Gehanu gathiya and pirimikama – desegregated gender relations in rural Sri Lanka

Over the last nine years, as a facilitator, activist and developer working with rural communities in Sri Lanka on systemic environment management, agriculture, fisheries, rural climate response, rural disaster prep and mitigation, aid effectiveness and development sustainability through civil, government, private, media, academic organizations and  trade unions, I had, for quite some time, been looking for a rather elusive link. As each year slid into the next, I began to feel the same type of frustration as scientists searching for the missing link between man and African tree frogs whose DNA apparently most closely resemble ours. I also began to lose hope. Until that is, I realized I was searching for the wrong thing in the wrong place.


This particular Dodo I was after is so deeply entrenched as being real in the minds of people that its existence has almost been taken for granted. It’s called masculinity and femininity and their classic associative links to males and females respectively. You see, a whole barrel load of development paraphernalia from funds to expertise to beneficiaries to goals are supposed to even out real or imagined disparities and inequalities and equip human beings to acquit themselves equitably. One of the more vociferously articulated differences was supposed to be those between men and women with women generally assumed to be sitting on the lighter end of the balance due to the said associative links and the power dynamics that supposedly arise from it with men snarling and drooling like tigers over women who were cowering and whimpering like rabbits beneath them.
Now, since its existence is so universally taken for granted I should have at the very least been wading knee deep in the stuff if not actually drowning in it.

hmm...? well!...ah :)... heh!... *giggle*

However, the fact of the matter is that I walked the length and breadth of rural Sri Lanka over a decade without coming across any evidence of it at all. This, to put it very mildly, was a cause for great concern on my part. That I, and many kindly, well meaning and completely silly donors and experts were fighting a mirage was not only obvious but also the least of my issues.  I was more worried that that sort of shadow boxing against an invisible or even unreal opponent could do some serious damage to a very large number of very real human beings completely innocent of the desire for differentiation, contention or outright war over an artificially enforced schism. This Hutu-Tutsi-itis or Blueeye-Greeneye  Syndrome or whatever silly else one wishes to call it, was downright dangerous so I explored the  actual dynamics of male-female relationships in rural communities in the country to find out how their heads were wired or disengaged with respect to their specific anatomies and the way those anatomies interacted with each other in socially cohesive groups.

Well, simply put, masculinity and femininity, matriarchies and patriarchies as they have been classically defined have little or no meaning in Sri Lanka.

Instead, what we have here are two qualitative factors “pirimikama” (positive attributes associated with the male principle) and “gehanu gathiya” (negative engagement strategies associated with the female principle). Both arise not from cultures or traditions or as resultants of interactive modalities but rather from Buddhist-Hindu karmic theory. Two very important facts that need to be noted here are a) that there is no concept of “gahanukama” (positive attributes associated with the female principle) or “pirimi gathiya” (negative engagement strategies associated with the male principle and b) that “pirimikama” and gehanu gathiya” are used when talking about the characteristics of both males and females with no tying of “pirimikama” to men or “gehanu gathiya” to women.

The conclusion is quite clear: Men and women are just that. Men and women. There are no classic attributes tied into the specific anatomies. The female and male principle as yielded up by karmic theory is applied without favor to both anatomical males and anatomical females with respect to individual occurrences of each entity. I must stress this. The application is individual – not collective. In the minds of rural communities, every human being displays specific trait combinations and the composite determine the personality of the individual, the type of strengths and weaknesses they have, the types of abilities they can use as a community and failings that need to be understood as a community. These types of individual dynamics shape the way in which the community optimizes the use of their individuals for the sustenance of the community which in turn is supposed to sustain the individuals that constitute that community. Rather than blanketing a specific set of SWOT results to an anatomical division, they SWOT the individual against the requisites of the community and the weightage of the composite male-female principles perceived in each individual that the community have to work with.

Does this essentially mean that rural societies are free-for-alls akin to urban communities where anyone can be anything in any situation with respect to anyone? Not at all. While attributes are not specific to gender, responsibilities and roles are and these are classic.  The two most important are based on the principles of protection and equity which are the core drivers of social cohabitation in rural communities and they are primarily passive in nature.  These have morphed into security and equality for urban communities and are primarily aggressive in nature. The one leverages individual strengths for collective good and the other leverages legislative mechanisms for individual good.

The responsibility of protecting the family socially and economically is assigned to men and the responsibility of protecting and educating the children to young adulthood is assigned to the women.  Men earn and women utilize what is earned. Women support men in their livelihoods and men as a group takes communal decisions on advisement from the women as a group. Responsibility of educating young males in livelihoods is for the men and educating young females for marriage is for women. In general, men do not attempt to look after the young and in general women never take on the task of protecting other women since both of these are considered beyond the innate skills sets of men and women respectively.

