Divine Bovine

The other day I noticed an elderly gentleman – a regular walker in our area – trying to circumambulate a cow of local breed, possibly because it was his puja day.  I understand that if you do this three times and each such time touch the rump of the above-defined cow (not some other passing bovine since infidelity is frowned upon) and then your forehead, hold your ears with cross-hands and do a quick twist-and-turn and pray for wealth, luck might shift to your side. 

 
While I am uncertain if luck would shift to your side, I do know that dung will definitely shift to your shoe, particularly if it is new, expensive and white (the shoe, not the dung) .  And, despite crippling and persistent inflation and everything that Baba Scamdev and Sigma Sri Sri and Jags-in-turban will tell you, dung is not the same as wealth (if it were, the cows around your home would each have shares in Google and a linkedin profile which says, Author of ‘Downloaded without Bullshit’. She/Her/Moo).

Now, you might find all of this unremarkable, but that is because you are not - when reports last came in - a cow. 

But I digress, as always, so back to the story.  This one was a fine HF specimen and she had strong, unambiguous views about being circumambulated, which were expressed by her turning, along with the man’s slow walkaround, so that she was always facing him head-on, with the other end - the tail-on, shall we delicately say - in Slow Release Splatter Mode.  

It took him a few seconds to realise all this, possibly because of an incomplete education in landscape geography where cows are concerned.  When he did realise, he jumped a step back in the well-founded belief that the cow was likely to poke him in, shall we again say, a delicate place, which thereby increased the circumference of the circumambulation.

And there they stood facing each other.

His problem with the cow now, in succinct summary, was that it would either charge or discharge.  

Now, all this was great entertainment for the public and he was advised by one and all (except the cow that kept its own counsel) to do a quick anti-clockwise round and take the cow by surprise but the idea was rejected:  the opposite of good luck is misfortune , he reminded the 8% of India’s unemployed who were now deeply involved in trouble-shooting and hardware updates.  

All this while, the cow stood unmooved - that is a rather feeble pun - and gave him a stony gaze that reminded me of Fr. Shenoy in high school, after a football had got him in the same delicate place mentioned elsewhere in this news account.

A few minutes later, after aborted attempts made in some embarrassment - for he was now the rock star of 13th main - he decided to do a larger circumambulation, by walking around the block a couple of times, while the cow stayed put, its nose in the abundant garbage that he (and others) had left behind.

I am sure there is a moral here, stay posted.  

In The Flood Lies A Tale

 Sometimes you hear a story that makes you sit up.  This is one such story.

“The water was like the sea.  Trees were floating by.  When I looked outside, my neighbour’s two-storey house was collapsing…..it fell and destroyed our house.

I heard my granddaughter, Mridula, crying as I was trying to get out.  I grabbed hold of her little finger, covered her with a cloth and began swimming through the flooding water.  My son pulled each one of us - my daughter-in-law, my grandson and the two of us - through the water and my back and my grandson’s chest were badly injured.  I cried for help while swimming but no one could hear me.  

When we finally reached the shore and moved through a coffee plantation, a wild elephant appeared in our path. 

I told him, ‘We are coming from a great tragedy, don’t do anything to us.  We are afraid.  There is no light and water is everywhere.  We have just survived death.  Don’t do anything to us.’

And then, his eyes welled up with tears…..

My granddaughter and I sat at his feet and he stood there motionless until dawn when,eventually, we were rescued.  Two other wild elephants stood nearby.”

Isn't this a breathless story?

And, just so that we know, until the 1950s, 85% of Wayanad was under forest cover; 62% of those forests disappeared between 1950 and 2018, while the area under plantations - tea, coffee, rubber, ginger - went up by 1800 percent. A thousand eight hundred percent.   

This, then, is another story, a tale of Wayanad.

These two stories aren’t disparate, for at the hip they remain bonded by a common bind.  Listen to the storyteller.  His eyes - and those tears that Sujata saw in them - tell the whole larger story.

How We Tell A Story....

 The best stories that we hear are the ones that we tell ourselves.  These are the most ordinary of stories, yet there is heroism, longing, sadness, contentment, justification and confirmation.  Those stories form from a lazy haze that works up a pattern upon the stencil we once had etched out on the table.  Each such story is but a version, just as history has always been, and those versions - of crystal haze - are the straws we cling to. If those straws form a bundle, we float under a warm, satisfying sun and – this is astonishing – we can stay that way for a long long time. 

The truth and a fact or two weave in and out of these stories, they have a place like the lamp beside our bed or the bread knife on the kitchen counter.  Elements of truth pick and arrange themselves along the strand of DNA, each a tiny weight of realism.  No story that we hear must be overweight, so the rest – what remains of truth and fact – is discarded into the neat recesses of conniving memory. 

