle chicks. Matters went so far as to prompt a group of herons to abandon that site and go look for another suitable one for mass nesting. And they found this spot at the edge of land merely twenty or so miles to the north, and just across the border in Canada.
And this season, the numbers had swelled to over 250 nests – about the largest nesting colony of great blue herons Neil had ever seen in his life.
It was there, that Neil had planned to visit early in the morning. But, his creator, meaning the writer of the story, Tonu, got up late. He went to sleep late the previous night. And so, as the writer got up late, by default Neil too, got up late. But in the case of Neil, he was woken up by a phone. The writer, Tonu, had to get up by himself without any external stimulant other than the light coming in through the large bedroom window.

Neil had fished for the telephone at the bed side table, while still have asleep.
“Hello”
“Hi, this is Mabel, morning.”
“Umm” Neil rubbed his eyes with his free hand. “Morning”. He squinted at his watch.
“Did I wake you up?” Mabel sounded surprised.
“Umm, yes, but thanks. What time is it ?” He was still squinting at the watch.
“Its ten past eight. You were to pick me up a half hour ago” Mabel laughed. “No harm done. Just wondered if the trip is still on.”
“Fuck .. Yes its still on, of course. Jesus, how did I sleep so late !” Neil was now fully awake. He got off the bed, found his slippers, and shuffled off to the toilet, still holding the chord-less phone to his ear.
“Give me another twenty minutes Mabel. My apology. I shall pick you up. Fuck” The last expletive was an uncharacteristic curse Neil had directed at himself. Normally, he would not be late, and even if he was, he would be relaxed about it since the change in schedule only involved him and no one else. But here, he had involved Mabel, and then failed to keep the time.
“Fuck” he cursed himself again.
“Relax, Neil. Its cool. Take your time, I shall have two mugs of coffee ready.”
“Great”, Neil was ready to gargle with the mouth wash, and brush his teeth. “What coffee?”
“Your favorite – Expresso instant”
“Okay, shall buzz you as I approach.. Mwaa, see ya”
That was then.

Meanwhile, the writer, Tonu, had done his own thing, including making his coffee. He had loaded two of his favorite cameras with two of his favorite lenses, and headed out by route 17 towards the Tsawwassen Ferry, the place with the impossible name, some twenty odd kilometer from his home in the south-west, and within a thousand feet from the US border.
On the southern end of Delta, to the west, the city had built two deep water terminals, to help the sparesely populated town to also benefit from economic activities of trade and transport without having to rely on nearby townships. But the ocean front on the pacific side as well as the bay on the south east were gently sloping and shallow soft mud deposited table of the continental shelf, not the best suited for development of ports.
To overcome this barrier, the city had built, on the pacific coast and just north of the US border, two long fingers of of road leading out into the ocean. Instead of building a bridge which may not survive major earth quakes in this quake prone area, the passage was built up with gravel and rock piled up from the sea bed. One of these two terminals were for cargo, and was called Delta Port. The other, further south and almost touching the border, was the passenger ferry terminal.
It was at the base of this road leading to the passenger terminal that the herons had selected for their mass resting. And it was there, that Tonu was headed.

Neil had put on a Canadian made wool-cotton blend button down insulated full sleeve shirt over a pair of jeans and his time trusted hiking boots. All this he did almost on the run.
Since he got involved with Mabel, he had taken to using mouth wash a lot, conscious that his mouth might smell odd to her, with his particular disorganized eating habits. Neil was effectively changing, and adjusting to accommodate another person inside his circle.
Mabel too had sort of dressed for the occasion, basically having a baseball cap on her head, and a blue-grey hiking jacket on, zipped at front and without a hood. She was wearing thick cotton jeans of brown color and had a pair of hiking shows. She even had a backpack on, and was holding two carry on mugs, presumably with the instant espresso coffee that she had promised to make.
She looked lovely, with the hair on her pony tail that stuck out of the back of her cap.
Neil waved at her and pulled the car over. She tossed the backpack in the back seat and got in, placing the two insulated mugs into the cup holders. Then she leaned over and kissed him briskly on his lips.
“You look lovely” Neil mentioned, meaning it. “And again, I am sorry I was late.”
Mabel placed her finger on his lips, silencing him.
Neil turned towards the highway, getting in the right lane for it, and took a sip of the coffee. “Aaah” .. It felt good as the caffein worked its way down his gullet.
“Want a snack?” Mabel fished out a wrap of paper from her jacket pocket and opened it, handing him a cookie.
Overhead, he could see a number of immature bald eagles chasing each other, and even a few adult ones. This was likely the season of the bald eagles to fight, to court, and to nest and raise chicks. The sky was often full of the shrill cry of bald eagles.
It felt good to be living in British Columbia, Neil thought.
“Its great, you know?” He said as he slowed to take an exit from the highway, on to route 17.
“Yeah… what is ?”
Neil nodded, tilting his head her way. “Everything. This bright blue sky. Me living in British columbia. Those eagles crying in the sun. You sitting next to me, and the radio weather and traffic channel talking about powdery snow falling on the mountains around us, while here down at the valley, the temperature is five, and the day looks so gorgeous.”
He slowed and turned right, into route 17, and looked around the agricultural field and dykes. There were blackbirds and sparrows in the low bushes. A ring necked pheasant browsed the grassland at the edge of the road ahead of them, and ran off as their car came closer.
In the air, a group of five long necked trumpeter swans flew north. He partly lowered the driven and passenger side windows and slowed the car slightly. Sure enough, the call fo the swans came through into the car. Mabel had noted the swans and were watching them, her face opening up in a wide smile.
Neil wished he was not moving, and that he had his camera in hand. But he was not complaining. He had the swans in his camera from other times. There were not many countries or regions in the world, where you could hear swans while driving.
“This is what Canada is, to me.”
Mabel smiled and nodded.
“And you, of course.”
Mabel nodded in mock seriousness. “Of course”.

A great blue heron at the Heronry

He pulled his car into the truck and trailer parking lot at the side of the road leading to the passenger ferry. Right ahead of them was the steep bank where the hill started.
At the base there was a cluster of tall black cottonwood trees, with dogwoods at their base and smaller shrubs leading up to some shallow fresh water ponds.

It was on the tall deciduous trees that the herons made their countless nests.
They stepped out of the car and onto the fresh air and sunlight. Behind them to the northwest, the highway 17 carried a few fast moving vehicles to the terminal. They could see beyond it the waters of the pacific, and Deltaport further away. There were ships alongside the jetty and cargo work was going on. Giant cranes perched over the ships.
In front of them, was the stretch of bushy lowland with a shallow fresh water marsh, where the frogs had started their cacophony – this being the first of the warm days of spring.

Across the denuded shrubs, stood the tall series of also denuded cottonwood trees, like tall sentinels. They could see behind the trees the land rise sharply to be the base of the hills. And in those denuded cottonwood trees, there were nests for herons. Countless numbers. The trees were chock full of herons that were jostling, crying out and pecking at each other, in a fierce struggle for maintaining their little patch of treetop real estate, while also busy either building nests, or attracting a partner to share the nest with.
Neil opened the trunk, took out the tripod with the swinging gimbal head for his camera, and set it on the ground, extending its legs to the fullest. He took out the long lens and proceeded to attach it to one of his cameras.
He kept one of his cameras, attached to a long black Sigma lens inside a grey canvas backpack designed for toting photographic material. He used it because it allowed him to store the camera body still attached to the long lens. He did not have to attach and detach the lens from the camera each time he used it. Besides, the backpack had many configurable pockets to store more lens, battery, flash and stuff.
Nest to the backpack, were two field guides, a binocular, and two books on sustainability.
Mabel leaned over and picked up one of the two books.
Neil adjusted the camera on the gimbal stand, balancing it  in the stand,  with the lens extended to full focal length. In that position, the heavy camera-lens combination would not tilt forward or back on its own weight in the gimbal cradle, even if he did not tighten the holding screws. That way, it could be freely swung side to side as well as up and down without having to fight against the force of gravity.
“Whats this ?” Mabel asked, flipping through the blue paperback book.
Neil glanced sideways. “Ahh, I have not fully read it yet. Its title says what the book is about.”
Mabel read through the title softly – “Beyond growth”. She turned it to read the back cover.
Neil lifted the Gimbal head so that the viewfinder of the camera was at his eye level, and he did not have to crouch to look through it.
Before he could train the camera at the herons, a soft chirping sound nearby drew his attention.
On a shrub a few yards from Neil, a solitary robin chirped advertising itself. Neil turned the camera on the bird, and pressed the video record button. The camera could take stills and high definition video. On the screen, he could see the birds throat swell, its beak opened and oscillate, every time it chirped. The sound of the chirp came clearly through to him. He was conscious that the built in microphone was prone to pick up wind noises and amplify them. Ideally, he should be able to use an external and directional mike that would pick up the sound without the wind. But, this was primarily a high end still camera that could also take some video.
The bird kept chirping for a minute.
Neil kept filming.
Mabel, seeing the bird, closed the book and watched silently.
To their north and west, one of the ships at Deltaport sounded its air horn – that penetrated the air above the blue ocean waters, and came to the bird and to Neil. The bird stopped in mid call, and flew off.
Neil stopped the recording.
Mabel stepped closer, watching the heronry, but still clutching the book, by Herman E. Daly.
Neil wrapped an arm around her waist, pulling her slightly closer in a sign of affection, before releasing her.
He left the tripod mounted camera and returned to the opn trunk of his car, fishing out his second camera.
Mabel watched the herons. “There are so many of them”
Neil nodded. “I think they have not hatched their eggs yet, or if they have, the babies have already grown. I do not see a tiny one anywhere.”
“Why do you think they have not hatched yet ?”
“Well, I am not sure when exactly they hatch. But you can see, many of these birds are coming down to those bushes by the marsh at the base of the trees, picking up twigs and sticks, and flying up to their nests to use the twigs as lining. They appear to be still engaged in nest building.”
“Yes. I can see that” Mabel nodded, turning towards the trunk of the car. “Can I use the binocular ?”
“Of course. You don’t need to ask.”
Back at the mound where Neil had placed his first camera, Mabel watched the nests, and the birds, through the binocular.
Neil attached another long zoom lens from Sony on his second camera and slung it over his neck, closing the trunk of the car.
Mabel lowered the binocular and pointed with her left hand – “There, looks like eagles are around too.”
Neil had noticed them. “Yes, there is a relationship in these areas, between heronry and eagle nests.”
He lifted the handheld camera to his eyes and looked at the tree tops, and then to the single mature bald eagle — and followed its path till he spotted the second eagle.
“There – the eagle nest. There is an eagle on it already. I think it is hatching an egg, the way she is sitting there.”
Mabel looked up, and shifted slightly to get a better look.
The robin came back and perched itself at the top of the brush again. It watched them briefly before starting its advertising calls again.
To the east, the puff of cloud had cleared, and the horizontal rays of the sun struck the heronry from the side, creating a contrast to the hitherto subdued scene.
The second eagle, sitting on a lone branch close to its nest, lifted its head skyward, opened its yellow beak, and let out a series of shrill calls, its white head lighted by the sun and in high contrast against the darker gray and greed shades of the trees in the shadow behind it.
It was going to be a fine day – Neil thought.