No rocket science here.

It is all pretty common knowledge except for the fact that there is a naiveté amongst urban segregationists who firmly “believe” that it is the men who exclusively control the family purse, that it is men who exclusively determine the course of a community and that inequality is equivalent to inequity. All three are observations that have arisen in the minds of people in the process of urbanization and despite their validity with respect to urban communities they are fallacious when applied to the rural populace.

Seems pretty cool but  does this mean that rural populations are a benchmark, a baseline, a valuable real-o-meter to measure sustainability or stability of social groupings?

Emphatically no. No on two counts. One, it is just one system and not the only system. Two, that system, like all systems fails as well under specific circumstances.

That the rural system, which has withstood centuries of internal and external impacts and upheavals, is under serious threat, shuddering and breaking apart at its seams is a fact. Climate, energy, food and money crises and their packaged outcomes – conflict and war have had rather charming impacts of the stability of these communities. None of these were of their making. Like gender segregation, all of that can also be laid squarely on the shoulders of urbanites that haven’t lifted a finger to plant a cucumber or catch a mackerel but have eaten their way through almost all of that which was produced by rurals and pastorals. Be that as it may, restabilizing it would require using its own system of checks and balances – not external interventions. The core silliness is to attempt to apply the rules of one social system or order to right the wrongs of another system. This where this imposition of alien ideas such as masculinity or a femininity to Sri Lankan rural cultures fails and fails miserably.

Where then lies the problem with rural communities? While there are many issues that are internal (such as migration, loss of resources, destabilized environments, loss of livelihood options etc.) and external (war, consumerism, development initiatives, resource capture etc.) arising out of the multiple crises that cause those communities to destabilize, going by the testimony of the Afghan woman in my previous post, chief among them is the weakening of the ability of men to fulfill their roles and responsibilities.

Clearly, there is recognition amongst women in rural communities of the mediocrity of their men these days. Maybe it’s gambling, non-traditional enforcement of monogamy, alcoholism… whatever… but the lessening of the man has put a lot of unfair and uncalled for pressure on the woman. Additionally, and dangerously, when a woman steps into the shoes of a man who is weak it makes that same man react in accordance with his frailty, spitting and foaming at the mouth, kicking and screaming, condemning, judging, manipulating, subjugating, raping, murdering, revealing his inadequacies in naked, inglorious silhouette for the world to see and condemn. However, it must be noted that the fact that this occurs, at least for rurals and pastorals in Sri Lanka results less in a sense of emancipation and more in a sense of tragedy. It is not a situation that calls for women to overtake men but one that calls for both sorrow for their lot and shame for the lot of their men. For these people, a weak man is not to be condemned, ignored or marginalized but rather, to be worried over … and over… and over. Reading between the lines of that brutally honest Afghan woman warrior, the reversal of this tragic situation is laid squarely on the shoulders of men. If they are strong in their maleness the women can be equally strong in their femaleness resulting in resilient, united, strengthened, sustained societies.

That, is a tough ask for both men and women given the spectrum of issues that assail them these days in rural Sri Lanka. However, it is when it is darkest that there arises the highest qualities of human beings amongst such societies. For example, it is when such a resurgence or re-enabling of a man is impossible to engineer that there rises in Sri Lankan rural communities the “dhiriya katha” (courageous woman) who takes on a large number of the attributes of “pirimikama” because the men have been overtaken by “gehanu gathi”.  Or, it is when the entire system is compromised that there rises the “yugapurusha” (the man of the era). This particular phenomenon is highly lauded in rural communities and the “diriya katha” is awarded the same level of recognition as a “yugapurusha” and both of these have historically led their communities. That leadership is vested in them for the qualities they depict and the enabling energy they bring towards stabilizing their communities and ensuring its protection and equitable interrelationships – not for the type of anatomy they possess.

Again, there is nothing very special here. Everyone knows all of this.  The danger lies in the fact that such dynamics are in the process of being forgotten to the detriment of the country as a whole.

In a recent news item the Speaker, Chamal rajapakse stated the following to the women’s parliamentary group:  “Women taking the lead sometimes obstruct work in progress. This is not something I am saying. When women take the lead there is a tendency to not listen to anyone else. It is like this in a lot of places. It becomes difficult to work. If a woman is in charge of a District Secretariat or Divisional Secretariat or any other high office, they have a tendency to exert their authority over that place. So because of that, sometimes justice is not done”.

