Where pronghorns meet trilobites

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

I had seen the pronghorns, but had not been to Yoho National park yet, though I drove past it a few times. Ir was in that park that Burgess Shale was located. There was also the Burgess Shale Geoscience Foundation nearby, in the town of Field, BC.’ It would be a whole days drive through serpentine mountain roads. I had done it before. The journey would be as pleasing as the destination might be thrilling. Add a 22 Km round trip through mountain slopes and a climb of perhaps over two thousand feet, to reach some of the fossil beds there. The place was out of bounds except by guided tours of less than a dozen individual at a time. I was not sure I could do the 22 Km hilly trek a day and still have time to check the fossil beds. One would need to start at around 7 in the morning and be back before dark.
Pronghorns were easier.
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Pronghorns in Montana – 30th Dec 2011

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

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

Of time, space and a barred owl

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A barred owl watches him from a low branch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The woman waved back. “Good morning”.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Karen smiled. “Are you sure its OK?”

“Of course it is ok”.

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

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

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

“Naah. Just a hobby”

“Well, its a wonderful hobby.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Othello

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

Who is an Aryan?

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

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

A few pages on a leap year day

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There was a snow dump on downtown Vancouver early in the morning. As I turned into Kingsway, I could see piles of wet show pushed to the side of the lanes by passing wheels. Vehicles moving in the opposite direction would at times veer from the track and have their wheels splash through inches of wet snow, causing water and wet chunks of snow to splatter on his windshield and side window. I had taken care to roll up his window glass. It was also raining a bit.
I got up around five in the morning, which is not normal. If I went to sleep in the usual late hours, after 1 AM, I would normally sleep through the night and only wake up at the alarm, at 6:20 AM. But if I went to sleep earlier, say by 11 PM, I would invariably get up early, sometimes by 4 AM. This was one of those days. So, after tossing about on the bed for a while, I tiptoed out of the bedroom, leaving Anu fast asleep on her side of the bed, and went to my study, half undressed.
I had started writing his blog on the 2nd of Feb, with a piece titled “Hello, World”. The title was a suggestion from WordPress, and not my invention. That was the only title I had borrowed from WordPress templates. Since then, I had put up thirteen different blogs till this leap year day, Feb 29th.
Apparently, I had written upwards of twenty thousand words on this blog and in this month. That translated to about 750 words, or almost three pages, every day. Was that good, bad, or irrelevant?
Clearly, it was relevant from my point of view. But, being a social animal, one would normally judge success and failure by how much those twenty thousand words affected other people, or at least how much it fattened my bank account.
One answer was clear – it did not affect my bank account. I was not writing this for any commercial magazine and not advertising it. So why was I writing? Could it be that I cared for the first part of the question – affecting other people ?
I know that at least a handful of folks had read them, from Canada, the US, India, Bangladesh, Japan and New Zealand. How did I know that? Well, there is an add-on to my WordPress blog site that tells the admin (me) the location on a world map, from where folks had clicked on to my blog. But I have no illusion that only a handful of people from around the world had read any of my blogs.
Thats normal. Statistically, I would say that only a few knew about my blog, but these few were not isolated in one corner of the planet, or restricted to one circle of interest. I guessed some of them might be bird watchers, while some others were promoters of permaculture, or rights of indigenous people. Some might be by personal friends, or folks from my ethnic and linguistic groups.
I also knew that, as I write more, I would likely generate interest among a wider group. Alternately if I wrote on boring subjects or had an uninteresting style, my readership would dwindle.
But, I was still unsure if I was writing for the readers, or for personal reasons. Writing improves one’s skills in authorship. It is also a creative outlet. It helps release pent up tensions, just like painting or drawing, or watching nature and wildlife does. I was not necessarily good in any of my hobbies, but I was happy that I had so many. And writing was one avenue to expressing myself, and telling myself, that I exist, as of now.