A road for Mr. Elgin

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I remember there was an Elgin Road in Calcutta of the old. Perhaps it is still there, in Kolkata of today. But they keep changing names of often. So I don’t know.
But, finding that book on Lord Elgin, the person behind the name of that road from my younger years in Bengal, was curious. And that too, while looking for some old history of Canada.Anglo Indian Attitude - the book.
And then to find out that he had had a lot of influence in three countries that I am reasonably well linked with today – Canada, China and India, was equally interesting. He was from such an era that I have no good grasp of. This was the time frame when India was ruled by a corporation – The East India Company. One of the books from that era claimed that a land of 300 million people were governed by just 1,000 civil servants.

It also claimed that the Indian population was fully one sixth of the world population at the time. That book, about the Indian Civil Service, or ICS in short, claimed that this statistics of a thousand civil servants administering a population of three hundred million made that body, the ICS, the most powerful civil service body in the entire world. But, that was a different book, named the Anglo-Indian Attitudes by Clive Dewey. And I am digressing a bit.

It all actually started with Ms Leena Chatterjee, who is a family friend and a neighbor and who I address as Leena di (Meaning Leena the elder sister, or a person deserving the respect of an elder).
Leena di and  her husband Tan Lee da had been a source of inspiration as well as a link with our collective eastern heritage.
Tan Lee da is an unique amalgam. His father, a famed Chinese scholar was befriended by Tagore and invited to Santiniketan, Bengal, in the 1920s, when India was still ruled by the British Government, And no more the East india Company. As a result of his father coming to stay in Bengal, India, Tan Lee grew up in Santiniketan and became a Tagorian at heart and at the same time a first batch IIT (Indian Institute of Technology) passed out civil engineer and architect by profession. His internationalism was perhaps completed by him working in India at first and then onto north and south America, before setting down in Delta, British Columbia. To cap it all off, he is a better Bengali than me in about all aspects except in appearance.
Leena di was the quintessential scholar that was only part Santiniektani, and part many other things that broke the mold. For one thing, she was a believer of Gandhi, Tagore and Karl Marx at the same time. I found that combination a near impossible mix, but then Leena di could separate what Marx thought and believed, from what people made out of his thoughts, and the same for Gandhi and Tagore. That was quite a feat. I did not study Marx much. To me, the similarity between Mark and Tagore was restricted in their beard. In fact I used to think Tagore’s beard to be more similar to Tolstoy’s for example. The similarity between Gandhi and Marx was harder to discern. Both wanted social change – which could be considered a similarity. The effort to bring that social change also became specific political paths for different nations. Those paths, incidentally, were diametrically opposite for India and Russia. One preached reaching its objective through non-violence or ahimsa, while the other called for armed revolt and a blood bath.
Leena di is also half Rajput and half Christian from her mothers side, and among the most educated person I knew. To me, educated meant something more than a piece of certificate paper.  Those who want proof that women might be better scholars than men, look no further than Leena di.
And to cap it all off, she had read the Vedas in their original sanskrit, and had also studied the Indian constitution, and knew a lot about constitutions in general.
So how is it that I write a blog named after Elgin, while speaking about Leena di?

It all had to do with the Imperial Gazetteer of India. Or rather, some of the volumes that were published by the British with that name, a long time ago.

The British had these great books published during their rule of India. But, before these could be published, material has to be gathered, which essentially helped describe India in as many ways as could be measured. These books were perhaps the bible for the future generations officers of the Indian Civil Service – ICS – that came to serve the Raj. Initially they would all be British, and products of the best schools of Great Britain. They were appointed under section 32 of the Government of India act of 1958 of the parliament of the United Kingdom.

 Initially, all thousand of them were British. Then, Indians started getting into it by passing the test. The first Indian to become an ICS officer was Satyendranath Tagore, Rabindranath’s elder brother. By the time of independence about half of the ICS officers were Indian. The other half, British, mostly left and returned to Great Britain when India became an independent nation.

Satyendranath Tagore - the first Indian born ICS officer.

Being stickler for detail and record keeping, they produced a number of volumes about India that was better than anything contemporary India had up to that point. In some ways, they are still the best work on the subjects covered, till date.
And Leena di had studied them in the past, and was looking for them in the present. And she had asked me to find them for her. She was also looking for census records of southern parts of India from late 1850s onward, in a hope of finding some details about her maternal ancestry, who were Rajputs that traveled south and settled around Kerala, became rich and powerful but retained their ethnic distinction by not intermarrying with the locals. Leena di wished to peer into those details, if possible, through British census and gazetteers.
I had located a few of the later publications under the name of Imperial Gazetteer of India volumes on line for her. There was a lit of altogether 26 of them in a series. The first one, Volume 1, was titled ‘The Indian Empire – Descriptive’ and was published in 1901. The last one, Volume 26, was name ‘Atlas’, published 1931.
These could be read on line. The first volume started with the following text:

“THE INDIAN EMPIRE
VOLUME I
DESCRIPTIVE
CHAPTER I
PHYSICAL ASPECTS

No one who travels through the length and breadth of the continent of India can fail to be struck with the extraordinary variety of its physical aspects.”
The term the British used at the time, was continent, and not subcontinent.

Anyhow, some of these versions were available to be read online only, and not downloadable. Leena di was not the most proficient in browsing the internet. Besides, Leena di was also interested in earlier publications.
And thus, out of interest, I located another source of them, through eBooks. One of them, The Imperial Gazetteer of India, by Sir William Wilson Hunter, 1840 – 1900, volume IV.
This over 500 page book was scanned from the original and put up as iPad readable eBook, costing 5 dollars.

And I bought it for my own iPad and read through it a bit before informing Leena di. And then I located some more books. One of them – The Tribes and Castes of Bengal. Ethnographic glossary, by Herbert Hope Riseley, was known to Leena di and she got quite excited that I found this book too, again for only 5 dollars.
These books were scanned and turned into iPad readable books. The quality of scans were very high, and included hand written notes, rubber stamps, and even signatures.
It was from a short text in that book that I wrote a piece on the ongoing novel, about the Lepcha tribes of northern Bengal and Sikkim.

Anyhow, I had by then downloaded free sample sections of over twenty books from the British Museum Library. If I wanted to buy the full version, each would cost me 5 bucks. All these books had been scanned and put up on line just in the last few months, so they were practically as virtual books on line.

And then, I searched for information of the formative years of British colonization of Canada, and found two. I bought both. One was titled ‘Canada under British Rule 1760 – 1900’ by John G. Burinot. And the other, was on Lord Elgin.

Now, that rung a bell. I did not know too much about the British Colonials of the late 18th century, but I knew Elgin was one of them.
I remembered that old Calcutta had a road in his name – Elgin Road.
And where was this road ? Well it was on the way to the Maidan or the New Market of those days. It was in the region just to the south of Theatre Road, west of the Chowrangee Road, and north of the the Circus Road. But these days, the Governments had been busy confusing the heck out of folks like us, renaming and re-renamign roads after dead people. Now we have Shakespeare Sarani, Picasso Bithi, Mujibur Rahman Sarani, Jawaharlal Nehru Road, Lord Sinha Road, Gorky Terrace, Albert Road, Laudon Street, Sarojini Naidu Sarani, U.N. Brahmachari Street, Madam Courie road, which is a dead end and many more. I often thought the American system was best, all roads horizontal are streets and numbered progressively, while all roads vertical could be avenues and also numbered sequentially. Thus, one could easily guess where any street crossing is located.
Reading up on parts of that book, I learned that Lord Elgin was a highly influential administrator for Canada, and had later been sent to China and India at important historical junctures, and was partially responsible for the history as it turned out, in great historical events in those regions.
For example, I learned that Lord Elgin, upon request received from India regarding difficulties the British were facing in relation to the fomenting discontent that would eventually spill over as the Sepoy mutiny, was instrumental in diverting many British military personnel and equipment that were going elsewhere, and sent them to India at a most critical juncture.
Likewise, Elgin, upon landing in China, helped in the final deals made there at the aftermath of the opium wars, that essentially ensured that the days of the Chinese rulers were over, and her days of subservience to Europe started.
In those aspects, his work turned out to be in support of colonization of Asia by his Britain in particular, in the case of India, and Europe in general, in the case of China.
His work in Canada, however, seemed to be of a different kind, ensuring that Canada would be an equal partner in the group of nations that believed in the same king of England, but otherwise ruled themselves. This, of course, only related to European immigrants of Canada, and not the original inhabitants of the land.