What the Honorable speaker says it correct.  Over the last nine years, I’ve seen examples of this nauseating condition in many females hailing from all sorts of social settings from urban to rural and all sorts of institutions from international donor agencies, academic institutions, CSOs, PSOs, TUs etc. and their chief victims have been other women. However, I have seen it more these days among men in high office in all institutions both state and otherwise. One doesn't need to be the coming genius of the 21st century to clearly understand that the men in positions of power in Sri Lanka these days obstruct work in progress, do not listen to anyone, exert their authority over a place and make it difficult to work. Also, their chief victims are women as well. While it is convenient and fallacious to attribute such mindsets exclusively to women, what the Honorable speaker should remember is that in Sri Lanka, there are many “pirimi” (men) with “gehanu gathi” controlling many of the socio-economic aspects of the nation and the reduction of the potency of Sri Lankan society as a whole could very well be tagged to this state of the collective national psyche.

(This post is somewhat of an anecdotal exposition of continuing research into gender relationships in Sri Lanka. I need to also thank my wife, Manju Dharmasiri, who earns four times as much as I do and is the chief breadwinner of the family who contributed invaluable insights into gender realities in Sri Lanka and whose insistence on not taking high office in her workplace and  her rationale for it that started this line of inquiry on my part)

The segregation of women and the myth of equality

Masculinely female feminine male... excuse us? *heh*

I like the idea of the Hindu deity Ardhanarishvara.

Ardhanarishvara represents the synthesis of the masculine and feminine energies of the universe and depicts illustratively, the idea that Shakti, the female principle of God, is inseparable from Shiva, the male principle of God. The union of these principles is exalted as the root of all creation. I particularly like the fact that the vehicle or mover of the feminine part is the lion and that of the masculine part is the bull. While I can have a huge chuckle explaining the rationale behind this juxtaposition, for the purposes of this particular post, it is less relevant and therefore I shall desist. *heh*

The keyword here is “inseparable”. As I mentioned in the previous post, attempting to understand systems that exist dependent on the right juxtaposition of a very large number or even an infinite number of parameters by breaking things down has only one practical outcome – it breaks them. Separating complex organisms merely separates them. No more and no less. While this is true with quite a few forms of human segregation, for this particular post, I will only concentrate on the segregation of “nari” (female) from “purusha” (male).

The ideas behind the buzzwords of the gender debate such as identity, traits, roles, relations, etc. have, to a large extent been based on segregating and separating females and males anatomically and these days people are creating new and improved versions of the very stereotypes that such differentiation is supposed to eradicate such as discrimination, rights, equality, mainstreaming etc.

Human beings are far too complex and far too diversely and contiguously graded in the integration, weightage and juxtaposition of the psychological and physical parameters that constitutes their existence for that sort of simplistic treatment.  

All is not quite lost though. At least from around the early nineties, there has been some awareness if not conviction that the fundamental life-dynamic created out of the interaction of men and women is an infinitely complex one that cannot be treated adequately through segregation. There has been a slow-dawning realization that breaking down the social entwine into its component parts along anatomical and/or age related lines cut through an extremely complex web and when it was put back together, it just didn’t come back up alive or, if it did show signs of life, then that life was comparable to that of the Frankenstein monster.

Yet, amusingly, segregation dies hard. It’s almost as if that particular train has gained so much momentum that no amount of pressure on the breaks is going to have much of an effect on its onward rush over the societal precipice.  I am amused that quite a large percentage of the summit attending global trotters, video conferrers, researchers, activists, writers, blog readers and email users seem to think that attempting to find fairer sets of life-rules based on what is essentially an unnatural cleaving of social inter-networks into groups such as “women” and “men” (or “youth” or “children”) actually works. The amusement stems from the fact that it is not that hard to understand that the synergy of a society overarches the individual potency of its components and extracting those out of a family, group or community for segregated treatment simply weakens, damages or destroys the cohesiveness and energy of the overarching phenomenon.

This is true for 66% of the world’s population who do not have Facebook or Twitter feeds, do not have email accounts, do not read online newspapers and blogs, do not respond to posts such as this and do not jet around the world attending conferences and debates on gender. These are primarily the rurals and pastorals of the planet and they really don’t give a rat’s bum about such issues. They have far more life-threatening problems to solve than go ballistic on the percentage of female representatives on a governance council.  Such issues reach stratospheric proportions only for the 34% minority.

However, that minority, primary made up of relatively urbanized components of the global population is powerful enough to change governance and policy based on their segregation-focused ideas of fairness.

