Overload

Posted on by

We are under attack – by information overload, material overload, trivia overload, sensory overload and ultimately – junk overload. Thinking about it could raise my level of stress, because I do not seem to have a suitable cure. This civilization does not recognize this state of affairs as an undesirable condition, and apparently does not, therefore, offer a relief. Equally frustratingly, this view is not shared by others. It is perhaps not even understood by folks that were close enough for me to discuss it with.
Take our personal emails. I get perhaps forty or fifty a day. With the best of the spam filters there still are a few advertisements that slip in – attempting to sell me cheap medicine, or connect me with young and lonely females that claim to live practically next door to me and are dying to meet me, even if they have no idea who I am. And then there are other advertisements that I have inadvertently allowed to come my way. These are offers to cheap airlines ticket that promises to take me to some far of place that I have no intension of visiting right now. There are messages from hotels that are offering economic rates, also in places that I do not wish to visit. There are streams of messages from unknown people that commented something in Facebook that has somehow a link with me which I was not careful enough to de-link.
The worst part of it is – out of a hundred emails that collect in our multiple email addresses, only one or two are actually from people we know, and addressed solely to me, on a subject that is personal. Few are from relatives or close friends. Folks call on phone rather than send email. Alternately they send messages embedded within social networking sites.
So, the junk overload accumulates if you are on a vacation or if you do not trash them regularly. They pile up into mountains of emails with not much value in any of them, increasing the temptation to junk the whole lot without reading any. This raises the risk of deleting something that might have been valuable, like a needle in a haystack.
Now, forget emails, and check physical mail. Everyday I receive some mail. A small portion of the weekly collection would be bills I need to pay. The rest are all advertisements I do not want to see and wish I did not receive. But receive them I have, and now must take the trouble of disposing in a sustainable way which increases my work, and might even cost me something. I and the planet would have been better off if those pamphlets, brochures, cards and envelops did not get printed and mailed out. Someone is paying for this wasted mail junk.
Whoever pays for them, is going to recover it back from someone else one way or another. Ultimately, the earth pays for it and has no one to complain to and nowhere to recover the loss from.
And then there are the junk phone calls, including from Mexico, informing me that I might have won some prize that allows me to have a fantastic vacation in Cancun or some place at a very reasonable price for a weekend for two, and they will right away confirm it all if I should give them my credit card details etc. And then there are unregistered callers that want donations for all kinds of great causes.
And then comes the electronic, metallic, plastic and other junk that we accumulate at an ever increasing rate.
Can I safely say that this civilization and the lifestyle has converted me into a junk producer or junk accumulator?
Where is the recourse, the exit plan, the relief from this vicious cycle ? The alternative is touted as digressing, retreating into backwardness, degenerating. We must continuously consume junk, produce junk and spread junk around ourselves.
That’s progress.


Meanwhile, we have no real friends that send us either a decent email or a decent letter. We have no real friends or relatives, not even one, with whom one could engage in intellectual exchanges. Nobody lives nearby anyway. And our interaction with those nearby are mostly at a trivial, or superfluous level. The entire human consciousness appears to be locked into superfluous pursuits of trivia. Everything is shallow and two dimensional. Depth is a concept alien to these two dimensional creatures.
We have created a virtual world for our spare time. Real world is only for the drudgery of earning money. The virtual world is where we must reside after work, and from which we must derive our pleasures of life. It is here that I do my writing, that some unfortunate people from different corners of the world might accidentally stumble upon and glance through. It is here that a clever widget someone designed as a plugin for my blog, lets me know how people from Delhi, Paris or San Jose, might have clicked on my page. And this knowledge, skimpy and insignificant as it might be, is expected to induce a sense of pleasure or satisfaction in me, so I can continue to generate more matter for more unknown persons to stumble upon from more corners of this planet.
And out of all those that stumble upon it, there surely must be folks that have no intension of reading my thoughts. There will be folks that do not share my views, particularly the negative or pessimistic ones, people who believe this world is fine and nothing is the matter with it. There will be those that could harbor a middle of the road approach – while things are not exactly ideal, it could have been worse, and in any case, there is not a lot one could do about it. Humans are creatures of habit. They get used to their surroundings. It is not natural, I guess, to step outside of our comfort zone and look at the world from afar.
Overload of insignificant trivia has become the foundation of our existence. That is the platform on which we base our culture, civilization, and modern life.
Why am I complaining ? Whats the matter with me ?