I had not read the book through. And there surely would be more books on the topic. I was no historian. But, reading what I did thus far, it appeared that he, being a product of his time – was probably racial in his thinking and could not consider non-Europeans as equal, or deserving of fair Governance.
I decided to read up some more about those tumultuous days, when the British empire, even after losing the war of independence against USA almost a century earlier, was still in its expanding mode, and the loss of the continental USA was to be made up by huge gains elsewhere.

So, if the local Governments of West Bengal, decided to change the names again, and if Elgin Road no more existed, I decided I should not feel too sorry. New happenings pile up on top of old ones, and eventually, take new flavor and shape. To know it all, one would need to pry away layers of it and peer deeper to find out how things used to be. That, in a nutshell, could be the essence of history. The road might have had another name even before Elgin. What was it, and how did it get that name, before it was changed to Elgin road?

I might talk about all this with Leena di some day !

How green was my Facebook

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I read the book ‘How green was my valley’ three times. The first time, I was in school in Santiniketan. I was mesmerized by the warm hearted and bittersweet story about a Welsh coal mining village of the 1930s by Richard Llewellyn. I was not as familiar with English then. I did my schooling in my mother tongue. And yet, I liked that book a lot because it had made me think. I remember talking about it with my elder sister, who had not read it at the time. After I spoke about it, she too read it. I remember that I was impressed by the Welsh names in that book.

How green was my valley – the movie

I remember how the main character of the book, Huw, would go to his sister in law Bronwen for advise. He loved the gentle character of Bronwen. I used to play around with that name, rolling it in my tongue and imagining how the Welsh  pronounced that name, so it would sound feminine instead of masculine. She vaguely even reminded me of the relationship between Rabindranath Tagore, and his sister-in-law Kadambari devi. I was just catching up those days, about the early years of Rabi, in JoraSanko, and often drew parallels between sets of information that floated my way. So, I tried drawing a comparison, however absurd it might seem, between Bronwen of the novel, from a welsh coal mining village, and the real life character of Kadambari Devi of Jorasanko, Kolkata, before she committed suicide.

How green was my valley – the book

Apart from the Welsh names, I got a glimpse of the now vanished life and times in a coal mining village in the western hemisphere. As I grew up, I came to associate that atmosphere in rotation with other regions of the world. It related to the mining towns in Soviet Russia and then to China and on to Africa, particularly southern Africa. And, in the name of progress, a version of it has come to India, with typical Indian versions of the political, social and ecological nastiness.
But, do we have a writer of the same caliber as Richard Llewelyn – someone that can write a book that can be the ‘How green was my valley’ equivalent in India?

I remember reading ‘Gone with the wind’ in school, with its social upheaval relating to a civil war and end of slavery in the US, and immediately connecting it with “Saheb Bibi Golam’ of the vanishing days of Zamindary in eastern India, on the last decade of the 19th century. The Indian story lacked the civil war and the social upheaval. The transition did not perhaps affect the common man too much. But the lazy and oppulent, wasteful life of the fading Zamindars reminded me somehow, with the fast vanishing life of the vain and pompous Southern Plantation owners of the American south. In India, the old lifestyle of people being born into wealth because they agreed to tax the residents for the benefit of the Raja, the Nawab or the British, were soon to disappear. They were to be replaced by a new breed to people that got license to do business by greasing the right palms. Ultimately, the coin was replacing the sword. But then, the coin had always employed the sword.

Saheb Bibi Golam – by Bimal Mitra

But – I did not find a book comparable to ‘How green was my valley’ with regard to the life and times of miners in India and their families, and expanding that, the general degradation of the land that such mining invariably involved. Even Llewellyn’s book did not touch that issue. Ecological degradation of the landscape was not in people’s radar in the 1930s. It should have been. Had they been conscious about it then, we might not be in the state we are in now. But, I am digressing.

My time in Facebook is going to taper down. The first thing that came to mind while writing about it – was How green was my Facebook. Somehow, I subconsciously connected  my departure from Facebook with the main character’s departure from his mining village in that book I read first in my childhood days. And just like the valley, Facebook turned out to be full of fond memories as well as wasteful and sad. That similarity resulted in me rambling for a few pages about that book, about Welsh names, and about mining. And now, I have finally arrived at the root – Facebook and the fact that I need to move on.
Facebook had been a wonderful place when I first got used to it. It was novel, it was like a virtual Kalor Dokan, or a virtual tea stall. Folks from different parts of the world would sit down and yap a little, exchange views and even show off a bit. Every one has a laugh, and then we go home to deal with real life.
And what is real life ?

I have pondered that question, but have not found a reasonable definition. Some would think my real life should be the time spent in the working hours of weekdays, when I am an engineer working for my employer. But I don’t think of that as my real life at all.
Some might consider the time they spend at home with their family as real life. I am tempted to agree with them, but am not sure.
To some, real life is the weekends when they can go and do things that they really love to – such as skiing, or watching soccer, or playing badminton, or, for me, wandering about the foothills of mountains nearby, just watching the scenery, or focusing on birds and clicking their pictures. I just realized I take approximately five hundred times more pictures of landscapes, birds and animals, than I do of humans. This has been the case ever since I got my first good camera, thirty years ago.

So, what is real life? Is it about humans, or birds, or mountains and rivers, or what ?
Whatever it is – it is not Facebook. But, for a long time, it provided an interesting parallel. Man is after all, a social animal Thats what sets us apart. We socialize, we communicate, we exchange views – because we are human.

It was nice to get back in touch with long lost acquaintances. Those were the heady days. At the back of my mind, there was also the wish that we needed to do something with our spare time that related to some form of community work – to give back to the system from which we have taken so much. This ‘system’ could be the school we studied in, the region or the people that we develop an attachment for, or the neighborhood where we live, the wider world, the nature, wildlife – whatever we feel obligated to for making us what we are. Its a token of appreciation and an effort to see that the ‘system’ will survive and thrive after we ourselves are gone. Humans developed not only communication skills, but also the notion of altruism. No?

It came from the general and fundamental understanding that systems need support, and the best support is one that comes from bottom up, rather than top down from the Government or politicians. It may be a wrong perception – but that was my perception and it stayed with me over the years.

Anyhow, Facebook, along with bulletin boards, blogs and such, became also an avenue to see if we could do something to support the vision of Tagore. Subconsciously, FB became a vehicle of sorts. But that was then, and I was more hopeful than wise.
It also became a vehicle of creative outlet. I doubt I would have penned as many cranky verses, “ছড়া”, as I eventually wrote, had it not been for Facebook. But, that was then, too.
Somewhere down the line, Facebook became just a thing one gets used to, and perhaps a bit hooked too as well – like a cup of coffee in the morning. It gets addictive.
We made many good friends through FB. But, along with that, we also accumulated junk. We saw more junk, we processed more junk, and we created more junk. By junk, I mean instantaneous flash in the pan that lasts a day, two days, or a week, but after that becomes part of the rising tide of background noise. This background tide of noise can, eventually, become deafening. I needed to get away, and look at it from another perspective. I needed to turn the volume down. I needed social ear plugs.

I had too many acquaintances on Facebook – way more than my brain or my time could reasonably deal with on a personal one to one level. So the question came, do I need the notion of having so many friends that I shall perhaps never exchange anything personal with? Do I need five or six people to like what I write so much, that I must advertise my thoughts and deeds to hundreds of people?
Our past is a great thing to remember. But there is one thing about the past – it is in the past. Not all things from the past will survive. I shall always have close and dear ones from the past – but, I should not need five hundred silent friends on Facebook just to keep in touch with a half dozen. There surely should be a better way.

Facebook is less green today. It is turning brown at the edges. Its details are beginning to fade. Also, as I get older, I find this platform more for the youngsters that have the time in their hand, and the interest in small items of their daily life. For them, it is perhaps the essence of catching up with the community. For me, it increasingly looks like a barrage of trivia that I do not want to know.

But, I cannot leave Facebook completely, just like Richard Llewellyn the writer could not quite leave his Welsh homeland, even as the main character prepared to leave that land for good.
Facebook, like the google forum on Santiniketan, like the “Santiniketaner Khata” blog I used to run, or the Uttarayan bulletin board, just like the podcast – they will remain fond memories and we shall retain contact with it, albeit from a distance. Distance is not bad per se. It shows us perspective. Distance is three dimensional.

I am not leaving it completely also because there are folks on this platform that I value, and who I would like to continue interacting with in future.

Somnath Mukherjee – for his sheer dedication and selflessness in community service towards the downtrodden Indians, and for being such an inspirational person.
Madhusree Mukherjee – for reminding me that taking up science as a profession should not make one uncaring about civic society and ecology.
Felix Padel – for reminding me that even trained economists can be caring ecologists.
Tathagata Sengupta – for being a smaller version of Somnath and growing up to equal him.

Edward Lee Durgan – for joining up with us for “Free Binayak Sen” March, after listening to me just for a half hour about Sen, and for his world view and firm commitment to principles that are so rare to find these days.

Ashley Zarbatany of Social Justice Group of the University of British Columbia – the second person that joined up on the Free Binayak Sen March in Vancvouer, who took the mike and spoke to the crowd. Although I have not had much interaction with her, I have watched her involvement with more issues of social justice. Folks like her help keep my faith in humanity alive.

Susan Bibbs of downtown Vancouver. She showed me what it meant to be a bleeding heart liberal of British Columbia – ha ha.

Ashie Hirji, the Ismaili rebel that read the Veda and practiced yoga, the entrepreneur, feminist, social reformer, secular and whacky, of downtown Vancouver of the past  and of Europe of present – for just being herself.

Subin Das – because I was once with him in college, because he know and spent time with my father when I was half a world away, and because of his perception of the world.

Pradip Malhotra – as the only person I know and spoke with on phone while he spent months on the Antarctic, not to mention being a great guy.

Lokendranath Roychowdhury – for being so intelligent, articulate and observant.
Chira, Barsan, Sujoy, Sandeep and others who, like Madhusree, live in the west, are from cutting edge Science and yet do such a wonderful job of maintaining social awareness, and compassion for the world. You may not know it, but you all have influenced my views on the balance between technological progression and regression, and the balancing acts between new versus old and good versus bad. I hope to find some of you in google + too.

