Tag Archives: Tony Mitra

The ten thousand year old woman.

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

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

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

Overload

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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 ?

Footprints of my ancestors

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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

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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 ?

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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

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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

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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

State of our lives

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So, whats up with this planet and how is it fairing in this new year of the lord 2012?

Well, firstly, it makes not enough sense to number this year after any Lord. Besides, it appears kind of silly, to follow a calendar starting from the death of Christ, as if there was nothing before that. And since there was quite  a few historical events before that, there is this mathematical anomaly of a missing zero. I mean, there is year 1, and the year previous to that is year -1. The year zero is missing – a mathematical impossibility.

Apart from that, ideally the year should have been representing the age of the planet, and if we wish to avoid a lot of zeros after the number 4, we could have found a way to do that, just like the number 12 represents the year 2012 today.

This is not to criticize the life or efforts of Jesus Christ, or against the Christian faith system. It is just a view that, for the world to follow a calendar, the death of Christ appears to be an inappropriate datum line for either the planet, or the history of human presence on this planet.

It is easy to guess that hardcore believers of other religions also wishing that the calendar be shifted to the times of Budhha, or Mohammed or Krishna or Zoroastra of Cyrus the great. And while we are at it, why not Gengis Khan or Confucius or Tut Ankh Amen for that matter ?

Anyhow, this issue is not going to be resolved by tonu rambling on a blog, so I shall move on, removing mention of the lord, and just calling it year 2012. So then, what is the state of the planet?
Do we have a clear indication from any source, anywhere, that can be taken as a standard measure of the state of the planet? Is there any common platform and mass appeal to consider the state of the planet ?

Is it important at all ? After all, the planet has been here for over 4 billion years, and likely will be here for many billion years more, even if you and I shall be gone, and even if humans will have probably evolved into something else before dying out, while life form as we know it is snuffed out of the planet, and as the planet loses its habitable environment, and as the sun dies out eventually, plunging the whole solar system and this corner of existence into deep darkness.

Well, for some, it is not important to consider the state of the planet, because, on a short term basis, nothing is particularly wrong with it – even if in the long term everyone and everything must die. But for others, the state of the planet, that of the well being of its inhabitants, particularly of humans and human induced changes to the environment that affects flora and fauna as well as global climate – is a hugely important issue, and things are changing rather rapidly, so much so that a changes during a single human lifetime is at times too great to really comprehend.

Is there a historical precedence of species overpopulating itself and over-developing itself to extinction ? I believe there are, and that humans are proving no better than lemmings or cockroaches, technology and God notwithstanding.

So, what is the state of the planet ?

Too long and evolved a subject – so I shall come back to this time to time. This writeup is just a musing of 20 minutes at lunch break. I was actually having a dish of Bibim Bam – its Korean. If you never had a bibim bam, you should try once. I mean, just for the name itself. How can anyone refuse a dish with a name like bibim bam ?

———————
So what is the matter with the planet ?
What is the matter with its climate, its environment, its air, water and soil ?
What and how much have we, the humans, done to preserve, or destroy it ?
At what rate are species going extinct in this age of human technology ?
What awaits us down the line ?
Is there a population bomb waiting to take everybody down ?
Is there reason to worry?

Living in North America, there are scores of people around the world that think coming to North America is the next best thing to going to heaven. And within the continent, it is USA in particular, that appeals to disgruntled folks around the world as a magnet, a mecca of freedom of speech, human rights, and the chance for everyone to rise to his or her potential – its the American dream.

Today, the affluent society around the world, and particularly of old Asian nations such as India,  appear to be blindly in love with a rather shallow version of the western pop culture and superfluous extravaganzas. But, is the American dream really sustainable over the long run ?

Is it repeatable on lands other than the US? Is it sustainable even within the US ? For how long and in what fashion ?
Meanwhile, what is happening to the planet, to the civilization, and indeed, to the future of our race and our ecology ?

I have a lot more questions than I have answers.

Tonu

Why write this book ?

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Well, for a start, this is not a book, but a blog. So, you might expect me to change that heading. However, I shall let it slide for now, because the text in the following paragraphs were largely penned a month ago with a view of creating an e-Book., and not necessarily a serialized blog. Anyhow, the question is still valid – why write this. The honest answer of it might either be – I don’t know why, or – I write this just because the idea came to my head. There is also an urge, I guess a natural one for an evolved animal such as a human living in the 21st Century, to express himself, and have some of those expressions available for passersby to glance at.

Animals mark the boundary of their territory. Perhaps these musings are similar to territorial markings of a new kind, by an animal that has gotten past urinating at tree trunks. In fact, he is moving into urban jungles where trees might be missing, or real trees are replaced by plastic ones – made in China. Attempt to urinate there might provoke unpleasant reactions, such as getting arrested.
The Freuds of this world might identify this urge to write as a hidden carnal urge, following an oedipus complex or something, perhaps an unfulfilled fantasy that prompts a person not known to be a writer, to start writing something, something that is not even addressed to a specific reader. For whatever reason, non-writers will sometimes pick up a pencil, or in this case, sit before a keyboard and type with eight fingers, producing material for a WordPress blog, or even an iBook, or on a web host, even using free software from Apple or WordPress.