Considering Mabel

Posted on by

“I had bought this house, if you remember, Mabel, partially because of the comments your uncle made six years ago regarding its construction, and also because of what you told me about the topography, the soil, the elevation and the chances of survival against both and earth quake and a tsunami. Remember?”
Mabel smiled back. She had a radiant smile that spread across her roundish face and it up her eyes. She had been a sixteen year old teenager when Neil had first seen her. Her uncle had built the house 18 years ago, and was also the realtor involved in selling it. Mabel had been living with his uncle for her summer job, and eventually joined him at his work. Neil was a new immigrant and had been living in a rented house. Bank loans were easy and cheap. Housing market collapse across the border in the US was several years into the future.
What Neil did not know much about, is that the fault lines that made California famous for her earth quakes of the past century, also plagued the Canadian west coast, with massive earth quakes happening once every few centuries. Depending on how the earth plates adjusted themselves, there may or may not be a Tsunami moving towards the West Coast of mainland Canada. But if there ever is to be one, major parts of the city of Delta and even Richmond would likely be flooded or washed away. The house he was was buying was at the higher grounds of Sunshine hills, at the edge of the great bog by the Fraser river estuary. The land was apparently safe both because of its higher elevation and because of its rocky foundation. Apparently, it was a stone quarry before it was turned into a residential block.
Neil was impressed by Mabel’s basic grasp of plate tectonics,  and of the geological history of the region. She, and his neighbor Jean, were among the first Canadian few Canadian women that Neil came to know when he moved here with a new job. His first impression of Canadian women were formed based on his observations of them. While Jean was elderly, kindly and neighborly, Mabel was young, bright and thorough in her ways. Both held a liberal world view and a caring, sympathetic outlook towards existence. Neither were dogmatic in their religious views, and carried their individual versions of dignity, and feminism that Neil found charming. Neil got to equate Canadians, that they were nice people, especially the womenfolk, through his initial observations of these two women.
Neil sat with Mabel and they together opened up two screens on the laptop – one on Neil’s genetic analysis report and the other on the geologic formations of British Columbia. His home page on the Genetic report had several links they could follow, including a search about ancestry on his fathers or his mothers side. Some of the reports, charts, maps and details were fascinating, both to Neil and to Mabel. She was in fact toying with the idea of having her own genes analyzed.
The other tab on the browser covered an eBook on the geology of British Columbia. There were sections on it that covered the fault lines and the epicenters of past earth quake events in the regions. It was interesting to see that the entire Vancouver island was covered with overlapping large circles of past events. Clearly, the longish island just off the pacific coast of British Columbia was geologically the most stressed and active zone in the entire region. The question was, where might the next big event happen, and if that might trigger a tsunami heading towards the British Colombian shore. Was it at all possible to have a bad tsunami coming from a narrow strip of the ocean. After all, the pacific ocean was sort of blocked by this longish island less than a hundred Km to the west.
But first thing first – Mabel wanted to know about Niels parental ancestry. Neil click on the maternal branch of his genetic report, following analysis of his mitochondria.
Mabel was wearing a cotton shirt and a half sleeve sweater and denim pants. She had taken her shoes off and was sitting next to Neil in her socks. As far as he could tell, she had no make up on her face, although her face looked sort of without blemish, and sort of glowing. He could smell a faint trace of some perfume. Neil did not use much scented stuff and his knowledge on these things were primitive. But, she smelled nice. He looked at her and smiled.
“What ?” She asked.
“You smell nice, Mabel”.
Her face got softer. He could see she was pleased. Neil was forever unsure of women and did not know if he should be romantically involved with someone twelve years his junior. Clearly, Mabel liked him a lot, and perhaps had even idol worshiped him as a teenager some years ago.
Neil was not used to complimenting women on their looks, or even smell. He felt embarrassed at having mentioned it. To complicate matters, he was thirty six and carried with him the baggage of a mindset that had its roots in India. She was twenty two and belonged to a different generation, a different world and a different culture. And Neil was shy when it came to opening up to women. He almost blushed at the thought that he complimented Mabel on her smell.
“Thanks Neil. You should compliment me more often. I really like it.” Mabel snaked her hand into his, locked fingers, disabling his left hand, and pointed at the laptop with her eyes.
“You use your right hand and I use my left, to type and navigate through your mitochondria”.
Outside, a skunk moved along the wooden boundary fence of Neil’s home, sniffing into the grass. It had made a tunnel under the fence and had taken to visiting this backyard occassionally. It found no trace of dog smell or markings, and had considered the ground to be safe. It needed a fresh burrow, and searched around the compound, spending some time under the remaining stump of the Douglas fir tree that had topped some years ago in a fierce storm, and scratched the ground with its front paws. Perhaps this was a good place for a burrow.
Light faded from the sky and darkness fell on the west coast of Canada. Mabel and Neil moved through sixty thousand years of travel of a copy of mitochondria, that took them from north eastern Africa, across the Mediterranean into the south-eastern tips of Europe, before the arrows started branching into different lines and spread across the landmass of the planet as it stood ten thousand and more years ago.
————————
Tonu considered what he wrote, and scratched the inside of his ear with his ball point pen. He was most uncomfortable dealing with relationships between men and women, on a keyboard. He felt more at ease letting his thoughts flow on topics others might consider academic, such as how likely it is to have massive earth quakes on Vancouver island, a hundred miles off the pacific shores of mainland British Columbia, or how his ancestors might have left in his genome some tell tale signs having been in far off places in specific periods in the dim past of human evolution.
He was not a geologist, a microbiologist, nor an anthropologist. He was an engineer. But he found those topics of great interest and could write his thoughts without inhibition. But people might like to know more about what happens between Mabel, born near 100 Mile House, British Columbia, and Neil, born half a generation earlier in Santiniketan, West Bengal, India. These two creatures of chance were subject of a chance encounter that established an acquaintance spanning six years and promising to move on to another stage. He wondered if that made a good story, and for whom.
Coffee. One this Tonu was partial about, when it came to writing stories without a plot, was coffee, especially since he had given up smoking some years ago. He got up to make a coffee for himself.

A coffee with a giant rhynoceros

Posted on by

Tony was partially stuck with the story. He had been busy with work, but that, as the reader would know – was an excuse.

The reason he was stuck had more to do with a doubt on how to proceed, and what precisely, was to write about Neil and Mabel. Neil was a man, and Mabel was a woman. Both were young and unattached. Both happened to like each other. Both were together in the same opening scene in the book.
It should be pretty obvious that there needed to be some chemistry between the two. But Neil, instead was focussing on different sets of chemistry – Neil’s
mitochondrial chemistry, to be precise. It was supposed to be different from a typical romance book where the man is tall dark and handsome and his bare stomach and chiseled facial bone structures look as if they had been photoshopped.
Also, Tony had injected a sap sucker and a skunk already, along with a doze of South Western British Columbia’s topography, not to mention dragging in Bengali scientists of a century ago that worked on wireless communication as well as plant biology.