One can’t really blame them when one sees where they are coming from.

Their life-dynamics differ from the rurals and pastorals. Urbanization is a relatively new phenomenon and urban travails equally so. They have had to adjust on the fly and that pea-soup is still a “work in progress” that is yet to reach any semblance of stability.  Indeed, stability is not even a consideration for it since it primarily operates on flux. Its chief social signature is the breaking of classic norms used for social engagement and replacing those with legislative ones. Their social web is constructed out of legal rules and not cultural, traditional or spiritual ones. Therefore, as a matter of life-and-death, they must have access to constitutional guarantees, they must have access to social institutions, they must be able to engage the legislative frameworks of the nation, region or planet and they must have trust in enforcement agencies. And they do!

As a direct result of their history, their ideas of what constitutes life-security and an equitable share of that life are driven more by the idea that the individual should be able to help herself as an individual than the idea that a community should be able to help itself as a collective and their colleagues in these types of engagement naturally tend to be of their own segregated kind since every other type of relationship is both relatively unknown and/or relatively irrelevant in comparison.

And they are right, in their own societies where legal and institutional safety nets are in place. That is the caveat that gives credibility to their claims and makes their standpoints on equality, rights and recognition of abilities valid since to all intents and purposes, the extra part or missing part between a human being’s legs should not have significant impact when all are made equal when measured against the building block of their society – their law.  And if, constitution forbid, their specific framework of safety is compromised, of course they have a right to shriek. And shriek they will, as they did in India recently where the safety of urban women became hit-headlines across the world as trust in constitutional guarantees, trust in legislative frameworks and trust in enforcement agencies failed in urban Indian environments.

And they are wrong, in presuming that such systems are applicable across all societies and that their shrieks on everything from equality to discrimination to rape should resonate with all women in all social groups in all parts of the world.  Despite the fact that for a majority of those howls, there is no such empathy, these people own the powerbases of the planet, and move quite aggressively trying to subsume all other norms, believing firmly, mostly ignorantly, definitely honestly, that their framework is not only the right one but should also be the only one.

It doesn't need a great deal of thought to realize that each social grouping has its own unique mechanisms for assuring stability, its own modalities of governance and its own systems of understanding who does what to whom, where and why, how many times, next Saturday night. Each needs to be treated as such and engaged as such. These societies exist because of their ability to integrate differences into a cohesive whole, not because they subsume those differences under an empirical framework of legal instruments.

For example, a very general rule, applicable to most rurals and pastorals, was articulated brilliantly by a young Afghan woman whom I interviewed last year on women in conflict (not Malala who is a spokesperson in a different type of skirmish albeit on a related battle field- heh). I believe (unconfirmed) that this young woman had links to or was at one point a member of RAWA .Her response was along these lines (I am trying to quote this verbatim as her translator stated it because it was powerful testimony stated in short sentences like one-second bursts from an Uzi machine pistol):

"Why do women take up arms? Why do women have to do (emphasis hers) anything at all? It is only because their men are weak. When their ability to protect us is gone. When their ability to feed us is gone. When their ability to support our children is gone. This is why movements like RAWA happen. Because we did not believe our men were strong. Because we believed our men were hurting us. Islam did much to protect women.  Shariya did much to destroy women. It is a good tool in the hands of a strong man. It is a terrible tool in the hands of a weak man. To do, for many women in this world, is not something that comes out of choice but something that comes out of necessity. This is why we help in the field. This is why we help in the fishing. This is why we do not farm or fish ourselves but keep at the side of our men when they work and support them. They in turn protect us. This is why we are amused by western women going to war in other countries. Their men are strong enough. Their weapons are strong enough. There is no necessity. We see a person who can be safe, protected and a good wife. So why fight? I think Hussain was right when he said the aggressor has brought his wife with him. When our women fight we have no choice. When their women fight they have no reason".

Clearly, the life-dynamics here are different and based on societal norms, not legislative ones and is rooted in creating a balance of differences, not reducing everything to an equation. None of them feel that equality in life is essential for ensuring high quality of life. For them that type of reasoning is fallacious. None of them consider their interrelationships stereotypical. They consider them rational. They consider them valuable. They consider them critically important. Why?  For these communities, the harmonization of societal inter-networks is far more important than rights.  Why so? Because they have little or no access to constitutional guarantees, legislative frameworks and social institutions and they trust enforcement agencies not at all. Anyone attempting to shove “rights based approaches” down the throats of these communities is actually doing far more damage than good since the base requisites necessary for their validation do not exist.

