Quid Pro Quo With The Gods

You shouldn't doubt such things and not apologise for these much-vaunted digressions.

Just like I chased up Don Camillo, Avvaiyar, Aldous Huxley, Isadora Duncan, Performing Fea, French-sounding Dardin, hairless Yul Brynner and our Fearless Fly, I will watch Peter Ustinov and report back. By the way, I like those Quo Vadis, The Robe, Ben Hur type of films. I will check out Romanoff and Juliet.

 

Dear sri
U good or bad?
A difficult question really. If I proclaim u to be a good man,u will be parted away from me,to heaven.haha
I want u with me in hell we will have fun. We will deal with yamraj don't worry.we will have the best of wine wealth and the in mentionable things.haha
Yes honest turn to dishonest sad really.
A great post sri.
You rock.
Regards
Kamal

 

Aye, once I am done with Rushmore, next onto Romanoff!
(I am loving Wes Anderson so much, right from his Moonrise Kingdom that I want to finish his filmy canon)

 

I had to shovel this post because something just struck me. I wish I was more organised in terms of factual connections. Two culturally distant elephants may struggle to get the subtle message across with their monotonous trumpet, meanwhile, it is amazing to know how the indigenous Pirahã (pronounced PI-DA-HAN) tribe manage the phonetics conundrum with scant alphabet, just eight consonants and three vowels to communicate with the civilised man. Words for "friend" and "foe" in their native language differ only by the pitch of a single syllable. Word to mean "one" (hoi, in a falling tone) and "two" (hoi, in a rising tone) also differ only in pitch (though it is a different matter that the Pirahã don't understand numerical plurality).

None of this fascinates me to the extent another insight in their unique trill does. The women of the Pirahã tribe drop a consonant completely from their speech which means they use only seven out of that eight revered consonants. Why? I don't know. May be women are prone to diet in all areas and the Pirahã tribeswomen took to this lean language diet as a fad (that hasn't petered out for several thousand years).

To top it all, what really charms me about this tribe is their sense of presence, i.e, "carpe diem" as a salient cultural tenet of their tribal lore. Pirahã are considered the happiest people in the world for they don't dredge their past or worry about their future. They have no sense of past or future. They all live in the now which is reflected in their language that has no verbal identifiers to relive the past or project the future. Y'know, few years ago, I heard this quote in a BBC programme about Michel de Montaigne and hold it very dear.

"Traveling through the world produces a marvelous clarity in the judgment of men. We are all of us confined and enclosed within ourselves, and see no farther than the end of our nose. This great world is a mirror where we must see ourselves in order to know ourselves. There are so many different tempers, so many different points of view, judgments, opinions, laws and customs to teach us to judge wisely on our own, and to teach our judgment to recognize its imperfection and natural weakness."

The key is to teach our judgment to recognize its imperfection and natural weakness. We bask in our superior cognitive and language skills and think the Pirahã are retarded, but to the Pirahã we are fools who need twenty six letters to converse and still cannot reconcile our differences with each other in our structured and formalised world. The intemerate Pirahã complete the harmonic series of Kurt Vonnegut's Tralfamadorians and Ted Chiang's heptapods [Story of your life] like some living fossils who are not constricted but content as the seers of the tangible now. They are the happiest and cheerful like those two vocalising elephants who might create sounds for things and feelings that are immediate and only matter to them in their life regardless of whether it makes any sense to the rest of the world or to other cognate elephants.

 

I don't say "nice" things about you because it is embarrassing for me to ram truisms into already known facts. I don't take these conversations lightly. I thoroughly enjoy these interactions. In fact, I don't take my time lightly. Though my online presence bleeds into my real life, I would not have connected with you in a way I connect today if this spacey interactions meant nothing to me. I enjoy our rambles. I have given up on original pieces for some time because I have always enjoyed being on the sidelines and commenting. Though I tease you about the lizards and flies, these animal-y discussions spur me to read up Carl Zimmer's Parasite Rex: inside the bizarre world of nature's most bizarre creatures and learn about a parasite called e. californiensis that transits between three hosts for a living: shorebirds, horn snails, and killifish. Though we talk about elephants blowing their noses to communicate, they make me look up Daniel Everett's Don't Sleep, There are Snakes and learn about the Pirahã tribe in South America. As you rightly said, anything may go as an original piece but I prefer when you write that original piece not because of its questionable survivability but while you ramble away, I prefer to scribble away and this partnership is one of the most enjoyable aspects of my daily amusement that I look forward to when I wake up. What did Cheeniya write back today .....

 

We only pretend that our real and virtual lives are distinct. But our real lives are heavily shaped by these virtual forces. I can assure you that your disorderly rambles where we divagated from John Milton to Milton Bradley are unique, in the sense, though outward they seem feathery and fun, in fact, they are very pungent because they make me reflect on lot of things ...life in general. Ho ho ..there is nothing vain, even if were to recycle or regurgitate your rambles (which you don't), they stand out afresh in terms of how to engage someone in the ensuing discussion.