And that was not enough. Then came the parallel story of a young girl is the french riviera, but ten or fifteen thousand years ago, essentially in the middle of an ice age, stuck in a cave during a snow storm. And to complicate matters further, Tony did not know enough about the life and times of that era.

Tony had searched for free copies of eBooks on the subject, hoping to find something on the web for his iPad. But he had not found anything suitable, and free, yet.

He had mentioned wooly rhinoceros, but was tempted to toss in the giants of them all, an elasmotherium. It was supposed to be a gigantic single horned long legged rhinoceros that galloped along the siberian steppes in the Pliocene and Pleistocene, from about 2.6 million years ago, till at least 50,000 years ago. What Tony did not know, was if the animal was also present in more recent times, such as fifteen thousand years ago, and in more southern latitudes such as the mediterranean coast.
Tony was attracted by the story he heard of Russian legends that mentioned a huge unicorn like animal living in the Russian steppes, and if that legend could have anything to do with a giant rhinoceros that might or might not have survived long enough to enter human mythology.
Tony had found a sketch of the giant on wikipedia, created by one Dimitry Bogdanov. Tony decided to use that picture for his blog, and mention the source of the image. That was not going to play a major role in his story of his ancestors. But, it might add to the sense of drama in the mind of the reader. It added it for Tony for sure.

And so, a cup of coffee at his side, Tony started writing –

Early in the morning, the light was still dim through the swirling snow storm, a small group of hunter gatherers had decided this was a bad day to go searching for food. They turned back and were trying to find a shorter route back to their cave. But ahead of them, emerging out of the churning snow and the haze, a huge single horned creature that was apparently using its horns to plough the ground. Its grunts, and the sound of its exhalation were loud enough to be heard through the storm before it could be seen.
Not having as keen an eyesight as the human party, the creature continued to clear sections of the sloping ground, oblivious to the storm or the approaching bipeds.
Solu came to an abrupt halt, alerted by the pet wolf which had come to a dead stop, the hair on its neck bristling.

—-
Tony stopped again. Pet wolf ? Late Pleistocene ? Giant one horned rhyno ?
None of these creatures were a human female. Therefore, none of them carried an earlier copy of Neil’s mitochondria.
What was he doing, getting side tracked with imaginary one horned giant rhinoceros while trying to write a story about the maternal evolutionary ancestry of a Bengali babu ?

Ohh well, he thought. Lets finish the coffee and leave the story for another day.

Suta at the Riviera

Posted on by

She woke up with the sound of howling winds. It rattled the stone buttressed flaps of leather across the narrow entrance to their cave. Puffs of snow burst through the narrow gaps and settled at the entrance. The stone below was cold, and her bed was lined with soft soil and leaves, on which she had part of a wooly rhinoceros hide, on which she had curled up with some dry grass and straw and another fox hide atop her. Hairs on her arms , back and legs had not grown much yet, and in any case, was not protection enough from the cold. Her mother had already left the cave, likely with Solu, their clan leader. Only baby Oth kept sleeping, curled around the wolf pup. Mama wolf had also gone, with the elders.

Suta gazed at the cave ceiling. The cave had earlier been used by bats, but abandoned since they themselves moved in. The strong smell of their excrement and urine made her heady at times, but every time the wind passed through the cave, the smell would go away for a few days. The cave had a narrow opening through which they could crawl out. The interior of the cave thinned out but did not end. A small shaft connected to the outside without the rocky mound. They would cover that opening with a stone slab, to prevent reptiles, wolverines and small critters from entering the cave. But when they needed the cave aired, they would open up both ends.
The cave was once also the home of a smilodon – a sabre toothed cat. Solu and his brother had fought and chased it away. Even now, the sabre tooth would occasionally pass by and growl at night, as if reminding them that it would like to have the cave back. Suta and her mother were not able to deter the smilodon from attacking them unarmed. But his mother had become and expert thrower or stone hand spears, a demonstration of which the sabre toothed cat carries on its hind flank as a scar, and learned to give them some distance in day time. A sabre tooth was an ambusher, and not a frontal attack predator – at least not for humans. Suta was still learning to throw a stone spear, but she was too small, and was more comfortable with the stone axe with the short wooden handle, used close to her body. She had once confronted a cornered fox with it and came out the winner, without getting bitten.
The cave was at the edge of a shallow lake in what in the future would be named the riviera. It would be a balmy popular oceanfront land of rich people. But in Suta’s time, it was a bleak, ice encrusted covered region in the grip of an ice age.
She was only six years old, and less than three feet tall. In another two years, she might find a mate and pair up either in their clan or go her own way. She did not know it yet, but she carried a piece of mitochondria, that, many thousands of years in the future, was going to end up in a woman of India, who would pass it to her son, who would be migrating to Canada, and sit down with a cup of coffee, and write about her times in the cave by the French riviera.
———————
Tony wrote this much, and leaned back in his chair, putting his feet up on the table, noticing that his big toes had some thick and fierce looking nails that were due for clipping. He sighed. He was never very good as chores of this kind. Fishing out the toe nail clipper from the shelf, he proceeded to tend to his toes, letting his thoughts go back to what he wrote.
The thing is – he was beginning to get an idea of a plot, and it was getting complex by the minutes.
First, there was this Canadian young woman, Mabel, that had taken an interest in Neil. Tony was never going to be a romance writer. So, Mabel was likely going to unsuccessful in getting Neil to commit himself for several hundred pages, and the reader by then would have given up.
But, there was a way out – and this involved writing about the fun detective work Neil was engaged in with regard to tracing his own paternal and maternal genetic lineage. Tony was going to get Mabel involved in it, and let the two of them figure things out from that point.
And then he was, perhaps in alternate chapters, add one more layer of complexity – that of a stone age women, who hypothetically carried the mitochondria that would end up, or rather, a sort of an imperfect copy of which would end up in Neil. And the story would sort of progress on two fronts – one more or less locked in time to the present, involving Neil and Mabel and the crazy world of today, while the other front would have the ice age cave woman gradually morphing through time, to end up a few generations ago into north-eastern Bengal, preparing the seeds that would eventually end with Neil himself, while Neils story would be very close to Tony’s own.
How is that for a story that had no plot, to end up having a hell of a complex one ?
The thing is, Neil did not know if it was normal for a cave dweller, ten thousand years ago in French Riviera, was expected to have hides of wooly rhinoceros. He did not know if the time, and the place was both right, for the now extinct animal. He did not even know if French Riviera area had any natural caves.
He did not know how much body hair folks had those days before the invention of fabric and clothing. He did not know at what age young women of the late stone age were consider to have reached the age of consent. Neil did not know a whole lot about ice age Europe. But, Tony suspected his maternal as well as paternal ancestors passed exactly through that land at that time.
And he was intrigued about it.