I know how insignificant my existence is in the greater scheme of things. From the point of view of this Universe and its existence, I do not even deserve a tiny mention in the log book of its events. But then, neither does Julius Caesar, Chengis Khan, or as far as I am concerned, God. Every human, every prophet, every earthly or unearthly entity imagined by humans, was ultimately irrelevant in the greater scheme of things. God proposes, Universe disposes, and man only pontificates.
Well, my pontification was clearly not directed to the Gods of this world, nor the mere mortals hurtling ceaselessly towards an eventual oblivion six feet underground, or incinerated into thin air, or left to be consumed by scavengers. I did not know who it was directed as. The main purpose, I tried telling myself, was to have a release that was not geared to please someone else. Commercial writers were essentially entertainers – like an actor, or a soccer player, or a singer. They performed their task in order to entertain other people, and thus earn a living. If folks did not like watching movies, there would be no movies and no movie actor. If folks did not like to listen to music, there would be no musicians. But people, especially civilized people, are supposed to have time on their hands and money in their pocket. They spend that time and money to engage in their hobbies, like listening to music, or watching a movie or a game.
However, I had, to be honest, passed the links to some of my blogs, to a small number of people, asking for their comments. For example, I had sent the link to my post on the cult of Tagore, to Piyali and Tukul, and also to Rajib Chakraborti. I had heard back from both Piyali and Tukul. Rajib bahu is going to read it shortly, he said. Why did I send the links to them? I guess I thought I’d value their varied perspective and point of view.
Apart from that, I got a few of them linked on my Facebook and google plus account. I was more present in google plus than on facebook these days. But, on the whole, I spent a lot less time on these social networking sites, and a lot more on my own writings, and looking around for information to my liking.
The eBook store is a good place for searching out for information to my liking. Recently I got an eBook about the geology of British Columbia, and found it fascinating to read, all 250 pages of it with its numerous sketches, diagrams, drawings, tables and photographs. I wish I had with me a book of similar detail about India. Unfortunately, I do not have such a book and have not found such a book that would also be easy to get hold of and ideally free of charge or for very little money, preferably as an eBook that did not involving printing and paper.
He had found just one book so far, named “Himalaya to the Sea, Geology, Geomorphology and the Quaternary”. It was by John F. Shroder Jr. 472 pages long, the eBook was not free of charge by a long shot. Its price was US $ 249.99.
I was not ready to pay that much money for that book. Besides the book had no review by any customer. Its content was not described too well. It was a very expensive unknown entity, for me. And so, I was still looking for a suitable source for my education on the development of the Indian topography and natural history. Most of the books readily available were about Himalayan Treks, addressing western visitors, and did not cover my question.
He had one nice book that he liked – Natural history of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon, which was written by Robert Sterndale, published by Thacker, Spink and Co in Calcutta in 1884. It contained 170 illustrations by the author, by T.W. Wood and others. It not only contained details including hand drawn sketches of animals I remembered from my childhood, such as a fox-bat in English, Chamgadili in Hindi and Badurh in Bengali, but also more esoteric animals such as a collared hedgehog of northern Indian and Afghanistan, or a Himalayan Brown Bear, or the clouded leopard, which at the time was called a clouded panther.
I was digressing from the original thought – which was about writing and not reading eBooks. But, like all things, there was a link here too. I got that wonderful book about Mammals of India, published in Calcutta in 1884, completely free of charge and developed a regard for its author for the details of his work. He must have been financially rewarded by the purchase of that book by people at the time. But right now, it was sold free of charge as eBooks on line, if one had the patience to look for it. And thus, I connected with the man that was older than my grand father, and lived concurrent with Rabindranath Tagore and his brothers, but had done a fantastic job of detailing so many different mammals that lived across the Indian landmass stretching from Afghanistan to Burma and from Kashmir to Sri Lanka. Did he write it only for the financial reward ? I was not sure if those days manuscripts in English were typed or hand written. I knew Tagore’s manuscripts were hand written. Today, almost nobody writes by hand in English, and if my guess is right, they also type it in many of the vernacular languages today, rather than hand-write an entire book.
So here I was, driving along the Waterfront road in downtown Vancouver, heading for a day in office, and wondering – why do folks write anything ? What is the value of a few pages of typed text.

I turned into the drive way for the underground parking below my office.
It was going to be another cold day – for Vancouver.

The ten thousand year old woman.