The best stories that we hear are the ones that we tell ourselves.  All else, we have always known to be fiction.

 

Samantha Peroxide

 Not sure if you keep track of the most exciting things that happen in Life, but last week an actress called Samantha somebody-somebody, whose name I had most regrettably never come across earlier, stated emphatically that inhaling hydrogen peroxide provides relief to those with flu.  

She is quite right in a way.  If you inhale hydrogen peroxide in significant concentration, you are likely to be dead, the clear advantage in that outcome being relief from flu of course.  

But something tells me that this outcome -flu-free-but-dead- isn’t exactly win-win, if you see what I mean.   

I just adore news like this because it adds to my research folder titled Idiots in Public Life, which is a sub-folder of a larger one called Idiots Online, which, in turn, is a small portion of the Master File - now, all of 41 GB - titled Idiots Unlimited And Growing Fast.  As you know, being an actress active on Instagram makes her perfectly qualified to speak on a variety of topics from the ICCT20 to French politics, penguin dances and hydrogen peroxide, all to an active group of devout followers (whose responses have been carefully stored in a sub-folder titled Plus Size Idiots Growing Faster).  

Now, the only thing I have ever inhaled in my blameless life has been Vicks Vaporub in hot water (no, no, I was not in hot water, the Vaporub was), but back in my college days, I knew of a whole bunch of guys in the last bench of our large class who inhaled stuff that gave others in the room comic relief, (though not, sadly, flu relief which is the exclusive prerogative of Samantha Peroxide).  My long-suffering delightfully boring Commerce teacher, Mrs Vaz, would ask one of them a question such as, ‘Give me two features of a Joint Stock Company’ and the 6 of them would laugh uncontrollably at the sheer imbecility, the ridiculous simplicity, the utter asininity, the profound impertinence of the question, when they were inhaling and contemplating the larger meaning and deep fragility of life.

‘Get out,’ she would yell in helpless rage.  Now, this created a problem for this group as, in their current state, the line between Out and In was richly diffused, which, of course, would make them put their heads down and laugh some more like those hysterical hyenas in Lion King on steroids (inhaled).  Plus, to Get Out, you need to Stand Up, which was clearly a task beyond their immediate comprehension or athletic ability.  

In retrospect, I wish Samantha H2O2 had been around then - since those classes were about as interesting as sipping idli batter with soda, we would then all have been carrying inhalers, some with her SamHyDro Pero stuff, me with Vicks (and hot water) and those six guys with, well, the stuff that guys in the back bench generally inhale in Commerce and International Relations classes.

Note that, for the record, Mrs Vaz needed to let off steam, not inhale, which would have messed up that H2O2 with more H2O resulting in molecular mayhem and creating a law-and-order situation that, the Hindu would have reported, was tense but under control.  

Moth-eaten? Well, partly....

Above the front door of Random Rubble

Is a moth with about half a wing

Those eyespots...they look ominous

And I wonder if it will sting?

(Well, no, that wasn't a thought.  It just sounded nice)

An owlet moth, I learn later

When consulting a guide

For once, I know why that name

And I am not stymied.

Random Rubble

June 30th 2024

8 pm
 

Bijuii

 June 17th 2024

I am in the district of Kannur, in one of those unending villages-cum-towns that run right through Kerala, surrounded by plantations of rubber, that are dense and pleasing to see if you have an aerial view, but are immensely harmful to ecology.  If that isn’t enough, rubber is a voracious consumer of water (have that conversation with your car tyre sometime). 

In the middle of this mirage is a few acres of land being restored - some intrepid folks have uprooted the rubber and are growing a food forest following principles that are rooted in the science of agri-ecology.  

And that is where I meet Biju, an unlikely and refreshingly humble hero.

A few minutes of conversation and I can see at once that he is an encyclopaedia on plants, butterflies and mammals.  He spent seventeen years as a watcher with the Kerala Forest Dept, all of it as a temporary staffer.  This fact is, of course, an awful commentary on pretty much every Forest Department I know but should be interestingly news for those software kids who would like to become Chief Software Architect-cum-AI Evangelist the day after tomorrow and think that python was first a programming language before it became a snake. 

His friend tells me, ‘Biju ettan is a hero.’  

‘Why?’

‘Tell him etta.’

Biju is reluctant so I let it go.  But just for now.  

We walk around the land and he explains the principles behind the food forest.  ‘Would you like to taste some mint-tulsi?  Here’s mangosteen.  See the butterflies on the Jamaican Spike - we have recorded 127 species of butterflies in our farm.  There are otters in the rivulet below’......there is a childlike excitement, an energy that is infectious and, despite the heat and the humidity, I spend a good hour as a diligent student (who did not take his notebook, of course, so how much is retained is a question you shall promise to not ask).