Ahh well, time to go to sleep.

Footprints of my ancestors

Posted on by

Click to enlarge

It has been an enduring few years since I first sent two distinct packages containing my tissue extracted from my mouth, for initiating two separate lines of analysis of my genes. One was from my mitochondrial DNA, to track my maternal ancestry. The other is from my Y-chromosome, to track my paternal ancestry.
It took about two months, before information started coming up on my own page at the Gene-base site. It also started a long learning process where I tried to decipher some of the information available about my genes, and try to make sense of it in satisfying my basic curiosity – who am I, and where did I come from.
In the following months and years, more and more information has been made available, not just from reports of my test, but as the larger picture gets more detailed, as more and more people have their genes mapped.
Then, as my curiosity was heightened, I ordered some more tests, which can in cases be conducted without further sending of tissue samples. Clearly, the samples I sent a few years ago are not all used up. Also, clearly, they do not destroy the sample, and keep some of the leftover for further study. If however, the remaining sample is no good for the purpose, I am notified and a fresh envelope arrives with instructions on how to extract fresh body tissues, mark them, seal them and post them back.
This map is one of the intriguing things one can generate, step by step, about our ancestry. I started out with my maternal ancestry, mitochondrial DNA analysis. The origin of it was traced to a Haplogroup called ‘L’, and in particular, L3. That pinned the emergence of my maternal clan to a spot in east Africa more or less where Sudan is today. But that happened likely than sixty thousand years ago or so. Then came further Haplogroups, from L to L3 to N, R and U. However, the strength of prediction that my maternal ancestry definitely followed that timeline and that track on the map, is not terribly strong. Chances that the lineage actually ended at Scandinavia is only around 37%. To be more certain of it, additional tests need to be done and likely compared with those with definitive links of the past in those regions. Anyhow, additional tests are undergoing right now, and we shall know the result in a month or so.
Meanwhile, I already suspect a few details, which are appearing from other parts of the analysis report. One of them is that my mothers side has had a wide ranging link with people around the world, much more so than my fathers side. For example, the map above that shows a link to Scandinavia has little, I think, to do with Nordic people of today, and has a lot more to do with the Indigenous folks that lived there a long time ago – like the ancestors of lapland caribou herders and tribals of the Caucasian steppe. This particular map can be clicked to show the next stage, where my mother also shares Haplogourp ‘D’, which is widely distributed among aboriginal people around the world, from Siberia, China, India, to Australia and the entire Americas. I can almost safely say that my maternal ancestors had cousins that discovered the Americas long before the tribe of Christopher Columbus evolved. I say cousin, and not a direct ancestor, because I suspect the direct lineage did not go to the Americas and then somehow return back to Asia. Rather, the Asian clan remained, continued to mix and evolve, and ended up somewhere to the north east of India where another lineage, that of my father, finally met up with each other in the town of Santiniketan int he last century.
The fat arrow lines and the red star mark (origin or my maternal distinct marker) are created by Genebase report. I saved the image and added my own thin red lines to superimpose the known (suspected) ancestral wandering paths of my paternal side. As far as I can see, my fathers side picked up distinct identification marks perhaps around ten thousand years after my mothers side, at a location only slightly to the north of the red star mark. But my paternal line likely took a land line route through Arabia and Anatolia to the Mediterranean, whereas my maternal line likely took a watery route that crossed the mediterranean somewhere. But of course, it is possible that the Mediterranean was at the time not connected to the Atlantic, and was dry or shallow enough to cross on foot.
My paternal side, as far as I can see, then took a consistently eastern direction north of the Himalayas, and into the Tibeto-Chinese-Mongol highlands and later into the eastern basin. Until about ten thousand years ago, still stone age, my paternal ancestry had not yet stepped foot in India, as far as I can see. My maternal side by then had criss crossed india a few times, though not yet showing up on this map.

Ohh well… so who am I. Where did I come from, and where am I going ?

Chapter 1 : The uncertain life of Dusty

Posted on by

Tony thought of writing a novel, one without a plot. The only thing he could decide on, for now, was the that it would likely follow the life and thoughts of a single person, and that his name would be Niel Dusty.
It became clear to Tony, early in his wanderings through the pages of this novel, that the person had an uncanny similarity with his own younger self.
However, the book did not start with Dusty. Not having a clear plot, it started out with a sap sucker. And here is how it started.