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Tony shuffled down to the kitchen, to make a cup of coffee. My efforts to write ten or fifteen more pages into the story that had no plot, was not going that well. He already had four different versions of it. He even forgot what was there in the first version. But none of the threads were good enough. The story lacked sand. It lacked the valleys and the peaks, the change of season and the sudden thunder. It lacked direction, and a strong basic theme.
Since the last coffee machine started leaking, he had changed over to instant coffee. He heated a cup of water in the microwave.
And thats when he saw her. She was looking at him through the kitchen window. She appeared elderly and small, and wrapped in some sort of a shawl. She was standing by the maple tree, fifteen yards from his kitchen. The light had faded from the sky. His front lights faintly illuminated her face. Her face had a strangeness – like it was cut from an old stone. And she was peering at him, intently.
Tony forgot his coffee. He felt riveted by this unknown woman. His eyes remained locked on her. He struggled and finally broke away from that hypnotic stare and looked away. Turning, he moved out of the kitchen and into his entrance hall, and opened the front door. He stepped through the door and looked up again at the maple tree.
There was nothing there, other than the tree, the grass of his front lawn, and the asphalt on the road beyond. The woman with the face of stone had vanished. Tony wondered if what he saw from the kitchen was an illusion. He stepped onto the front lawn and walked to the tree. The grass was short cropped but heavy. He did not think there would be any footprints, and he was right. No footprints in the grass.
Tony leaned on the tree and rubbed his eyes behind his glasses. He was tired. The water for the coffee would go cold soon. He turned and walked back to his house – still wondering about the missing woman.
Ahh, well – he’d warm up the cup of water again, and make that instant coffee yet.
—————————

Neil and Mabel walked to the movie hall from the parking lot. Neil was trying to get used to this new sensation, this new arrangement, where Mabel was his girl friend, and they were together as lovers. Mabel seemed to take this a lot more naturally. In fact she looked almost radiant. He hooked her arm around his elbow as they walked around the parked cars and crossed the road to enter the movie hall. There were people milling about near the entrance to the hall.
—————
As Neil and Mabel walked through the opened doors, Tony saw the woman, again.
She was standing outside. She had that shawl around her. And this time, she had a child with her, standing next to her. They were holding hands.
Tony recognized her this time. She was Suta, the woman of of southern Europe or central asia, from around the end of the last ice age. The one that carried similar mitochondial DNA as he himself did. She was in direct line of his maternal ancestry. She was also the product of his own imagination. He had named her Suta and written about her in two of his chapters.
It seemed that she had started appearing in his real life, as well as the section of the story which was anchored in the present time, and proceeded through the life of Neil, his own alter ego.
He started reheating the cup of water. He wondered, how an imaginary woman that was in direct line of his maternal ancestry, from ten thousand years in the past, could also be present in his imaginary story of the present.
Besides, she appeared to be present in his, Tony’s own life, looking at him through his kitchen window. From his stories, she was crossing a line, and appearing in his real life.
He added a spoon full of instant coffee granules and a dash of milk. He reached for the sugar and took a spoonful of it to add to the coffee.
His story just got one more layer of complication.

