The ten thousand year old woman.

Posted on February 28, 2012 by admin

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

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

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

The vanishing Y chromosome

Posted on February 27, 2012 by admin

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

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

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

Old woman sacrifices herself

Posted on February 25, 2012 by admin

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

American Lion - wikipedia

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

Straight-tusked Elephant - wikipedia

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

———————————-

Cave Paintings of ice age eurasian animals - wikipedia

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

Cult of Tagore

Posted on February 18, 2012 by admin

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

: Tagore Bust at UBC, Vancouver

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on February 18, 2012 by admin

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 February 17, 2012 by admin

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 February 17, 2012 by admin

“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.

Chapter 1 : The uncertain life of Dusty

Posted on February 6, 2012 by admin

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 February 5, 2012 by admin

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

How to eat an English cucumber

Posted on February 4, 2012 by admin

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

Tony Mitra

Exploring citizens duty on food security, environmental sustainability, covid and freedom issues.

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