The south western sky grew darker as the sun went down over the Pacific ocean. Branches on row of trees at the edge of a field swayed gently in the breeze. A red breasted sap sucker stopped drilling the bark of one of the trees, looked at its work keenly, clinging to the vertical side of the trunk, its stiffened tail feathers pressed against the bark. It shifted sideways, hopping a few inches at a time, and considered drilling another hole in the bark. Fresh sap would well up where the skin of the bark has been ruptured. A few insects might be attracted to it, and get trapped in the thick sticky glue. The sapsucker would return to consume the nourishing sap as well as any insect trapped there. The bird turned its head and watched the darkening of the sky as the sun went down. It was time to call it a day. With a sharp call, it announced its departure, launched itself into the air, and flew off to the far off conifer forest by the edge of the low hills.
Neil looked out of his window from the dining table. 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.

At this point, Tony stopped writing and sat back to think it through. He had no experience in writing a book. He wondered, if he might show these first few paragraphs to someone. Anyhow, he decided go with the flow for now. He pulled his laptop closer across the glass top dining table, and proceeded for now.

Neil watched the scene outside his window. The sap sucker was gone, and the sky was turning darker orange by the minute. Sun was going to set. Layers of clouds had been outlined by the setting sun, turning them deeper orange. Small flickers of light danced across the darkening scene below the horizon, representing moving vehicles, street lights, or someone shuttering a lighted window in the distance. Before him was the flat lands of the delta of Fraser river as it met with the Pacific ocean. To the east and away from the ocean, was a gentle rise in the land that was known as Sunshine Hills. That was where Neil had a small home  in a cul-de-sac. He looked across the darkening landscape through his window, and the reflection of Mabel, on the double layered window glass. It was there, in his home that he sat facing Mabel across his dining table.

“How is the world coming to an end?” Mabel asked in her calm, carefully delivered voice. Mabel had a calm and composed way of dealing with issues that faced her. She never appeared flustered. In fact, Neil had once called her the queen of England, jokingly, because of the composure she always displayed. She was among the first of the Canadian women he had come to know. She did not have outward sophistication in her attire, unlike the queen of England of later her daughter in law – Diana. But Mabel had composure and substance.
He had come to know three women since he came to Canada that might be potential mates. He was too shy, or too proud, or too slow, to take his relationship any further than casual acquaintance. He had not taken anyone out on a date. He had not even asked. Out of those three, Mabel was perhaps the easiest to talk with. And here she was, sitting across him in his own home. She knew his address, as she had delivered stuff to him. She worked for her uncle’s construction firm. Today, she had called and asked what he was doing, since she was in the neighborhood and might drop in for a coffee.

Tony stopped typing and scratched his head. He was beginning to get into the layout. He decided on at least one thread that had room in the story – his ancestral trail as discovered through his gene mapping analysis. He paid good money for it, and the results that were beginning to emerge at the web site for him. Neil was going to get his life either more interesting, or more complicated, or both, by attempting to contact some of the people that apparently were close to him genetically, but who were not related to Neil as far as he knew and whose existence Neil had no knowledge of. And some of them lived in North America, just like him. He wondered how Mabel would fit into that. It dawned on Tony that he was writing a novel about writing a novel. This was not unique. He had seen movies where the main character was a writer, and the story he wrote got mixed up with his own life. Perhaps that was normal. Perhaps writers drew inspiration and example from their own lives.

Could it be that he could pull in an ancestor, twenty thousand years into the past, to share his life too ? Tony did not feel confident about writing on the life and times of any hunter gatherer clan that traveled the highlands of central Asia during stone age, even if he suspected those clans included his own paternal ancestor.

Perhaps it was going to be fun, writing this story – Tony thought.

What about our thumbs ?

Posted on by

Man is an animal. That much even I know. But a social animal? Well, so it would seem if one checks the evolutionary changes that has happened to the creature ever since it decided to try an opposable thumb to grasp things better a long time ago. It started the creature down a path separate from the rest of them, a path that eventually prompted cerebral evolution on a social front in a massive way. The animal and its relatives survive through combined efforts of groups of individuals held together by a social glue. Their lifestyle has evolved such that unattached individuals living outside of society might find the going a lot tougher.

Social behavior has evolved in species without an opposable thumb also. In fact it has evolved in creatures without a thumb altogether. It is hard to imagine a bee surviving and perpetuating its species without its colony and its queen bee. This is just one example of many, to confuse the heck out of a blog theme.

Anyhow, human social evolution has a long history and was highly complex long before the invention of the transistor, the tv the computer and the internet. During the times of Napoleon Bonaparte, or Ramses the first in Egypt, the glue for the society worked differently and had nothing to do with binary signals traveling around at the speed of light in wires or optical cables from point to point. It is indeed doubtful if people even had a clear concept about speed of light. If you were an actor, you travelled a bit, looked for rich patrons, and performed on stage in big cities, or small towns, or village squares, more or less daily. You probably did not have a fan club except in big cities and that too of a different kind than today’s. In today’s world, Shakespeare would have been coaxed by his agents and managers to either wear a wig, or have a hair transplant, and work on his speech delivery style, even if he was only a playwright and not an actor himself. In fact, even Einstein, if he was a celebrity today, would have likely been forced to change his hair style.