One thing is pretty clear here. One must engage a group of people as a cohesive whole. Try to give them women’s rights, youth rights and child rights and all that one manages to do is remove their cultural, traditional, spiritual, familial and communal rights and replace them with hollow spaces that are essentially useless in providing them with either safety or equity. Working aggressively and/or earnestly along such lines is basically an amusing cop-out at best and mostly selfish in its target. It is the exercise of tired minds and weakened insights and little academic tricks like “nuancing” which presume that the base reasoning is right but that it needs to be tweaked contextually just don’t cut it. One must realize that the base reasoning is wrong and an entirely different rationale unique to that specific gathering needs to be understood if one desires to read it. Luckily, there are some people who are aware of all of this and are attempting to stop this mad rush towards societal suicide.

Trying to get men and women to work together has its place in some types of social grouping but they are anathema to those where men and women work with each other.  The later majority is deeply and justifiably rooting for norms that are based on alternative cosmologies and in almost all of their cases; they would rather work with the idea of Ardhanarishvara where two halves make one composite and not nari-purusha where two individuals make two individuals.

For the majority of this world, the former is exalted as the root of all creation. The later is debilitated as the root of all destruction.

Ardhanarishvara understands how a cow manages to suckle a lion and why a lion manages not to eat a cow whereas Nari-purusha will wonder “why the effing hell is the male on the right and the female on the left in that illustration”.  *grins*

(Some of the assertions are based on nine years of work in rural development and social activism, part of this was based on a blog response to women soldiers in American armies and part of it was based on a research exercise on the use of women centric gender models in development projects.  Oh, and, as I was searching my mind for the name of the Hindu deity mentioned in this post and I was pondering aloud, my 15 year old daughter who is an expert on Hindu Polytheism pipes up “Ardhanarishvara you goose”.  Given the type of deity, that was entirely appropriate *winks*)

Nothing special about specialization

THE TREE OF UNDERSTANDING

Everyone knows that a tree is an organism that is standing on its head. A very large percentage of tree species absorbs nutrients through their roots and excretes oxygen and water vapor through stomata in their leaves. The tree of knowledge is no different. However, we, in our collective madness have done something rather shocking with it. We have, to all intents and purposes, decided that *yuck*, no self respecting organism should identify as its “head” something that is buried in the ground and instead, we have, over the last century or so, valiantly attempted to legitimize the case for calling it’s excretory organ its intake organ. We have tried to re-label its backside as its mouth.

Let me explain. Despite the fact that knowledge, by its very definition should be an all encompassing whole, we concluded that we could become “knowledgeable” by acquiring fact-nuggets selectively. This is the result of a fact of science which proposes, aggressively promotes and teaches us that everything can be broken down into their component pieces, studied in a mutually disassociated state, deductively or inferentially linked together through analysis and understood as a whole. The rationale stems,as Thom Hartmann says, from thinking such as this: If you break a car into its component parts, you can understand exactly how it works and if you put it back together it will come back alive. However, and here is the fallacy of that argument, if you do that to a dog, regardless of how competent a surgeon one is, once one puts it back together it will remain dead. Something very essential to the idea of the living dog, the whole of it existence is lost in the process of dismembering it.  As a matter of fact, when attempting to understand systems that exist dependent on the right juxtaposition of a very large number or even an infinite number of parameters (such as a living being, an ecosystem, a social group, a nation etc.), breaking things down has only one practical outcome – it breaks them.

That there is a serious error in the thinking doesn't seem that hard to get and yet, that is precisely what our education systems, our schools, our universities, our teachers and our examiners are insisting that we do.  That, we are told, is the best shot we have at understanding what is really going on in this cosmos. It is the rope that our inquirers or researchers cling to with bulldog like zeal because there is precious little else to cling on to.Over the last century, blindly believing in this almost axiomatic truth, we have created more than a thousand major scientific “disciplines” or “areas of specialization” and literally hundreds of thousands of minor specializations. I like to call these specializations “fact-buckets” and specialists “fact-sops”. There is nothing there that even remotely resembles knowledge. Just a series of answers to a series of (mostly) irrelevant questions that yield a lot of nothings about mostly everything.