Bhaiya, Kukul, Tukul, Moni and so many others – for being my relatives and friends – who I shared my past with, and hope to share part of my future with too.
Tapas da, Tukul, Piyali – the trio that, along with me, formed at one time the quadrangle of Santiniketan ex-students that existed on conference calls, on Facebook, on Uttarayan, and physically in Santiniketan as well as even here in Canada when some of them would come to visit. I shall always remember the great time we had, speaking with each other and rattling off. I even have recordings of most of it.

Then there are my many friends from Santiniketan – that I share a great memory with.
Ravi Dwivedi – because of the size of the lens on his avatar – ha ha.

And then there is Debal Deb, one of the few that stand tall in my view for wanting to buck the trend of globalized and corporatist food industry where indigenous strains of food are to be destroyed and replaced by genetically modified and patented food that will feed those that can afford to pay, and same time enrich the patent holder, and where the hungry will no more have the choice in selecting what kind of food he likes to eat. He, Vandana Shiva and others like them that defy the corporate Goliath and their cohorts in the Governments and decide to preserve indigenous seeds when no one else will – so a small slice of our biodiversity may still survive the onslaught of “economic progress”. But, he is moving out of Facebook and on to google+. So he did not really deserve a mention here. But then, I am a human and not a computer. I make mistakes.

All my local friends from Greater Vancouver area.
And many many others that I came across.
My thanks to you all .. You will see me here, but not that often.

I shall be more present in google+ as a social network site. Its easier for me to find folks and events that I like to keep track of. But even there, my presence may not be high. Any of you that have a gmail account can find me there. I am not even sure if it requires a gmail address. Anyhow, mine is tony.mitra@gmail.com

Other than that, any important message that is just for me – pls send an email. I tend to ignore mass emails since there are so many that come my way. An interesting statistics of the quality of our communication against quantity – out of 100 emails in my inbox, usually there are only two that are directly addressed to me by someone I know. The rest – are just floating debris.

Those that have an interest in catching up on my random thoughts and musings and creative writings, – well, there used to be bulletin boards, multiple blogs as well as podcasts, each carrying volumes of stuff written and talked over the past so many years. But I am winding them all down.

I shall only concentrate on one site, and write only what pleases me, irrespective of if it pleases readers. I do not aim to make money out of it and so I do not need to follow convention and formula. You can find that in www.tonu.org.

And so, here I am, starting with how I first read the book ‘How green was my valley’ and ending here, on a blog, writing how green my Facebook was.

Be good, everyone.

It was nice.

At the waters edge

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Saturday and Sunday were bright and sunny, and glorious in the color spectrum of the landscape around my home in Delta, British Columbia, about ten miles north of the US border.
Coming from India, I do not recollect being overly concerned about the presence of absence of clouds in the sky. Nature had been spectacular throughout the year and in all seasons. But that was then. I remember asking permission from my mother, as a young kid, to take a shower in the shower – meaning, go out bare bodied and bare feet out into the field behind our home, wearing only a pair of shorts, in the middle of a rain shower, and get thoroughly drenched. This allowed me to roll in the grass and generally have a great time while rain splattered on my face. I am not sure if it washed all the dirt off, since I was maintaining a sort of balance – letting the rain wash old dirt off, while accumulating new dirt by rolling on the grass.
I even remember stray dogs coming up and joining the fun with me – howling into the rain and rolling around, all in good fun.
But that was then. Today, the area were I grew up has no open field behind – it is chock full of cramped houses with serpentine narrow lanes, plastic and garbage collected at every corner. The area has a bleak apeparance, and has gotten dangerous because of petty crime, which I have no doubt, will mature into more serious crime down the line.
The grass, the sky, and the roll in the rain – is a distant memory.
But here, in British Columbia, the temperature is usually a lot lower than in India of my childhood. If I went out to bathe in the rain when the water is at 4 degree Celsius, I am likely to shiver and catch pneumonia. Besides, I am no more an 8 year old kid, not yet spoiled by the act of growing up and getting civilized.
Here in British Columbia, weather is a big thing. It rains a lot and the sky is often overcast. A cloudy day is warmer, in winter, but the gloomy appearance and the rain in the urban areas appear depressing, mainly because it is no fun going out in the rain when it is also cold and damp.
Clear sunny days are spectacularly bright, and also a lot colder. Temperature often drops many degrees when the sky clears up. This is a proof that moisture or water vapor is a greenhouse gas too. While the total amount of water remains the same with climate change, less ice and more liquid water on the oceans, and higher temperatures usually means more evaporation, more clouds and more green-house effect.
But, meanwhile, I spent the weekend roaming the country side around my home, carrying a heavy camera/lens/tripod over my shoulders, wearing a sort of hiking boot that was also thermally insulated, and wearing a parka and a pair of woolen gloves.
I walked and I walked. I stood still at some places, with the tripod on the ground, for long stretches, watching and counting birds at times, and looking for some bird that is rare in these areas. I have stamped my foot and watched as the tide runs out of the shallow ocean front at Boundary Bay, overlooking the coast of Washington state in USA.
And then I have walked through marshes, reed beds, sandy or pebbled land, through bushes and over dust patches and mud banks, just soaking in the atmosphere and marveling at the fantastic variations of nature.

Here I stopped for a moment, watching the near sights of trees. They sported different shades of color as spring came upon us. The northern snow tolerant trees that have needle shaped leaves, that do not shed all their leaves at the same time in the winter, and can be called evergreen, stand up as green outlines.
The tall leafy trees that went bare in winter, are showing signs of small buds sprouting all over their high branches. Some of these would be new leaves, and some would be flowers.
And then there are the low bushes, still bare of leaves. They show up as reddish brown. They are still waiting for a trigger. It would be a while before they too become leafy and green.
But beyond the tree line, there were the mountains. Vancouver and surround area are on a river estuary, which is land created by silt deposits of a large river. It is therefore flat and almost at the sea level. But the river itself broke out of a long and wide range of mountains. As a result, all around us, there are mountains and more mountains. Some would shed their snow completely in the summer, while some would retain a snow cap throughout summer.

I might have walked twenty or thirty miles in these two days, carrying heavy camera and most of the time by myself. Sometimes a guy or a small group would join up and we would cover a track together. But mostly, it was my own interaction, with the planet as I see it.
Yes, my aging body aches after two days of walking about morning to evening. Yes I would feel hungry at the end of the day since I had not stopped to find lunch at noon. Yes, my legs would feel tired. And yes, I would have deep sleeps at night when I hit the bed.
But, this was my way of interacting with the rest of the world.
I did not really feel lonely at all.
Given a choice, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Is it always someone else’s fault ?

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The date was November 8, 2009.
I had written on the then maintained blog on Santiniketaner Khata, about my feelings and frustrations about the continued decline of Santiniketan. It got off to a flying start to from a world beating institution way ahead of its time and geared to spearhead creative as well as social movements on multiple fronts for the nation, and for the region and for the world of the future. But from that, it has now come to a sorry state of irrelevance so deep and pathetic that it defies logic.
And yet, there seem to be no serious soul searching by anybody. I find the bizarre situation not an act of God, and not a machination of the Delhi Government. I see the people of Santiniketan, the Bengali group and the exstudents of Santiniketan as directly responsible for the deterioration of the institution. Out of them, the ex-students have been the biggest failures. They failed to live up to any single expectation of its founder.
This has been a cause of a major heartburn for me, I have tried to shake the apparently lethargic and drugged group of ex-students into some form of recognition that the ball stops at our court and to contribute into some serious thinking and joining hands and doing something more than lip service towards reviving the institution.
My failure, along with every other person before me and after me, has made writings such as the one I did in November 2009 so heart wrenchingly bitter. It is like admitting that we, ourselves, are the greatest failures as social humans.
We are in fact the reason india will struggle to get out of its difficulties. Those of us that have migrated to the west, we ourselves are responsible again for overseeing the slow deterioration of the west and devaluation of its great institutions and philosophies.
Its like a virus. We go everywhere to suck out what benefit we can for ourselves. But instead of contributing to its growth and giving something back in return, we have only learned to take and take and never give anything back.
Welcome to the new diaspora of educated Indians – the techno-maggots of the new millennium. We have mastered the art of training, and yet have not understood the meaning of the word ‘education’.

And for those that worry about the decline of Visva-Bharati, look no further than the ex-students to find one of the main root causes of its decline.
The decease lies within.

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Is it always someone else’s fault ?

We spend a lot of time, thinking and talking of Visva-Bharati and who and what has been the reason for its decline.
It is my belief, that the ball is in our court, and the biggest fault lies on the shoulders of the ex-students. Of course, I do not expect the ex-students to agree. Admitting fault is not in anybody’s nature.
Sunday, November 8, 2009

WHOSE FAULT IS IT ?

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

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

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

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

Next comes the Government, which is the custodian, and the financier, of the University.
Lastly, there is the vast diaspora of Alumni, literally spread around the Globe.

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

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

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

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

Tagore and Gandhi - Wikipedia

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

Why is it so ?

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

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

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

Why ?
It is high time when this critical group that has thus escapes scrutiny, be placed under the microscope.
This group is the biggest failure, the biggest shame, in the history of the University. And it happily remains invisible – while willingly passing high judgments on all others.
It is perhaps just as well that Tagore was cremated and not buried. He would have had a restless stay, having to turn in his grave so often, for the misguided faith he had placed on the ex-students of the University.
For the last 25 years, being involved as I have been with ISO 9000 Quality Assurance system, and with developing tools for self-analysis systems based on searching for the root-causes of problems in order that a firm might be able to self-regulate itself for perpetual and incremental improvement in its function and its operating process, so that the ultimate product can stand the competition and be counted as a quality product – I have tried to think things through for the past two years, about Visva-Bharati. And hundred times out of hundred, I come back to the same issue in the root-cause analysis, and in thinking through a road map for the betterment of the University, from the stand point of us, those that are not working for the University. Every time, without fail, the ball ends up in our court – and the Alumni are identified as the first and most critical group that should have, from our perspective, been engaged, been unified, and been proactive. And we have not.
The first step in all this would have been to get the Alumni together under one umbrella, and instill the first lesson in the process of self-assessment – learning what this group as a stake holder could potentially do, and what is has so far done.