He let Neil and Mabel walk into the darkened theatre. They apparently did not notice the woman. In fact, nobody else indicated an awareness of her presence. After all, a ten thousand year old woman walking about in today’s world should be noticeable, should she not?
She was short. Uncommonly short. Tony tried to recollect what he saw, or imagined he saw, outside of the movie hall, and compared her with others around. She must have been less than five feet. Even young kids were taller than her. And yet, she did not seem to be a midget. Four feet seven or eight inches? Was she wearing heels ? Tony climbed the stairs, heading for his study, holding the cup of coffee in one hand, and his laptop, folded up, in the other.
She was not wearing heels. In fact, she was bare feet. Her tiny feet looked kind of gray brown. It peeked out of her garment, which, Tony thought, was a kind of wrap around shawl. It was not quite a sari, and not quite a toga. Perhaps the sari and the toga had a similar origin. This woman was perhaps wearing the mother of all saris.
Tony set the laptop on is desk and opened the lid. The screen came to life and lighted up. He checked the top right corner of the screen. Hmm – forty three percent of juice still left. It will last more than an hour before he would need to plug it into a power supply. He brought it on his lap and leaned back in his swivel chair, placing his socks wearing shoeless feet on the desk. He had gotten into this habit of walking about with socks inside his home, especially in winter. It felt comfortable.
Thinking back on the scene, he balanced his hands on the keyboards and lightly touched the keypad. Thoughts mixed with imaginary scenes came trickling at first, and then tumbling about in his head. One moment, he saw the woman’s hands, rough, strong, creased, with the palm having hardened warts from a lifetime of rough work. The nails appeared gnarled, thick and even twisted and broken at places, black dirt sticking under them. Although she was small, her hands could probably strangle him or break his neck if she so wished.
Her wrist bones were not normal. Tony closed his eyes, and tried to figure out what was abnormal. Was there a lump or a projection ? Perhaps her wrist had broken once and healed unevenly. Or perhaps she had some bone defect. About half of all human bones were in hands and feet. Too many pieces to make it possible for humans to use their hands like no other animal could, and to walk on two legs with dexterity that no other primate could. But, back ten thousand years ago, the stress on those limbs were likely a lot more severe, in the course of one’s life.
He tried to imagine her features, and ended up scratching his eye brows. Imagination can play tricks here. Otzy, the iceman of the Italian alps, over five thousand years old and mostly intact, had, as far as he could tell from the photographs, distinctly European features. If Otzy’s ancestors had walked out of Africa a hundred thousand years ago, and assuming that first generation to have more or less similar features as man in Ethiopia or Sudan today, those features had changed over the course of a hundred thousand years, and the last five thousand had more to do with height, weight, and stature, that facial features. In fact, the body size apparently started growing rather recently, perhaps only in the last seven or eight hundred years, and as a direct result of better nutrition during growing years. Europeans started eating better, and thence began to grow taller and lankier, perhaps in the northern reaches first.
Tony felt a little unsure of himself at this stage. He was stepping onto unknown territory of the history of the growth of human body size in the Eurasian steppes. But, going back another five thousand years before Otzy, and ten thousand years from now, he felt sure that the tall thin and dark appearance of the East Africans would by then have changed to shorter, stockier, and fairer humans in the mediterranean, the middle east and central asian steppes. Besides, they where surviving through the ice age. Protection from heat was less of a problem. Surviving intense cold, in an environment were plant material should be scare and availability of food would be a constant worry for a hunter gatherer.
Tony stopped again. When was agriculture invented? Was that not forty thousand years ago or so? Alright, it was perhaps only seasonal agriculture, only on river banks and places where natural irrigation and soil fertilization made it suitable for experimentation with planting select seeds could bear fruit. It would likely be a long time before this had any direct impact on daily meals of an average human, especially those that were forced to move around, migrating from land to land, and still living mostly a nomadic hunter-gatherer existence.
Tony started typing – ‘the woman held the hand of the little child and peered intently as Neil disappeared into the darkness inside the movie hall, then turned and walked away, fading into the evening mist and disappeared from view’.
Tony knew by now, that she was there carrying his mitochondrial DNA, for a purpose. She wanted to be part of the story Tony wrote. Somehow it has to connect.
Somehow, so many things had to connect. The story of life, even his own undramatic life, had so many little nooks and crannies, so many twists and turns, that all had to connect with each other to make the present possible.
Ohh well, he would have to pry something more about his mitochondrial DNA. He knew a bit already. The ‘L’ haplogroup was the origin. All living humans today shared it, and it originated in north eastern Africa around 150,000 years in the past. From that point on, as mankind fanned out to the rest of the known world, different folks developed different twists into their mitochondria and left those marks, those footprints in the sands of their genetic shores. Today, it was possible to pry out some of that ancient tales and travels of individual ancestral lineages through the geographic and cultural lands of the past tens of thousands of years, and link an ice age woman of central Asia to a man born in India and living in Canada, taking a Canadian woman out on a date.
Tony looked into his empty cup. He needed another coffee.

The vanishing Y chromosome

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

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

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

Old woman sacrifices herself

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

American Lion - wikipedia

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

Straight-tusked Elephant - wikipedia

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

———————————-

Cave bear worship - wikipedia

Cave Paintings of ice age eurasian animals - wikipedia

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

Cult of Tagore

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

Tagore Bust at UBC, Vancouver

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A sunset, mitochondria, a peat bog, and a kiss.