We have, over ten decades, managed to split the tree of knowledge into a very large set of branches (areas of specialization), an even larger set of twigs (minor specializations) and an almost infinite number of leaves (facts), none of which are even remotely aware that they are part of a twig let alone a branch let alone a trunk let alone a root… let alone a tree. I cannot be but blunt about this, but since leaves are the primary waste expelling unit of the tree, we have, essentially, spent thousands of man hours, zillions of dollars and tons of infrastructural resources to buy ourselves a world’s-worth of factual sh** and each time some poor apology for the human race coaxes and teases out a “new finding”  - or factoid - or fruit if you many, in some rarefied “field of inquiry” (for example: The effect of water droplets on the air-water interface, or, basically, what on earth happens when a drop of water is dropped into glass of water- or even more basically, oh lord, is this guy serious?), that individual is perpetrating the dung gathering exercise that we all earnestly believe is true blue gourmet chocolate manufacture, mined out of high quality endeavor, guaranteed to help us in our understanding of what we are, where we are, who we are and why we are.

Pause here for awhile. Take a look around you. What has this done for our world? Have we understood it clearer or made it better? It has done nothing of the sort. In fact, it has had the opposite effect to the one intended. We don’t need climate specialists, agriculture experts, energy gurus, military strategists or money moguls to tell us that through our scientific insanity, we are now almost at Armageddon.

These days, when I go to a doctor, I feel like the elephant that was analyzed by five blind men. I get shunted from the trunk -lady to the foot-dude who consuls the tail-gal who phones up the mahout who collectively proceed to test everything from my teeth enamel to my nose hair, tell me about the dangers of clipping my toe-nails too short,  give me ten dozen different types of medication, attack my wallet to the tune of fifty thousand rupees and turn me into a chronic, serial pill popper.  Almost, I want to tap them on their shoulders and whisper “people, it is the whole darn elephant that is sick, not the elephant’s spleen – that is only diseased and curing that will only cure the disease not the sickness”.  I know it won’t do any good though. Specialization has blinded these people and telling them they are blind won’t give them back their sight.

Amazingly silly aren’t we all? We who specialize and we who believe in the abilities of specialists?

Is there a cure for this giggle? Is there any possibility that such a course of action can be reversed? Sure. There are no questions that human beings feel the need to ask that don’t have solutions, provided that we are not afraid to look wide enough and deep enough. Wide and deep are the operative words here and acknowledging those two words is a challenge for most. Through this process of specialization, we have become instinctively terrified of both of them.

Instead of scrambling up into the branches and twigs of the tree of knowledge, we need to scurry down to its root. Instead of flying up into its canopy like eagles, we need to scratch at its base like turkeys. Instead of selecting the particular type of telescopic tunnel vision we will use for the rest of our lives, we need to buy ourselves the widest angled scope possible. Instead of selective facts we need holistic awareness. We need to be able to study the dog in-situ and figure out how it actually managed to be alive without trying to make mincemeat out of it. This can only be done by the wise – not by the knowledgeable, not by the intelligent, not by the intellectual.

Those who possess an intellect can formulate questions. Those who possess both intellect and intelligence can move towards formulating answers to those questions. Those who possess intellect, intelligence and creativity, can formulate answers to those questions. Those who possess intellect, intelligence, creativity and emotional stability can actually make those answers work in real.

The intellectuals? They are able. Only. The intellectually intelligent? They are enabled. Only. The intellectually intelligently creative? They are knowledgeable. Only. The intellectually intelligently creatively emotionally stable? They are wise. Knowledge, in some ways, we can get at with great difficulty, even while we are scrambling up the tree.  Wisdom requires that we make like rodents. Wisdom insists we acknowledge the importance of creativity and emotional stability as key requisites for actually solving problems instead of merely creating them, analyzing them, discussing them, collating them, researching them and publishing them. Both, unfortunately, are anathema to science and its limiting framework of reference. This is unfortunate for humanity as well.

(This post was triggered by a presentation I made on Democratizing Agricultural Research In South Asia in 2009. While there were a few great souls at the conference, two stand out. My own father, the ex-director of the Agrarian Research and Training Institute and P.V. Satheesh, the Leader of DDS and convener of the National Millet Network of India, Zaheerabad, Andhra Pradesh. To both, over time, I owe unrepayable debts not least for their unique and separate types of fatherhood). 

Factoid - Where originated "The Lion Sleeps Tonight"?