One does not need to be certified as a lead auditor for ISO 9000, or for that matter, to have high level of experience in root-cause analysis. After all, these systems were thought through by ordinary people, using nothing more than a bit of common sense, and unbiased analytical thought. It was astute of Rabindranath, that he had come to the same conclusion, long before ISO 9000 was born, that the most important stake holder for the Asram should be the ex-students.
And we failed him. And we continue to fail him. And we continue to waste time, judging others.
Sure, we engage in some token activity, in a path of continuously diminishing returns, where more and more effort produces less and less significant return, and bring no appreciable change for the better. We all know, that the path so far pursued is a slippery slope going downhill.
And still – the ex-students continue to fail, and continue to feel good about themselves.

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

November 8, 2009

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I wrote than more than two years ago on the Khata blog. Now that I am planning to close down every other site, more or less, except this one. I thought I shall bring over some of my musings from there, to here.

Nothing much has changed in these two years, except that Santiniketan has faded further into the backwaters of the world, slowing decaying, along with the rotting vegetation of a dying forest.

Tonu – March 24, 2012

Autobiographic blues

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If nagged at Neil that he had not mentioned Karen, to Mabel. In all practical purpose, he and Mabel were sort of going steady. They were not living together, just yet. But, other than that technicality, there were an item, he supposed.
And yet, he was, on occasion, meeting up Karen, the single mother from his neighborhood, time to time. Today was one such occasion. Sure, he had not planned it. He had a long day walking around in the bushes by the dyke, looking for warblers, kinglets, larks and buntings. His legs felt tired and his throat felt thirsty. He had quenched his thirst with a bottled lemonade in a gas station. And now, he was heading towards the book store, hoping to pick up a magazine or something to read, and then sit down at the attached coffee shop. But who would he see on the road if not Karen? She too was heading the same way. Apparently, she needed to pick up something at the store next door to the book store, and was otherwise free. Her daughter was not with her. Neil had stopped his car and was talking with her. She ended up getting in his car so he could drop her off at her store while he walked into the book store next door.
She joined him there, and, as Neil could guess, they were going to spend the next hour, or two, together. Sure, it was a chance encounter, and in a public place.
But, it nagged him. Karen had a matured calmness and yet a refreshingly feminine and compassionate way about her that was rather attractive. She was a bleeding heart liberal and often joined protest marches for this or that.
Neil decided he would call Mabel up and tell her about the three occasions where he ended up spending time with Karen, two of them now without her daughter present. He hoped Mabel would take it for what it was, and not make too much of it. Neil, meanwhile, was not sure himself what exactly it was, if anything, between himself and Karen. Its not lime they were secret lovers or something!
Inside the book store, they ended up at the biography section, instead of the magazine corner. The biography section was at the back of the large book store, diametrically opposite to the coffee shop and the adjacent magazine racks.
Karen flipped through a few books. She had picked up a box that carried the picture of Queen Elisabeth II, opened it and flipped through the large and glossy book. This book, and some of the others, were displayed prominently on a table in front of the racks. A prominent spot on the table was occupied by a recent biography of Steve Jobs.
Neil glanced at the book racks of biographies. They appeared to be arranged alphabetically. Aristotle was placed next to Mohammad Ali, Louis Armstrong, Jennifer Anniston and Pamela Anderson. He almost picked up Aristotle, but then thought better of it and let his glance sweep across the racks. He remembered Aristotle as a Greek philosopher that had thinning hair and a good looking beard. A contemplative man, his writings perhaps laid the foundation of western philosophy and covered issues such as morality, science, and even metaphysics. He remembered Armstrong as a great jazz musician with a very interesting face with bulging eyes.
He was not in the right frame, to read biographies of any of them.
After ‘A’ there was ‘B’. Alexander Graham Bell squeezed in with Lucille Ball. Neil thought how it might have been if Graham bell used Lucille Ball as a model for advertising his telephones. The thought made him smile. He could think of a few more names with ‘B’, such as Babcock, Babbit, and Baber. But there were no books on them.
For ‘C’, Cleopatra, Bill Clinton, Winston Churchill, Fidel Castro, Tom Cruise and Christopher Columbus shared the same biographical pigeon hole. Perhaps an imaginary Clinton of the present could have an affair with Cleopatra of the past, for the sake of world peace. The couple could have been blessed by Castro, overlooked by Columbus, and acted on by Tom Cruise ?
He wondered if he might ask Karen for famous last names she remembered that started with ‘B’, and hint at Cabot, Cardigan, or even Caesar. But he thought better of it.
Karen put down the box on the queen and picked up another, on Elisabeth Taylor. Neil’s thoughts drifted to the time when he had seen the movie “Cleopatra” with Liz Taylor in the lead role and Richard Burton playing Mark Anthony. Charlton Heston was Caesar. Nice movie. He was young those days, and did not know that Cleopatra was not really an Egyptian princess as much as she was a princess ruling Egypt.
But Karen was a bleeding heart liberal and a feminist more than she was a woman in awe of glamor, Neil suspected. Soon enough, she had picked up another book on Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the contribution of women in the abolition movement as well as an early women’s rights activist.
Neil knew a bit about her, but not too much. He looked over her shoulder at the book too. There was a picture of Ms Stanton. Karen noted Neil too was looking at the book. “She was one of my early heroines”.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton - Wikipedia

“Hmm.. Am not surprised. I haven’t read too much about her,  or about the women’s right activism of the nineteenth century America, you know.”
“Would you like to read it ?” Karen asked, turning the book over to see how much it costed. It was not cheap.
Neil shook his head. “Nope. I do not like paying big money for books. I read a lot, and am not a rich man, so I have to be careful. I guess I shall catch up on them through articles or free press through the Gutenberg project or something.”
“Gutenberg project ? You mean free electronic books?”
“Yes. I got a lot. Lately I started using my iPad for these books, and already have over two hundred of them.”
“Two hundred ? Wow, you gotta show me how it works. Its amazing !”
Neil nodded. “I have the iPad in my car, can get it when we go to the coffee shop. Its quite easy, but I guess one needs to open an account with the Apple book store first, unless you have a similar account with Amazon kindle or something.”
Karen shook her head. “I don’t know anything. Is it costly?”
“Not really. Opening an account does not cost anything, but you might have to link a credit card with the account. Then, if you buy something, like an eBook, and if it is free, you can download it straight away. But if it is not free, you have to agree to pay for it, and it will be charged to your credit card. There are a lot of good but old books that are free, or where the charges are very small, such as a few cents, or less than a dollar.”
“Really ? Wow”
“Yes, sure. I can show you. If you like reading books, this channel has its own advantage. Of course, you can also go to a library, but I find that a bit of a hassle.”
Karen nodded, looking at him. She put the book back in its place and nodded at him. “You know, you are quite a smart chap and know quite a lot. I guess all folks from India are genetically smart.”
“Thats a croak of shit, Karen. Nothing special about Indians, except that they suck up to the west a lot and ignore their own downtrodden. Pretty disgusting if you look at it from another angle.”
Karen stopped in her track and observed him somberly.
“You know Neil, I need to learn a bit more about India and whats going on there. Perhaps you need to tell me about it sometime ? I am a member of some social justice groups and women’s right groups and such that also work with immigrant communities, and even support causes in the countries of origin of some of the immigrants. I think I’d like your input in some issues. I really do not understand much of it, and have not been personally involved in those as a result”
Neil frowned. “Well, I am not a social worker or an activist per se, you know. But, I can tell you what I know. I am a curious person and like to figure out why things happen the way they do. I am alarmed about the way India is going and what is going to happen there, just as I am alarmed at where the west is taking the planet and what is in store for the future of mankind.”
“Future of mankind ?” There was a twinkle in her eyes. “Is there a conclusion, Neil ? Anything I should be aware of?” She asked, only half in jest.
Neil nodded. Well, for one thing, good old Canada is going to disappear in another generation. We can talk about it sometime, sure.
Neil watched the books on the shelf. Walt Disney, Salvador Dali and Charles Dickens appeared to suppressed by the towering presence of Charles Darwin. To Neil, Darwin was one of the all time greats in his list. He was very impressed at a time as much by Dali’s paintings as by his famous mustache. He had read many of Darwin’s voluminous writing and still loved going back to them to re-read. But he did not feel interested to read a biography of him written by a third party.
Karen moved with him. She had her bag over her shoulder. He supposed the bag contained whatever she bought in the store, which was obviously not anything big.
“Do you know anything about the Rohinga people?” She suddenly asked Neil.
“Rohinga?”
“Yes.”
“I know some, but not too much. I know they are ethnic minorities in Myanmar, or earlier Burma. They are muslim by faith and Arab by decent. They arrived there in multiple waves, starting from I think around the 7th or 8th century all the way till during the British Raj. They are not recognized by Burma’s military junta to be citizens of the nation. They claim these people came from India. Hence they are essentially stateless and without rights. The group is recognized as one of the most persecuted people of the world. Now that the junta is moving out of power, and perhaps parliamentary democracy is on the way, with some important role played by Ms Aung San Suu Kyi, may be they will finally see some reprieve.”
Karen listened. “What language do they speak?”
“Honestly, I don’t know. I don’t believe I have met any of them yet.”
“Hmm, interesting. I know some Rohinga community people that came to Canada as politican refugees. I was thinking about them. Perhaps you’d like to come with me sometime to see a few of them ?” She asked.
“Is that allowed ? Sure, I’d like to meet them if possible”
“It would be fine, since you’ll come with me. We sometimes organize social events, like taking some of the elderly to a day’s picnic. Perhaps you’d like to come to one of the nature parks. As it is you like to go there to chase birds, right ?”
“Well, not exactly chase them, but yes, I’d like that.”
Karen nodded, pleased with the understanding.
Neil glanced at the ‘E’ section. It had Eastman of the Kodak fame. It had Einstein, Eisenhower and Thomas Edison. Einstein, just like Darwin and Newton, were among the greatest of modern thinkers in their respective fields, Neil considered. But he was not going to be reading a biography yet.
The F section sported Sigmund Freud, Ben Franklin and Douglas Fairbanks. Neil did not have strong conviction about either, so he moved on.
Gandhi was next to them, with Greta Garbo, Judi Garland, Clark Gable and Ulysses Grant. Gandhi loomed larger than life here.
Karen picked up the book on Gandhi. It was a thick hard cover book. She flipped through the pages and glanced at the pictures. She shook her head in wonder. “Amazing man”.
Neil smiled in agreement.
There seemed to be no biographies for ‘I’. This made him stop and think. Did he know any famous man whose last name started with an I? He could not think of any other than a singer by the name of Iglesias, and the business guru Lee Iacocca. But he found no books on them. Iacocca used to be an important corporate guru a few decades ago. He even read an interesting audio book written by Iacocca recently, named “Where have all the leaders gone?”
“Find anything interesting?”
That was a question from Karen.
Neil shook his head. “I am not much of a biography reader. But I can see you like picking up books of glamourous women?”
Karen used her elbow to lightly dig into his side, in a sign of familiarity he did not expect. He was holding in her hand a book on Angelina Jolie.
“I love her movies. Do you see movies much ?”
Neil shook his head. “Not much. But if its a nice movie and I have good company, I’d drop in time to time, you know?”
Karen smiled at him. “Are you asking me out to see a movie?”
She was kidding, but Neil did not pick that up initially. He felt flustered, and was groping for something to say, till he noticed her eyes. He laughed. “I thought for a moment, you were serious. Ha ha. I don’t even know what movies are running in the halls right now.”
“Ohh I can tell you whats running. There is a movie called Windfall. I think its a documentary on wind energy. You might like it.”
Neil listened, nodding. He had his doubts about the viability of wind power as a serious alternative. He looked up at Karen, hoping to hear some more.
“Or you could ask me to come with you for another recent movie – The vow.”
“Th Vow ? Whats it about ?”
“Its a typical romantic comedy tear jerker. Girls will love you for it, you know ?”
Neil laughed. He was tempted to ask, but thought he really should ask Mabel rather than Karen.
Looking at Karen, he cleared his throat. “Karen, do you know Mabel ? Mabel Jacobsen ?”
Karen frowned. “Cannot recollect that name. Should I know her?”
“Well, she is a friend. She works in the construction business with her uncle. Anyhow, would you mind coming along for the movie if I also asked Mabel ?”
Recognition, and understanding, came into the large and liquid eyes of Karen. Her face softened but did not lose the mischievous smile. She touched his cheek lightly.
“I was kidding. You need to take your girl friend without a third party. But you might introduce me sometime. Let me check her out for you and check you out for her, you know ?”
Neil watched her, already beginning to feel a lot lighter. Things were, thankfully, not going to get more complicated than what he could handle.
“Ohh ok. But lets plan for a picnic of something, some time.”
Karen nodded, winked at him, moving past the next few books and picked up one.

