Tag Archives: Santanu Mitra

Where pronghorns meet trilobites

Posted on by

I looked at list of items before me. There were the pronghorns, feisty little pseudo-antelopes from Montana.
——————————————
“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.
——————————————
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.
—————————–

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.”
—————————————–
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.
—————————————–
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

Posted on by

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 ?

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

Posted on by

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.
—————————–

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 !

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.

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.

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