He insists that we drive up a nearby hill - about midway up we stop to visit a home where the borewell has had water gushing (and I mean GushinG with a capital G at both ends)  out of it ever since it was drilled a decade ago, which is stored and piped to the village below in a classic example of enlightened collaboration - to see the view and on the way down he tells me the story of his heroism.

Some years ago, as a watcher, he was guiding a team of three young students studying slender lorises in the dead of night in the Aralam Wildlife Sanctuary.  They had puny headlamps with narrow red beams to avoid upsetting the elephants.

And then they stumbled on them.  Well, almost.

(stories like this get my pulse racing).  

Three elephants stood looming over them just five feet ahead - you read that right - flapping their ears and watching them impassively .  Biju stopped, signalled to the students behind him to retreat slowly and waited for them to move away some distance before he retreated one step at a time, observing the pachyderms without turning his head.

The elephants did not move.

‘I was sweating,’ he says.

As he speaks, I am sweating too and it isn’t the heat…..

Three students owe their lives to one person’s experience, composure and sheer bravery, for he put their lives above his.  

Biju has a footnote in science as well - he has a local wasp named after him by a grateful entomologist.  So the next time someone comes up to you yelping in pain and complaining that a bloody wasp of the genus Tiphia - Tiphia bijuii - has nipped him in the ear, remember to rub some salt into the wound……..

Hand-in-glove

The last time I bought a pair of gloves, some years ago, I went into a shop and asked for, well, gloves.  The shopkeeper took out a pair that smelt strongly of a rubber factory in which all extra space had been reserved for rotten eggs and molasses.  I bought it (the gloves, not the factory) and it’s still in great shape, but no longer smells of rubber+rotten eggs+molasses.  Instead it smells of something that makes the earlier smell feel like a Pierre Cardin perfume on steroids.

So, I checked out Amazon.  Keyed in ‘gloves’. 

There were over twenty thousand instant results.  

Are you a giant idiot? the chatbot said (Actually, it did not, but I could see the bloody emoji and that said it).  Did I want Organik Premium Quality Washable Reusable Cotton Hand Gloves? This was on sale for Rs. 166 for ten pieces in a limited time deal (highlighted in red, so this got me all excited). Or was it my hidden, long-suppressed, deeply emotional desire to own The Coolio Midas Safety Brown Shell with Crinkle Finish?  

Another option was powder-free gloves, in which there were about two hundred and seventy sub-options, divided into further categories (I remain unsure if powder-free means that there will be no powder in the gloves, which I never knew there was in the first place, or that I will get some powder free with the gloves.  In which case, do note that my preference is for Ponds Sandal talc).  

Riderscart, whoever he is, has the option of non-sterile latex medical examination disposable hand gloves which, since it is non-sterile, can only be used to clip your finger nails in a hospital or for a doc to dig his nose in-between patients (no, the nose is not in between patients, how can I make this any clearer?).  

There were latex gloves and silicon gloves and plastic gloves and nylon gloves, and it was about an hour later that I realised that buying gloves was becoming a serious, committed, you-only-live-once task.

I keyed ‘Scotch Brite gloves’ in, which, you will agree, was a stroke of masterful genius.  

The Bot was incredulous: was this customer’s idiocy genetic, generational and needing immediate medical attention?  Did I want kitchen gloves (ultra soft cotton lining with extra sensitive grip and fresh lemon scent) or heavy duty (extra strength with secure grip and adjustable strap) or multi-purpose with reinforced fingertips (not to be used to dig nose in-between patients, without risk of injury to what is now a bigger nose).  In each, there were four sizes (of gloves, not noses) and instructions on how to measure your hand and select the right size.  There were colours as well, so I chose a delicate-skylight-grey, heavy duty, extra strength with secure grip and adjustable strap in medium size, that was a Amazon’s Choice Limited Time Deal (the Bot relaxed now and gave me a fetching attractive smile. Not a laugh.  Even I know the difference in these two emojis).    

Yesterday, I received a package that was so big that it had been check-in baggage on a Russian Antonov An-225 aircraft.  There were about seven layers of plastic, which was deeply touching because it demonstrated how much Amazon cared for me.  I peeled it all off carefully with my Swiss-knife-For-Amazon-Packaging (Exclusive Limited Time Deal, Amazon’s Choice), with feverish anticipation.  I am now the proud owner of a pair of pink Kitchen Gloves Ultra Soft Cotton Lining Extra Sensitive Grip With Lemon Scent, sized Extra Large, that will neatly fit a Yeti's hand, as and when he shops on Amazon.

If I ever see that Bot, there will be a murder reported.