Marilyn Monroe looked back at him from the cover.
He had had enough of biographies.
He tapped on Karen’s shoulder and indicated he was moving along to the coffee shop section. He left Douglas MacArthur, Jawaharlal Nehru and Paul Newman at their shelf space and walked on to the coffee section.

Things were OK, with or without biographies.
He went out to his car and retrieved the iPad. He met her again at the coffee shop and sat down at one of the smaller round tables. He stretched his legs and leaned back on the chair, taking a sip of the Caramel macchiato.
She took out her phone and called someone. He could hear her talking to her daughter, and checking on what she had been doing. Karen smiled at him while speaking with her daughter, and told her that she was sitting and having a coffee with Neil uncle, the same one that took their picture at the Bog a few weeks ago. She listened to her daughter and whispered back to him “She remembers you, and says hi”
Neil smiled and nodded. “Hi to her too.”
Karen finished her call and settled down with her coffee, looking around the coffee shop and checking on the other customers.
Neil played with his iPad, logging on to the free wifi provided by the shop. He then checked the book store on line and typed “Stanton” to check what comes up. He leaned over towards Karen to show the process. Karen watched, as the screen refreshed itself with the search results.
“Hmm.. The Women’s Bible is one book she obviously wrote. Its free of charge completely.”
Karen watched. “Amazing. I wonder whats in it.”
“You could check that out. I can download it for you here and loan you the iPad for a few days.”
Karen shook her head and pulled his shirt collar. “Cute, but no thanks. You need this iPad more than I do. But I shall consider getting hold of one. There is someone who might sell hers second hand, as she wishes to upgrade.”
Neil nodded and checked the other books.
“Here is another – Eighty Years and More : Reminiscences 1815-1897, by Elizabeth Cady Stanton.”
“Wow”
“This one too is free of charge. You see what I meant?”
“Yes. I see it, indeed.” Karen was impressed already.
“And here is another intriguing book. Collection of various writings, including Stanton. The name of the book tells it all – History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III”. It is 1033 pages long. And it is not free of charge, but costs only one dollar and ninety nine cents.”
Karen was amazed. “I’d like to get that book. But over a thousand pages ! Jesus Christ.”
“Yeah. But read the description. It has collection of contributors, edited by Anthony, Gage and Stanton, that come from England, USA, France and Canada, giving personal experience and the progress of the movement to grant equal voting rights to women. A monumental book I might say, though I have not read it. And its less than two dollars.”
Karen read through the lengthy description of the book and watched the picture of the cover page.

“You know Neil. You just sold me the idea of buying that second hand iPad. You are a sweetheart.”

Neil smiled, and scratched his ear. He decided to download that book himself, and read it by and by. It was rather too thick, but, perhaps should be informative.

They finished their coffee and got up. Neil dropped Karen at her friends place, where her daughter had spend the day. She leaned across and kissed him on his cheek. “You are a good guy. Stay that way Neil. We shall stay in touch, about the Rohinga, the book, and things.”
Neil nodded.
“And say hi to Mabel for me. We should go out sometime for a meal or something. She is welcome to join up when and if we go with the Rohinga and others, you know!”
“OK, thank Karen. I shall tell her.”
Karen turned and walked up the front door of the house.
Neil turned his car and prepared to head out.

A northern flicker, pecking at the side of a trunk got a sudden flash of his cars headlight as he turned his car around. With a small call of surprise, it launched itself in the air and flew almost directly over his car. Neil craned his neck to watch it disappear, and smiled.
It had been a good day.

Rice in the Vedas

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“Come to think of it, this is a complicated question.” Neil finally observed.
They were stretched out on a flat rock by the water’s edge. Neil thought of taking his shoe off and dipping his feet in the water, but decided against it. It was still quite cold, and the water might be near freezing. Besides, he could not remember when he last changed his sock, and was conscious that his socks might smell. It had happened to him before.
Mabel was sitting next, and she had taken her shoes off. She had feet that, to Neil, looked as it they had been encased in shoes all her life. Her toes were sort of clustered tightly together, each crowding onto the other and all trying to join up with each other at a point in front of the feet. That’s how painters often drew buildings and roads – where things further would look smaller, and all parallel lines would be inclined so that they join up at some point further up. This brings the perception of depth, of distance. In that sense, Mabel’s toes were three dimensional and followed the European renaissance painter’s preferences.
Neil’s own toes came from a different theory. Not being encased in shoes early in his life, the toes propagated, or tried to, like branches on a tree – each striving to enter into uncharted territory and get much of the space around it as its own. His toes were independent, and not necessarily democratic. Her toes where, he thought, more like groups of elderly Japanese tourists – always clustered together, never venturing too far out where he or she could get separated, and always wearing a sign that identifies him or her as belonging to the group.

Mabel shook her feet and curled her toes a bit, and looked across at him. Sun was still bright and it fell on them sideways, casting a longish shadow over the grass.
“I thought you liked complicated questions”. She teased.

Neil remembered finally. He had changed his sock yesterday. He took his shoe off and peeled off his socks. Then he extended his feet and compared his against hers. His were brown. His toe nails were less pedicured. Some of the toe nails looked as it thy might benefit from a bit of clipping. And, his toes were free. He could even flex then and fan them out, like a Japanese hand fan. They were almost diametrically opposite, from her toes.
Mabel watched and laughed, seeing his toes fanned out as it it were the fingers on a hand. “That’s funny.”
“Yeah. I could always do that, from my childhood days.”
Neil contemplated the question again.
“You see, there are some unknown issues here. I do not know when folks identifiable as Aryans, first arrived in different parts of India. I am not at all sure that they were invaders or visitors and not from the indigenous crowd. So, the date of their emergence would be important. Next, we also need to pin them on a map, along with dates. Then we need to know when each of those regions started farming of rice, if ever. I know rice was more wild than cultivated in their early days. It is possible that some folks just collected the wild rice seeds for eating, while some also attempted to farm it. They might have had a mixed diet of wild and farmed rice. They might have boiled them, or might have roasted them, or might even have eaten it raw, grinding the seeds down to a powder in their molars.”
Neil closed his eyes and tried to imagine a bunch of early semi-nomadic folks at the edge of a jungle, couching in the open by a small seasonal stream of water, washing early rice seeds in the water and attempting to eat them. He tried to imagine that crowd having one of two distinct people that got to be known as Aryans. The picture did not evolve properly in his minds eye. He ended up opening his eyes and squinting at the clear blue sky above, and the small flock of trumpeter swans that crossed his vision, long necks extended and in single file, each riding the wake of the slip stream of bird in front, honking loudly in their passage.
Mabel watched him, wearing a bemused smile.
“So, what do you think? He ate rice or not?”
Neil turned away and looked her in the eye. He had an urge to give her a smooch. It was nice, spending the last two nights together. He was beginning to get used to her habits including the fact that she liked sleeping on her belly – a very odd way of sleeping, he thought.
“I am tempted to guess in the negative. But am not sure. It is possible that folks that lived in the forest environment ate a mixed diet of home grown as well as wild food. I know some of them hunted anything that had fur on it, and would cook and eat it. They were not fussy those days. But – rice – I don’t know. I have never read about anyone that might have investigated this issue. And I have not read the Vedas in their original Sanskrit, and don’t even know if rice in mentioned as a cultivated crop in those verses.”
Mabel snaked closer. She was not feeling particularly cold. She had taken off her parka and set it aside. She snaked an around around his head, and pulled him closer. “Perhaps you know someone that can answer that ?”

