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

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

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

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