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Across his backyard and the open space behind where the power lines cut across the land, he could see the edge of the peat bog, and across it, the lowlands of the river delta, and far off into the distance, the faint lines of the pacific ocean. It was a while since he had seen a sap sucker up close. He had walked up to the trees where he could see rows of drilled holes on the bark, a clear sign of work by a sap sucker, and tried to check the sap collecting at the punctures. He had even tried tasting it. Actually it was kind of sweet. No wonder it attracted insects. The bark was in a way proving to be a conveyor belt for nutrients to travel up the trunk, all the way to the leaves. This was as if a chain of thousands of tiny heart were pumping the tree’s lifeblood one cell at a time, all the way to the top. There, leaves could then draw energy from the sun, and break down the sap by photosynthesis into essential ingredients to nurture the tree and help it grow and stay strong.
One of the forgotten scientists of his homeland, J.C. Bose, a century ago, had proven that plants responded to artificial stimuli, essentially proving that plants were living creatures.
Meanwhile the sap sucker would puncture a few holes in the bark, causing the sap to start oozing out, before the tree would trigger an automatic healing process by cauterizing, or closing up of the open wounds, and the sap would stop oozing out from there. If left in open air, the solvent would evaporate, and the sap would solidify, turning into resin, or amber, trapping tiny insects into them, sometimes for thousands or even millions of years, for man to sometimes stumble across some of them and discover ancient insect species frozen in time, possibly including some undamaged DNA of the long extinct species. Neil did not know if DNA or body cells and tissue would survive the length of time, even if it was encapsulated in amber. He needed to ask someone on this. Neil did not know any archaeologist, not any scientist working with ancient DNA.
Meanwhile, there was his own DNA – the mitochondrial one, to be precise, that was under investigation.
Mabel had been avidly looking at the computer screen, as Neil navigated through his home page, past the welcome sign. He selected the link “my tests” and onto a list of tests already conducted on his genes, and a few that were in progress.
“There” he showed Mabel, his finger pointing at the bottom of the screen. There was a small magnifying glass symbol, and a bit of text next to it that said – ‘mtDNA HVR-1 Status: Completed – View Results >>’’. “That is the first of the tests on my mitochondrial DNA, which I inherited only from my mother, with no influence from my father. My mother, in turn, inherited it from her mother, and so on. I have it, but I shall not be passing it to any future kid of mine, because I am a male. This part of our genes only moves from mothers down to their babies. It reaches a dead end at every male child, but continues to pass on through their female offsprings.”
Mabel listened to him, big eyed. “Can I see some of the findings?”
“Sure”. Neil clicked on the hot link ‘View Results’, and waited for the next page to com up.
Outside his home, the dimming light blanketed the landscape overlooking the Bog. A sequential set of events stretched over eons of time had made the creation of that bog and many others around the world possible. It was an important feature of the neighborhood, and was likely going to survive in spite of the raging fire that burned for weeks on end just half a mile from Neil’s home on the other side of the highway a few years ago.
Mabel’s cheek brushed Neil’s as they peered into the laptop screen. Neil had an urge, to turn and kiss Mabel on her lips. He was thirty four years old, and yet, he hesitated, unsure of what she might do. He could hear her breathing softly, inches from his face. He wondered if Mabel was purely interested in checking how genetic mapping is done, or if her interest included Neil in person, and not just academically. He knew the answer, he told himself, and yet, could not muster the courage to just hold her face in his hands and look into those wide blue eyes.
The sun had dipped below the horizon, but still lighted up the underside of low clouds over the ocean. The low lands of the Delta estuary and its agricultural fields allowed an uninterrupted view from Neil’s window into the faint purple of the fading western light. But Neil and Mabel seemed oblivious to the scene outside. Before he realized it, he had freed his left hand from hers, and had placed it around her shoulders, pulling her closer. “There, that is the top haplogroup identifiable from my mitochondria, the ‘L’ haplogroup. It originated in the north eastern Africa, somewhere between today’s Egypt and Sudan, some 150,000 years ago.”

This is where it started, 150,000 years ago.

Mabel kissed him.
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Tony got up and looked outside the window. It was a Saturday. No office today. Time was half past seven in the morning. And it was raining cats and dogs. He wondered how that term came to be – raining cats and dogs. He was glad though, that geology, ocean current and other factors had combined to give Vancouver and nearby areas a milder climate. So, instead of snowing, it rained in winter.
One thing he could not do now was take his camera and binocular – and go bird watching. If it stopped raining in the afternoon, he might consider visiting the Iona Beach area for a few hours.
Meanwhile, time to make the proverbial mug of coffee.
At least he managed to do something this morning – produce a kiss in his story of Neil and Mabel. He still did not have a clear idea of the way the story might proceed, but some notions were getting into his head. Tracing his ancestry was one thread. Overlapping the story of Neil in the present with a woman from the past, who carried that mitochondria which was to pass through eons of time on to him – was another thread. He has to improve his knowledge and skills in order to be able to write about forgotten humanity in landscapes that no longer existed. He knew he did not have to be absolutely accurate. He was writing a novel and not a thesis.
He glanced into the bedroom. Anu was still sleeping.
He padded his way down, whistling softly to himself. Writing about his mitochondrial track, he managed to produce a kiss. Hmm.. Fancy that !