Neil thought of two persons who might just do that. One was a woman he knew from his school days, who studied Sanskrit and the Vedas. She was a professor in a University in India. She might be able to help. The other person was someone involved with preservation of indigenous strains of rice, since many of the original strains were already lost through disuse and neglect. He might know something about it.

“Yes, I know some folks. We can consider asking them, though not sure if the question will be considered important by those folks.
I meanwhile have in my iPad a pdf document on the subject of preservation of varieties of rice in the eastern part of India. Let me show you.”
He took it out from their backpack and played with it for a few moments. The screen came to life. He opened the application iBooks and finally opened the item he was looking for. The screen got filled with a picture of various strains of rice, the stock of each having some kind of an identifying tag. They were of varying shades of a warm color – from beige to almost red. The article heading below the picture said “Valuing Folk Crop Varieties for Agroecology and Food Security.” It was dated October 2009.
He showed it to Mabel.

Mabel took the iPad. She was interested in its capacity to hold so much of interesting documents which would need multiple book racks and likely would overflow a house. She had been toying with the idea of getting one herself. She did not read as much as Neil did, but still, she did like to read stuff. She had gotten used to navigating through the gadget, because Neil often gave it to her.

She read through the article, nodded at Neil, and then closed the article, going back to the book shelf for eBooks instead of pdf files. There, she found books that were of her interest. One was about the geology of British Columbia. Before she knew Neil, this was not an interesting subject. But that was then. Now, we was very keen on it.
There were other books of interest too. Backwoods of Canada was one. She had read part of it one day. She remembered reading about the Strickland Trail, written by one of the early pioneering women. The article was written in the 1830s, almost 180 years ago. She liked reading books like this, and she found in incredible that Neil had this book too. After all, he was born in India and had come to Canada relatively recently.
She was also interested to read about Annie Wood Bessant, a very interesting woman, and elected member of parliament in the UK and among the first to agitate for equality of rights and pay for women in the workforce. She was among the earliest of the true feminists and spiritual independents that broke from the Judea-Christian mold and carved a niche for herself and all free thinkers of the future. Mabel did not know anything about her before she met Neil. But Neil knew a lot about her, since she eventually left Europe and settled in India, and was among the earliest of the leaders for India’s independence from British rule.
She did not know about a lot of things before she met Neil. Neil thought that her fascination with him was more because she was impressed by what he had read, rather than because she liked him as a person. Mabel would laugh at that. Neil might know things about the external world, but he knew nothing much about women.
He had a lot to learn, and she intended to broaden his horizon there.

She looked into his eyes, up close, and kissed his nose. “Thank you. Yes, I agree that folk rice varieties are the best. In fact, I’d even add that the folk human varieties are not bad themselves.
I have one right here reclining on a stone next to me.”

Neil ignored the comment about himself, feeling a bit flustered. “You know, the saline resistant strains of rice that had … “
He did not get a chance to complete the sentence.
Mabel had rolled herself on top of him and smothered him with kisses.

The Vedas, the Aryans and issues of early rice cultivation in eastern India would have to wait.

When you are right and wrong at the same time

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“That is the greatest tragedy of today. Brilliant people are pulling us in different directions with regard to how to save the world, the economy, the environment, whatever. And you know what is the tragedy?” Neil asked.

Mabel looked through her binocular. The black crowned night heron remained perched on the tree branch, its neck bent in a U-turn and face tucked inside the feathers on her belly. It offered a compact curled up indistinct image to the viewer. Mabel wished it would look up, so she could see if the bird really had red eyes.
“Whats the tragedy?” She asked.
Neil was standing nearby with the tripod mounted camera on his right shoulder, its lens several times larger than the camera. He held a second camera in his left hand. He had a baseball cap on his head. Over that, he had drawn the hood of is parka and tied it with the string under his chin. The wind was strong, coming in gusts. It was cold. Neil was trying to keep himself warm. He had a pair of blue woolen gloves on his hand, but he would often pull off the right hand glove with his teeth, and take a picture using bare fingers, still holding the glove in his teeth.


He was unlike anyone else Mabel knew personally, with or without his camera gear.
“The tragedy is”, Neil shuffled his feet, attempting to stamp out the cold from his toes. He wanted to get moving. The night herons were unlikely to budge. They had curled themselves into a ball to preserve body heat. They might not know solid state geometry, but they would instinctively curl into a ball when it was too cold, because a sphere offered the least surface area through which a body could lose heat. It did not make sense for them to look up and watch the world when they were not threatened by eagles. They were perched in branches with sufficient cover over and around them. This made it difficult for a hawk or an eagle to try something funny. They were surrounded by smaller perching birds who would raise alarm calls if a hawk ventured near. Long stay in this general area, in proximity of a lot of raptors, has helped them to learn what was safe and what was not.
Even Saw-whet owls dozed in day time in view of people, because they searched a well protected niche where bigger owls or hawks just cold not get in.
“The tragedy is”, Neil repeated, “that these guys are mostly correct – but they do not speak the whole truth. And since they are proposing things that are sometimes contradictory to one another, the public can be thoroughly confused. What is the truth about climate change and what is the right course of action ? People need simple, straight forward solutions. Unfortunately, the experts are not fond of simplifying anything. They merely add more and more noodles into the the soup.”
Mabel smiled. “Noodle soup of climate change ?”
Neil smiled, straightened and tugged her hand. “Lets move on to the fresh water pond ahead. I want to see if there are Mergansers preening like before.”
A year ago, Mabel did not know of the name merganser. She called it a sea-duck, and did not know there were many kinds. But, a year ago, she had not started hanging out with Neil.
Now she knew three kinds – the common merganser, the red breasted one, and the hooded one. And each of them had distinctly different males and females. That made six visually different mergansers one could see around Vancouver, at different times of the year.
She hung the binocular from her neck and took his hand, walking along the wooden rail towards the fresh water pond. There were large fish there that hanged around at the shallows, their tails and upper body visible at times. They were most likely carps. But Neil was interested to check if he could catch any preening merganser. He was in the mood of capturing some of these scenes in HD movies. His recently acquired cameras could take reasonably good movie clips along with still shots. Considering the time he spent looking at birds and nature, it was perhaps natural for him to record as much of it as possible.
It was not convenient to carry separate cameras for still and movies, if you are going to be the only one filming the scene. Besides, the movie cameras did not have the range of high telephoto that his digital SLR and SLT cameras did.
“So what are the main contradictions?” Mabel asked, to keep the conversation going. Its not that she was not interested in the topic. She was. But she had an interest in keeping Neil engaged in issues he liked to ponder on. Neil was a well read man, covering a range of subjects that she found almost mind boggling. In fact, that was one of the reasons she had a crush on him so long ago. The very first time she saw him, at her uncle’s place, he was talking about the Toba super-volcanic explosion that nearly succeeded in causing a total extinction of the human race, at a time when the anatomically modern man was just beginning to step out of east Africa, say seventy odd thousand years ago. Mabel was hooked from that point on.
Neil was the only person he knew, that had actually sent his tissue samples for lab analysis to trace his genetic ancestry, independently through his father’s side and his mothers side. Mabel did not know anybody else who did things like this.
“Well, take folks such as Charles Darwin, Richard Dawkins, Bertrand Russel, Isaac Asimov, Gandhi, Tagore, Copernicus, Galileo, Michael Faraday, Benjamin Franklin, Aryabhatta, James Lovelock, Vandana Shiva, Dalai Lama – take your pick and read these great people. They all are declaring facts of life, and its ebbs and flows, some in stark language, others philosophically – it would appear. And yet, they all are not unified in their thinking or voice, as to what is the best way to deal with difficult issues facing us. Not all of them even identify man as the main agent of climatic deterioration. Take Dalai Lama. He seems to indicate to us that the answer to all ills of the planet as perceptible to man lies within us. We should calm down and contemplate. Then we shall not only find the answer, but also find ourselves to be a lot more at peace with it.”
Mabel watching his frowning face and almost giggled. He looked so engrossed and concentrated. “Anything wrong with that?”
They had reached the side of a longish fresh water pond. Neil put down his tripod on the ground and watched the scene in front of them through the viewfinder of this camera.
“There are external changes coming to this planet earth which is going to be devastating to a lot of living creatures. Closing eyes and lowering out metabolism can help us stay calm, but it is not expected to out trillions of tons of carbon back underground and refreeze the ice caps and recreate the glaciers.“
Neil scanned the water and the bushes at the edge of the water. With some luck, her might get to see a muskrat or a mink. Once he had even seen a family of river otters, though that was at a different pond.
“Hmm, well, God is supposed to have created Man after his own image.” Mabel said, half jokingly. “But of course, you do not believe in that, and most feminists of today might even dispute that God was strictly a male.”
Neil chuckled. “Yes I am a non-believer. But I can borrow God time to time, if it makes a good slogan. For example : God created man. Man created junk. How do you like that ?” He chuckled.
Mabel widened her eyes in mock horror. “Its like saying God created junk indirectly. I think my grandma would have been very disappointed in you.”
“Well, I would perhaps had managed to win her over somehow, except for one thing though. My skin is not white.” Neil laughed.
Mabel laughed too. It was a kind of a joke with them. Her Grandma, all those years ago, had apparently almost fallen in love with an Italian helper who reportedly had a darker or burnished skin. She was not allowed to marry him, or even see him, once her distant romance got to me known. The reason for the disapproval had less to do with the man’s standing in society, and more to do with the fact that he was a bit too dark to be purely European. They suspected him to have Arab or African or some other contaminated blood. She did not care, but her folks did, and that was that.
“My grandmother would have approved of your skin, but not your lack of religion, I think.”
Neil smiled. His eyes went back to the mallards that were flying fast overhead heading out to the far field across the pond. A pair of wood ducks floated lazily on the water far from them. He wished they’d swim closer.
Canada was far to the north, and also had a lot of land and a lot of water. Canada was likely to be relatively less affected by a hotter climate. He wondered if there still would be wood ducks and mergansers around in these areas, if the earth temperature rose by several degrees and the ocean currents carried a lot less nutrient along the seabed between the mainland and Vancouver island.
“What are you meditating about?” Mabel nudged him. “Don’t worry, I am not going to tell Grandma that you are an atheist. I wont even tell you are a Hindu by berth.”
“Ohh I am not worried about that. I was thinking if I meet up with Dalai Lama some day, I should be able to have a good chat with him. He is quite a clever chap, you know?”
“I can guess, though I haven’t read his books”.
“Well, even so, there are things we just cannot solve by merely meditating. However, it is possible that deep introspection helps find the answer to difficult problems. Those answers, I am afraid, are all rather ugly. I might tell Dalai Lama that evading unpleasant answers is same as telling a lie, indirectly. The world has crossed the threshold on climate change. We are past the point were answers could be pretty.  And yet, we are in denial of the crisis at hand. We only wish to paint a rosy picture and a market oriented solution to everyting. Americans like to call that a win-win situation.”
There were a pair of hooded mergansers. No, there were two pairs. But they were a bit far away, swimming in their general direction though.
“Its not going to be a win-win, right ?”
“Uhh huhh. I feel pretty certain it will look more like a lose-lose, no matter how one looks at it. But the world hates lose-lose solutions. It ranks of defeatism.”
Mabel picked her binocular up. There were a handful of Canada geese honking like crazy in the distance. She cold also see a few common merganser in the distance. And then there were at least a pair of wood ducks in the water. Neil had seen them too, and was clicking off a shot or two using his camera with the long lens.
“I don’t like defeatism either.”
Neil smiled. “Nobody likes it. Thats one of the problems though. A very major problem. The world remains in denial. As a result, instead of taking steps to soften the damage and prepare ourselves so the survivors can better face the challenges of the future, we are still engaged in day dreams that the threat of damage can be eliminated completely, or that there is no threat in the first place.”
Mabel nodded. Whatever the fate of the planet might come to in a generation or two, she felt happy to be with Neil. Hopefully, that would last long enough for them.
Neil pointed up. High up on a spruce tree, a solitary adult bald eagle was surveying his domain. It was at the top most branch, with an unobstructed view all around. It was typical of bald eagles to sit high up and in plain view. They had no natural enemy up there.
The wind was strong, and cold. Mabel focussed her binocular on the bird. The wind was parting the feathers at the back of its neck. It still looked so regal, with its snow white head and deep yellow large hooked beak.