If you haven't already heard of the origin of this song:

Originally recorded in 1939 by a guy called Solomon Linda and a group called the Evening Bells in 1939 in South Africa. Solomon was a South African of Zulu origin and worked as a cleaner and record packer for Gallo Records. The song was originally called Mbube (Lion).

according to South African journalist Rian Malan:

"Mbube" wasn't the most remarkable tune, but there was something terribly compelling about the underlying chant, a dense meshing of low male voices above which Solomon yodelled and howled for two exhilarating minutes, occasionally making it up as he went along. The third take was the great one, but it achieved immortality only in its dying seconds, when Solly took a deep breath, opened his mouth and improvised the melody that the world now associates with these words:

Linda and the "Evening Bells"

"In the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight"  

Issued by Gallo as a 78 recording in 1939 and marketed to black audiences, "Mbube" became a hit and Linda a star throughout South Africa. By 1948 the song had sold about 100,000 copies in Africa and among black South African immigrants in Great Britain and had lent its name to a style of African a cappella music that evolved into isicathamiya (also called mbube), popularized by Ladysmith Black Mambazo. Black Mambazo of course is the band that Paul Simon collaborated with to make Graceland back in the day and you can hear the Mbube style rear its head in Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes and Homeless.




Here is the clip, go almost to the end of it to get the killer sound byte:

Confessions of a doubting Royalist

I didn't go to the school. I was sent there.  There was nothing voluntary about that decision. To me it seems like a conspiracy to deprive me of the fun that I gotten used to and was quite happy to continue indulging myself in for as long as I lived. I was taken to Royal with as much mental resistance to the idea of school as many of my soon to be pals.

While I can’t remember physically kicking and screaming, I know that I did bop my parents with a few teary reminders that I was not here of my own volition. Our class teacher, as far as I remember, was one of the bubbliest people around and her initial verbal gambits which had all the kindness and care of her sweet soul behind it only managed to upgrade my general emotional status from “mild disquiet” to “absolute terror”.

The only practical activity of any worth was frequent, furtive glances out the door and windows of that small class room for a reassuring sight of the mother.  As the day wore on, it became apparent that she, along with a clutch of other mothers who were skulking beyond the row of trees lining the playground, were all wearing the same look of - wow - worry! This cheered me up greatly and well, it all started to make real sense to me. None of us involved in this skirmish were relishing it. All of us, teachers, students and parents were engaging in an interaction that was supposedly needed but none of us had a great deal of heart for and the collective relief at the tin-ti-tin-ti-tin-ti-tin-ti-tin lets-all-get-the-heck-outta-here bell underscored that fact. mmm… that, as far as I remember, with hindsight observations of course, was me first day at school. “Not the best, could’ve been worse” sort of feeling is what comes back to moi from thirty eight years ago. The rest of the year was a series of mid-day intervals that gave me a welcome reality check on the fact that school was a temporary, uncomfortable hiatus in my world of fun.

Mrs. Samanasinghe, our second grade class teacher was way cool. I think she was my first love but hola, wasn’t I a bit too young to be thinking such things? Probably.  Decades later, I guess it’s just a smile and fond remembrance of a really great lady who was far kinder than most other strangers I had met up with until that point. Pradeep (Jegga)’s mother was probably the only other person that I would feel comfortable with and  trusted if I needed the bathroom in a hurry and didn’t have the technical know-how to face the combined challenges of squatting pans, water buckets, and an extra  pair of shorts. Over the years, that lady was very significantly responsible for honing some of my better known abilities and I cannot speak of Royal without mentioning her since my teacher-student relationship with her was woven very prominently into the tapestry of the whole learning experience.

We students got along relatively well I think. The occasional disagreements were usually agreeably neutralized except I think when, as far as I remember, Chandimal was unfairly punished by the principal. I mean, if a chap wanted to thump one of his friends, let him do so and have done with it without getting the cops, legal system and ultimate school authority also involved in a nothing thing, surely?

Anyways, apart from a few rare incidents similar to the one mentioned when I actually did a bit of thinking, I lived my school life from second grade to fifth grade with all of the protective armor, physical agility, mental prowess and emotional strength of a slug.

It’s a bit of a laugh to think about it now and realize that there was precious little that I really learned apart from the fact that not doing that badly at the exams meant extra time to have my kind of fun which was to read Enid Blyton, do puzzles and play cricket.

Fifth grade. Scholarship year. The larger-than-life Mrs. Peiris was our class teacher and she used a formidable battery of weapons not least of which was her booming, intimidating voice to make sure that we didn’t embarrass ourselves at the scholarship exam. She never had to use a cane. If I felt bad about the treatment being meted out to me, I felt even worse for her son whose arrival on this planet was so badly timed that he ended up in his mother’s class in the very first year that we had an academic challenge to face. I really felt for that guy who was womanhandled around even more than the rest of us and for the first time, I had a vague sense of foreboding, knowing that my own mother was part of the staff of Royal at the time.

I also downgraded myself from slug to potato.