Anyhow, we are here and today, and not there and at that time. We are not in the court of Gengis Khan, thank goodness. So what kind of social animals are we, of the electronic age? Just for the sake of argument, could we be judged by our past society as anti-social animals rather than social? Or could it be that we are a bunch of pseudo-socials that wear a sociable face, but harbor some perplexing unsocial thoughts? In other words, are we pretending to be elites, or intellectuals, or just “me too” clansmen ?

What is the meaning of being a social animal in today’s world ? What should it mean and what does it mean instead?

To further complicate matters, a twist of the word has produced an offshoot – socialism, as against capitalism. Capital has created that opposing offshoot of capitalism. But why capital should oppose social, I have no idea and whatever the definition of capitalism is, or socialism should be – I am sure God does not know, and neither do I. One gets to hear quite a bit of talks on this undefined issue of Obama’s socialism against some of his opponents capitalism during this campaign season for the US presidential race. I am beginning to doubt if Obama himself is clear about the definitions and what they might mean.
But, I shall leave the Obamas, Camerons, Harpers and Singhs to their world. Perhaps in their world gravity is not a function of geometry and space is not curved around objects. What is curved instead is the atmosphere of spin, and it spins like crazy round Washington, London and Delhi, among other places.

For now, the target of this writing is not the social black holes in the capital cities of the world, both Capitalist and Socialist worlds, where matter can pass through, but truth goes into an endless spin and can never re-emerge. What does emerge, is various spins of it. No, that world of eternal angular momentum is not the intended target of this blog.
And frankly, I am not really too involved with theory of the evolution of opposing thumbs either, though I do have them. I have thought of them in different ways. Early in my life I noted how infants would suck their thumb as a reflect action that replaces suckling their mothers breast for milk. But later in life, as folks develop lactose intolerance and grow up to do different things with their thumb including using it as a visual expression of particular thoughts. This display of the thumb starts to carry a meaning, a gesture, an expression. And the meaning can be different to different folks in different societies.
Back in Bengal, where I grew up, showing an extended thumb was a sort of an impolite sign. It also has a name – showing the banana. I guess banana is used here because the extended thumb is usually curved, like a banana. Showing someone the banana is like tossing the banana peel on his path and having a hearty guffaw when he slips and sprawls on the road.
But the same gesture, in the US usually means all is Good. But, for all to be good, the thumb should be pointing up on a closed fist. Point the thumb downward, and the gesture means the opposite – it sucks. What about thumbs extended sideways? I guess that, accompanied with the owner of the thumb standing roadside, usually means the person is looking to hitch a ride. Either way, up, down or horizontal, it means quite a different set of things, than showing the banana in Bengal.

Nonetheless, I was not going to write about showing the thumb to Obama, Ron Paul or Mitt Romney. I was not even contemplating writing about our own evolution, or what an extended thumb might have meant to a Neanderthal.

The original notion was to think through this phenomenon of internet based social networking sites, and how it might help or hinder the natural growth as a human being that has learned the art of charm, spin and of political correctness.

I’d say this newfangled social media is a mixed bag. You win some and lose some, thumbs up on a few counts and down on a great many more.

Everyone is on the internet social bandwagon. Before I knew it, my friends circle had bloated to a ridiculous number of many hundreds, a majority of whom I had never met. Suddenly, I was confronted with an unending stream of trivia notes forcing themselves on me informing me that someone likes to pet her dog, or someone else likes the fact that his friend likes someone else’s comments. Matters begin to get ridiculous, so much so, that I had to go to war on the list of friends, and decimated the parasitic growth of friends without friendliness.

My experience here, is of a jungle of faceless humans, a vast majority of whom are like passing flotsam drifting in the stream. Its nice to be moving with the water. But I find it unattractive to be social in that sense, just drifting together, barely aware of each others existence beyond the fact that we are floating, and not yet underwater.

So, how much of a social animal are we?

More you get to know people, more you learn of their behavior. Just like a biologist studying animal behavior, you could, at a distance, try to figure out what it is that makes people tick on the electronic social media. I have, and have come to some heartwarming as well as heart wrenching conclusions.
First the good news. There are a lot of people that are inspirational and do amazing things with their lives. But, many of them are low key and work with people that are not in the limelight. They are a sharp contrast with people in the limelight, and in a fair comparison, they, those silent inspirations, would win hands down. But the world is not fair. Without a platform that sort of leveled the playing field, these folks would never get to be known beyond their village or town. So, internet has helped enormously, for persons like me, to seek real inspirations and not phony stage managed ones from religious headquarters like the Vatican, or political Headquarters like Washington, or cultural headquarters like Hollywood.

But what about the bad news? Well, the heart wrenching part comes later as you come to realize that folks you knew for a long time, folks you consider your friends, your kin, your loved ones, have not lived up to your expectations, and have betrayed your trust in them.

Its not personal. You were not expecting them to line up with you just because you were a friend. You however expected them to line up on the side of truth and speak up as responsible social animals. But, with the chips down, all you noticed was their silence. You saw injustice being done to individuals, to groups, to communities, to entire nations, and your friends chose to remain silent and selfish and sitting on the fence. Actually, they behave as if they live on the fence.

You yourself might have spoken out at times, and tried to seek support from others. But all those people you held in high regard, and considered to be giants, were actually pigmies. They would prefer that you do not notice them, or ask them or expect them to be fair and impartial and just. They wish to be silent, non-committal, and selfish. They do not care, where you thought that they should.

But instead of those fallen giants and dear one’s, you do notice a small trickle, one out of a hundred, that you did not know that well and did not think much of, have proven you wrong and have come up and surpassed your expectations.