And as she watched, the bird turned its head skyward, opened up its beak and let out a series of high pitch trills. It was distinctly different from the low frequency and louder quacks of the ducks in the water. The bird repeated the act, turning its head in all directions, and letting out its shrill call.
Mabel was mesmerized. She had seen bald eagles before, but had not ever heard it call out.
“Did you hear that ?” She hushed excitedly.
“Shhhh” Neil whispered back “I am filming it”

They stood side by side, she looking at the bird through her binocular, and he looking at it through his camera. He had a swinging head Gimbal to connect the camera to the tripod. This allowed him to swing the camera around in all directions rapidly and still have the camera more or less balanced through the centre of the tripod. This allowed the camera to hold its position at any angle without the need for tightening screws to lock the camera at each setting. Neil was happy with it, and was taking a video of the eagle.
Seconds passed by, then minutes. Apart from the quack of the ducks and the occasional shrill call of the eagle, the only other noise was of the wind buffeting them and swaying the tree branches around.
It was a few minutes before they decided that would be enough, and turned their attention elsewhere. The eagle maintained its tree top vigil.
“You know, I looked up Dyer’s Climate Wars. I might end up buying it.”
Neil looked her her. She seemed serious. “Its a very good book. Its also quite stark in its prediction. Gwynne Dyer does not mince words. Thats one reason I like his analysis. Not everyone had stomach to read what appears unpleasant. Thats the reason some folks avoid James Lovelock too. You should read that book. I can loan you my iPad so you can read it there without having to buy a copy. He is good.”
“I know. I read a few pages from your iPad that day. In that scenario, Dyer was talking about what happens to Russia, in 2019.”
Neil nodded, walking on.
“I mean, it was a hypothetical scene, I think. Was it not ?”
“Of course. Any prediction of the future has to be hypothetical. There are any number of things that could happen and alter the course of history.”
“Yes. Anyhow, I found those pages really worrisome. A little scary even. I mean, 2019 is only seven years into the future. Do you think the polar ice cap is going to disappear by then?”
Neil frowned as he considered the question. “I don’t know. There are some that predict the arctic ice cap to vanish in five years, at least in summer. Five or ten years – whats the difference? The damage is done. It took 35 million years for the polar ice cap to reach its pre-industrial maximum size. It took us a few hundred years to kill it. But the arctic sea ice is not the only worry. The same thing is happening to the Antarctic ice sheet too, though not as rapidly as the arctic one. This is a hard fact that is not being told properly to the masses.”
Mabel remembered Green Peace activists that were based in british Columbia. The movement had started from Vancouver. It was a pity, she felt, that Canada was rejecting ideas of carbon emission control, merely to promote the relatively dirty industry of extracting oil from the tar sands of Alberta.
“It makes you skeptical of our leaders, no?” She asked
Neil nodded and snaked his arms around her waist. Mabel was not exactly skinny. He liked her fleshy hips and the way his palm could rest on her curves. He liked the muscle and tissue mass of her upper torso, the curve of her breasts and the arc of her neck. He had come to like her slightly roundish face that appeared full of blood. She is not a freckled red head, but close to one. He wondered if she had any Irish blood in her.
He leaned over and kissed her cheek, then got conscious of being in the open, though there was nobody around other than a bunch of birds. If the birds noticed their display of affection, they showed no sign of it.
“This is one reason I tend to be skeptical of most leaders as well as most climate scientists and sustainable living gurus. Some of them just don’t know enough and yet chose to talk. Some have sold themselves to the devil, and hence talk through forked tongue. But there are some scientists that know the truth, and yet will not talk about it because it is too bitter a pill. I particularly dislike them. They are afraid to call a spade a spade because it might upset the crowd and shake the public out of its complacency.” Neil spread his hands in frustration.
They had walking along the agricultural field, a vast stretch of land plowed in parallel lines, circle by rows of trees and their periphery. They could see groups of Canada Geese flying over the trees to settle on a field half a mile away from them.
A small group of trumpeter swans went flying across their view, in single file, their long necks stretched forward, their nosy calls alerting the world about their passage.
Neil stopped, put his tripod on the ground, turned his camera, focussed and clicked a few stills of the group of swans in against the grey sky.
“These are all adults, I think. I have seen them with juveniles before. The young ones have a shade of grey on them.”
Mabel too watched them through her binocular, till they disappeared over the tree tops.
The walkway came to a fork. To the left were miles of reeds leading to the pacific ocean. To the right was a wooden shed that served as a blind for watching water birds.
They turned left and headed towards the edge of the reeds overlooking the ocean. They could hear faint calls of the snow geese. A female northern harrier went on its rounds circling low over the reeds, the ponds and the fields, often banking this way or that, swooping low and then rising back up. It passed over head. Neil turned his camera up and followed the bird, clicking a few successful shots of the bird and then exclaimed in frustration as it ventured too close and its rapid movement cause Neil to lose the bird from his high power telephoto lens. He had to take his eyes off the camera and search the sky to locate the bird, and train his camera again.
Mabel watched him, and the bird, by naked eyes. She too had a problem following this bird with a binocular, especially when it gets close.
The bird, apparently oblivious to the pair of humans, eventually swerved further and further away at the edge of the ocean. Neil shut off the camera for now, and lifted the contraption again on his shoulder. His second camera hung off his neck.
Mabel joined him, pulling his hands back on her waist, and walking hip to hip. It might be a bit childish, but she still had it in her, and he was, perhaps belatedly, enjoying a bit of it.
“My brothers are in denial about the change of climate” Mabel commented. “They know it is happening, but do not believe it will be something we need to worry about for many centuries. They both like the idea of developing oil and gas industries in Canada. More jobs, you know ?”
Neil nodded. He knew. Perception of more jobs was one of the root causes of the trouble, in his mind. But then, he did not have any easy solution either. No solution appeared easy to him. This was in fact part of the reason the issue was left untouched by leaders.
“I know. Even pundits are biased.”
“Pundits?”
“Sure. Pundits are no better than you and me.” Neil retorted, only half in jest.

They noticed the coot and stopped. An American coot cut across their path and headed for the shallow fresh water pond on the other side, its head bobbing as it stepped its way purposefully over the short grass, its roundish black body surprisingly agile. It even let out a few clicking sounds, perhaps to tell Mabel and Neil that it was keeping an eye on them, so better not get any closer.

The sun dipped another notch over the western sky, towards the low hills sticking out of the ocean, and the layers of clouds overing around the mountain tops – those famous low clouds of March that hung around the horizon to turn an average sunset into a spectacular one.