If one is of a kinder disposition, one might see here a very human desire for social recognition, and an exchange that is more than a one-sided silent observation of players on the field, like bing a spectator in a sport event. He plays solo for a while, does his “talking” and gets off the podium. He or she hopes a few others might do the “listening” and perhaps even react to it by leaving a comment, or writing something in return. Its not mass communication, not Pope passing a sermon to millions of listeners and telling them what God wants out of them, and not Obama telling listeners why it is someone else’s fault that the US is having a bit of trouble.

This is a kind of one-to-one communication with a difference. It is initiated without knowing who the other party might be that responds, or if there indeed will be another person.

Most of us like to be appreciated – for our looks, or our deeds, or just because someone loves us. It feels good to be appreciated. This feeling might even be a genetic code linked to an urge to climb social pecking order, inherited from a distant and faded past when we were still attempting to master new modes of locomotion based on crawling around in watery muds of a primordial world.
Think about it – would writers write, if the world had no reader? Would poets exist if poetry was not liked by folks?

But, this is a new world, a new century has not only dawned, but has passed its first decade already. Stories have changed, formats have evolved, and the message is no more the same.

Consider moving picture. Among English movies, two of the very best I have ever seen are ‘To kill a mockingbird’ and ‘Doctor Zivago’, followed by a few more, such as ‘A patch of blue’. But, those movies belonged to a different era. Todays film makers are likely unable to reproduce similar movies even if they could, because the public today might want absurdities such as the Harry Potter, or Star Wars, or Rambo stuff.

Perception of reality has changed. Blood and gore is in. Moral values are in transit, and the shape and color of our culture, spirituality, realization and perception of the planet and its sustainability are very different today among different strata of humanity. The definition of ‘civilization’ can be questioned.

The same goes for regional movies. At least I can make a comment about Indian movies.

And then comes the books, the essays, and the articles. Newspapers have evolved and changed form. Ownership of papers have moved from small town flavor to mega-corporation globalized standards. The transformation is so great that it can hardly be called news any more. Its manufactured factoids that are doled out in measured doses to a global pool of mass patients.
Freedom of expression has turned to represent freedom to own and manipulate what expressions are “expressed” in popular media. The popular media is now a place to make money for savvy investors.

Ohh well.

For many of us non-cave dwellers of this planet, there is also this need to earn this fictitious and almost virtual commodity called money, in order to spend it so we can acquire food to eat and keep body and soul together. So, for some, writing is the means to sustenance – an existential issue.
But not for me. I do not earn a living from such writings. I am not even a good writer, either in English, or in Bengali, as far as I can judge.
Recognition is good, and often catalyses a person’s efforts to create more content that is appreciated. Being born in Santiniketan, West Bengal when I did, and growing up there with the ancestry that I have, an influence by Tagore and his thoughts were unavoidable for me. He was the first ever non-European to have been awarded with a Nobel prize, which he got for literature that was mostly written in Bengali, and a small section of it was translated by Tagore himself, in English.
In my book, if the world was a fair and equitable place, the first non-European to be awarded a Nobel Prize should have been the Bengali scientist J.C. Bose, Tagore’s friend that actually did the most work in inventing Radio. He should have gotten the award in Physics a few years before Tagore did. But, colonial India and racial prejudice being what it was those days, Bose did not get the award, which years later landed in the lap of Marcony from Italy.
So, Tagore, a few years down the line, broke another important glass ceiling – and got the Nobel committee to award him the prize in literature, and Tagore’s fortunes transformed itself, and he became the best Ambassador to explain the spirituality of the east, to the western world. His personality helped open a lot of doors worldwide in most continents of the world. But, as he got more and more famous outside of India, his homeland elites showed a perplexing mix of jealousy and resentment, proving that the Bengali and Indian intelligentsia, or the educated elite, were as small minded as any in the world.
Tagore often felt hurt by the lack or appreciation and even ridicule of the average Bengali intelligentsia (if there ever is such a thing), regarding his writings and efforts. The concept of Santiniketan was ridiculed, the language used by him, the songs, both spiritual and romantic, were misunderstood and/or often criticized by people who probably did not have the mental span to understand him. I personally have often suspected that people in Santiniketan today do not have that span, and do not understand Rabindranath. Even those ex-student community and sworn Santiniketanites that claim to be boiled into ripeness in the Rabindrik broth, rarely show an understanding of anything other than a zeal towards parroting his songs, dances and meaningless preachings in a pristine and almost holy ambience.
So, yes, recognition is a strange and double edged sword. People do not often want to recognize anything, unless it is some sort of a fashion statement, even a statement on cultural-fashion.
So, I do not know if that should be the prime reason for my effort here to write something. I am no Tagore, and have not his endless capacity of shock-absorption and forgiveness. besides, I sometimes question the very need for recognition by my contemporaries – what is the point?
Unlike Ravindranath Tagore, I have not yet cemented any unshaken faith in Man, over and above human institutions. I have a somewhat negative impression of both Man and his institutions, covered in a Darwinian layer of evolution which both attempts to improve a species and same time push it towards an ultimate extinction, to be replaced by something else. The new replacement may not be considered superior in your yardstick, but it would be more fit for survival, the only thing that really counts in the end.
And so – I am not particularly keen on mass recognition.
So the question expands to include my own efforts – why bother writing a book of this kind, even electronically on iBook?

I do not have an answer – except that, perhaps my genes are behind it, somehow.
How is that for a non-writer with an un-planned write up that was done in 20 minutes flat without a plot ?

Tonu