This is the most heart wrenching and heartwarming aspect of growing up. You recognize that, while you might be a social animal, your cozy world has been an illusion.  People you expected to stand up for principles, were actually mice looking for a larger hole.

Social animal ? Well ….

Tonu

Glaciers of our ancestors

Posted on by

It was the beginning of January, 2012. I had gone north from Glacier National park in the US, crossed the border and entered Canada in the province of British Columbia just west of the Alberta state border, and south of Banff. My intension was to take the southern route going west back towards Vancouver, and stop on the way wherever it looked good. I had travelled some of these roads before, but not in the dead of winter. A lot of high mountain roads were involved, with sudden change of altitude and weather. Heavy snow and limited visibility in sharply curving mountain roads were to be expected. One had to be vigilant.

I was also going through what many call the southern edge of British Columbia’s wine country. A few of the vineyards were within site, among the lower foothills of the mountains.

I was watching the scenery. It took me a while to identify what was intriguing me so much. It was the slopes of the distant hills to my left. There was something odd about it. It was not just a farmland, a few farmers vehicles in the foreground, and a low hill in the background.

I slowed down and watched the side of the hill for a while – till I could not continue any longer. I had to stop, and seek out a dirt road going through the farmland towards the low hills, so I could take a closer look. Beyond the flat farmland, as the land began to slope upwards, there is a vineyard. Someone had planted grape trees what were currently barren, shorn of leaves in the winter. Its not so visible from here, but can be seen closer to the hills.

But what drew my attention was the hill itself.

The side facing me was rocky, without much soil cover, and therefore mostly barren with no trees. At the upper regions, there was soil and also trees.

The rocky slope facing me had a light powdering of snow. Water coming down over thousands of years had carved the rock and made a few channels and ravines. Gravel and dirt coming down from top had collected into these ravines, enough to support a few trees.

But, right across that bare rock face staring at me, were horizontal gigantic scratch marks, over which the water-cut ravines ran zigzag down the slope. These scratch marks, were the ten thousand year old footprints of a gigantic glacier that ploughed and ground its way through this land, carrying huge boulders, rocks and other material that caused those horizontal markings on the rock face. Those tell tale footprints of the passing glacier has survived the ten thousand or so years, and remains visible primarily because soil and trees have not hidden them from view.
Water has done its work over it, cutting all those vertical channels over the horizontal scratches. And trees have grown where soil collected at the depths of those channels.

I am not a geologist, and never studied the subject except for reading a book that Gautam Sen had given me, written by a French Geologist, some fifteen years ago while I lived in Florida.

And yet, here I was – mesmerized by a geologic text book facing me through a simple rock face of a hill by a quiet stretch of highway heading west towards Vancouver.

Wanted to speak with Debal Deb

Posted on by

What kind of a topic heading is that ?
Well, I don’t know what kind – except that it is what came to mind, with a fresh cup of hot instant coffee Sunday Morning, after having mopped the kitchen table. I do not feel too good this weekend because I did not go outdoors and walk about in the reeds, and did not train my binocular on far off mountains. It does not feel nice if household chores take precedence over nature. But then, nature can survive without me. In fact, nature does survive pretty well without human interference. But the kitchen table had dried stains of old coffee, specks of marmalade, dried butter, crumbs of bread, and other associated tidbits. It needed cleaning. The trouble is, whenever I engage in some household chores, my lower back starts aching after a while. Somehow, when I am carting a heavy lens on a big camera, mounted on a heavier tripod, across uneven grounds and through bushes, for hours on end with very little respite – that same back seems not to be bothering me at all. I wonder if the welfare of my lower vertebrates are somehow linked to the subconscious wishes of my brain. I am not even sure which half of the brain is involved in encouraging me to spend time outdoors with my camera.
Anyhow, mopping done, I started another household chore – converting old DVDs into digital files in hard drives, so the physical disk and its plastic jacket can be retired out of my study and hopefully out of the house. It takes up space and its no more convenient to run a  dvd player to see movies.
Anyone heard of iTunes store and netflix ?
But that’s not a proper chore – you click a few buttons and then the computer does its thing without needing further help from you. You are free to do some more mopping, or finding those dirty trousers that are tucked in this or that corner, and take them downstairs to the laundry bag. Well, I do not take clothes downstairs per se. I toss them from upstairs into the air, and curvature of space does the rest. This curvature is not seen easily, but felt – in the form of gravitational pull between two objects that have mass. The earth pulls my dirty trouser down towards the centre of the planet, and my trouser tries to pull the planet up to meet it in mid air. But since the relative mass of the planet is a tad more than that of the trouser, the earth manages to pull the trouser proportionately more down. The tiny amount of upward motion of the planet, is so small, that folks standing on its surface, and moving up and down with it, do not notice. Folks do notice heavier unplanned motions of the planet, but usually recognize them as earth-quakes or being attacked by enemy bombers and such – most unpleasant turn of events that have little to do with my dirty trousers.
So, the trouser lands on the carpet on the ground floor near the entrance door. I descend through the stairs – because I cannot do what the trouser can, i.e. Meeting planet earth in mid air, without the selfsame lower back vertebrae and other parts of the body facing some serious damage.
I usually pick the dirty clothing off the carpet and move sideways about four meters into the passage where we have the washer and the dryer. We do not share it with our basement tenant – they have their own.
But the point is – the lower spine gives an indirect indication that I should consider sitting down at the dining table with a hot cup of coffee and do something less strenuous and more stimulating, for a short while at least.
And thats when I thought about how to arrange a telephone talk event with Debal Deb, the social activist that I am just beginning to fully appreciate, as I read more about his activity in India, as well as read his book. I should cover those issues properly on future blogs, perhaps. Meanwhile, I was looking for an opportunity to speak with him. I wanted Madhusree Mukherjee to sort of co-ordinate it on the phone, she in Germany, me in Canada and Debal in India.
But, man proposes, woman disposes. Madhusree is on her way to India for a vacation. Debal has been silent on this issue.
And so, here I am, dirty trouser tucked away in the laundry bag, a large cup of hot instant coffee next to me, sitting at the dining table with the mac pro notebook open, writing yet another blog, where the subject heading has only circumstantial reference in an otherwise strange blog.

Tonu

How to eat an English cucumber

Posted on by

When I started on this path, creating a blog on WordPress and obtaining a host and a domain name under tonu, I did not know, and still do not, the full extent of  the capabilities of this site. So, as I created it, within the first hour, and jotted down a post or two on it – I noted that my posts are supposed to have been created by one ‘admin’. The site had the tonu name, but the content belong to admin. And I was the admin. I knew it – but my guess is I was the only one that knew it at that point.
So, what to do? I logged out and tried to log in as tonu. Doing that, I came to the discovery that one can actually subscribe to this site I did that, as tonu, and selecting a dedicated email address not already used up for admin. And voila, I could not only log in, but start creating my own blog environment, not showing up anything under admin. Kinda cool, ehh ?
Then it dawned on me – I had not only created a blog of my own – I had created a site where any member can have his or her blog site without showing other peoples blogs in them. Well, something like it. When I do not log in, I can see content created by admin. If I log in as tonu and not admin, I see a different blog site of tonu, with no content created by admin showing up there. This was tonu’s own personal space.
So, another member can, I guess, do the same.
This was not just tonu’s blog, but it was indeed a blog site for any member so inclined.
Hmmm … fancy that !
Anyhow, this is the first post in a new category – a diary. Perhaps it should be named a journal ? I should be able to change the names and fix their relative hierarchy later on. Like most social animals of higher order, I guess even a blog category might eventually find a better fit within a hierarchy, with a parent, and sometimes a child too. Bleh.
The thing is – I need to spend most of today, a Saturday, not walking around swamps watching birds and otters and plants, but rather, cleaning house and shifting all things that appear more like junk and less like something I would like in a room – out to the garage. There, on the shelves, it can pass the next phase of its life, awaiting nirvana. Its not unlike people retiring from active work, and looking for either a reason to exist, or for the ultimate union with the void. I hesitate from mentioning union with God – somehow it sounds false.
So, I got up in the morning, cast a critical eye at the state of the house, or rather, the interior, and decided I liked the look of the uncluttered work desk in my study, but did not fancy all the stuff on the floor. They had to go, mostly to semi-retirement. I had one plastic box and two more small cardboard boxes. Lets fill them first, then see if I needed more.
Hunger is a feeling we the upwardly mobile but currently moving sideways class in the middle, that go by the generic name of middle class, have not experienced as a daily occurrence. Our familiarity with it is only abstract. We are sensitive enough to avert our eyes from, or better still not go near a hungry person begging for money, or food, or shelter. Hunger is often psychological for us. We see a cake, a stake, a pizza, and “think” we might be hungry.
But, this morning, my stomach definitely indicated that it needed something. I cut up half an fresh English cucumber, and sprinkled some salt on it.  The name is strange. It was a local produce of Canada and not imported from England. It looked pretty much similar to what we had in Bengal in our childhood, which is when I picked up a liking for it. In Bengal we called is “Shosha” and wrote it as – শসা . Anyhow, I liked these cucumbers, both the long English type and the shorter and rounder ones. The only difference with the Bengal cucumber might be that in Bengal the skin was lighter color and thinner, while these are a bit thick skinned and a darker shade of green. Am sure the reason has something to do with adapting to climate. And I ate up half of it without cooking, unless you consider cutting it up into small pieces and sprinkling salt on it may be defined as cooking, in a minimal sense.
It felt good, having that. But stomach said not enough. So I took two slices of brown bread and toasted it light. I added salted butter on it, and then some marmalade. Why do I take butter and not margarine ? And why salted butter ? What about blood pressure and cholesterol and the rest ? I don’t know and dont get me started on that. My parents, uncles and aunts have all lived to 80 and often well beyond that, most of them not even knowing what cholesterol was, not knowing there was such a thing called margarine, and to them, adding salt to butter improved its taste. It did mine anyway.
And I kinda got a sweet tooth. I am a Bengali – did I tell you that before ? Bengali babus are supposed to be in love with sweets. I guess that might be because their lives are otherwise so sour ! Anyhow, so I put a thick layer of marmalade on them, and ate them too. Stomach felt better, but needed a glass of water. I do not take bottled corporate created water. I drink water off the tap. It tastes absolutely great. I do not use special filter, I do not boil, or run ultra violet light, nor do I subject that water to any other high, medium or low tech process to kill bacteria. I love bacteria for that matter, and have made peace with the fact that there is no getting around without them. They were there before us. They are here today in most everything we eat or touch. And they will be here after us. They are a lot more omnipresent, that God, if you want to be frank.
Anyhow, that glass of water felt great, but left a little bit of craving for caffeine and some more sugar. So, I took a mug of milk and water, heated it and added instant coffee and some more sugar in it. For good measure, I added just a touch of pure honey too.
Then I sat down to finish the coffee. But its hard to just sit and have coffee. And so, I thought a category – a post – a diary, and a mug of morning coffee just might accompany each other in tuning me for the rest of the day, which should be spent on the inhumanely drab and boring work of house-cleaning.
tonu