If I had even a marginal chance of affecting my immediate environment in the years before, that year saw that privilege removed. Teachers, parents and even peers were uprooting me, chopping me up, cooking me down using me for all sorts of fancy decorations – all in the name of some stupid exam that meant nothing to me - and there was jack I could do about it all. Thankfully, since Royal Junior students were not eligible for scholarships it wasn’t that bad but still, passing – and passing well, as we were all never allowed to forget, was a matter of pride that reached life and death proportions. All in all, the best I can say about that year is that I didn’t crap my pants on the day of the darn exam and did pass fairly well. Also, thanks Mrs. Peiris and a grudging salute to Mr. Atlas Hall.

Seventh grade was all too short. Courtesy of the mother unit who was a senior staff member of the college, I was yanked out of royal Junior school (whose environment I had, through a slow and painful process of assimilation, become not too uncomfortable with), and dumped in Royal College and into the company of some of the best “scholarshipped” eleven year old minds from across the country. I believe that I was the first student to be “amalgamated” with the senior school. My junior school buddies were to follow a year later, but at that moment, sitting in one of those humungous classrooms in the senior section of college, for the first time in my life, I came face-to-face with that monster known as “academic competition”. They were all a bunch of pretty nice blokes really. Yet, all those boys had gone through some sort of baptism of fire via the scholarship that I had no inkling of.  And here they all were, and the feeling that they were pawing and ground and foaming at the mouth to prove themselves to be even better than they had already done was…mmm... intimidating - to say the least. I just couldn’t face that beast so I cut and ran, or rather, hid my head under my desk and pulled it back out only rarely all the way to the O/L’s.

As far as I could figure it out, there weren’t any “grades” between the seventh and the tenth. It was simply one long battle to come out tops at the O/Ls. Mind you, I did, on occasion, pop me head out of the barrow into which I had slid myself and in those few moments, apart from the fact that I simply wanted to get right back into that comfy hole, I did meet some very nice human beings apart from my peers.

Best amongst the students were the senior prefects. Just a dozen or so of them were taking on the whole school and what a job they did. Gafoor, Schooman, Gomez, Parakrama, Sasidharan to mention a few were the type of Royalist that I really longed to become. Leaders (as their varied subsequent careers proved to all) of an ilk that is now a rarity. I was more worried about what they thought of me than the teachers. The teachers had a default power differential but these boy-men were of a different caliber. They had earned our respect, commanded us not at all and yet, ensured that we were top notch Royalists with that spirit that we had come to associate with the school over the almost century and a half of its existence. Loosing face to those prefects was, at least to me, tantamount to committing spiritual suicide. Needless to say, I never got myself in a situation like that - at least, not until they had left school.

From amongst the teachers, the late Mr. Viji Weerasinghe, Mr. Cooray, Mrs. “Bombe” Dharmasiri who was anything but a bomb although she seems always very ready to explode, Mrs. Jeganathan, Mr. Sawad and Mr. Munasinghe  stood out as  the type of teachers that every teacher should attempt to emulate. Indeed, in later years, as a teacher of many things from piano to guitars to mathematics to computer science to holistic development, I have tried my best to live up to the standards of excellence that those men and women  showed us by making examples of themselves. That I enjoyed reasonable success in these activities is in no small measure, thanks to them … although no personal thanks will do justice to what they “taught” me about teaching. The best thanks I can probably give them is by pointing to about a dozen of my own students who are now emulating them and say “See, Sir, Madam,  those young  boys and girls have become superb teachers because of you”

During that four year lead up to the O/Ls, I was happily flunking in everything but music and English (in which I was up amongst the top three more through a natural ability than by applying myself in an academic sense).  I was also playing chess. Quite a lot of it actually. “Playing for college” took on an insane significance and thank you, Arjuna Parakrama for inculcating this sense of “mission” in me. All through those years, while playing for college, I never lost a match of significance to anyone and “anyone” counted national players to whom I would loose like a dog in “national circuit games”. Chess was not a fun activity when one was carrying the Blue’n Gold. We played for blood and neither asked for nor received any quarter. Due to that mindset, I suppose, Royal College (Juniors) never lost a schools chess tournament in the years I played and we never went below number 3 in the senior division. Although I never was the competitive sort, through that single activity, I excorcised  all of my competitive zeal and thank all the gods there may be for the fact that as a result; I completely exorcised every vestige of it from my soul *laff*.  

It wasn’t as if I didn’t indulge in recreation. The best activities from a “fun” perspective were “French cricket” and various forms of “ata bola”. I would get to school at 6.10 am just so that I could get optimal mileage in the recreation department before school started. That distance was further increased during the interval and after school. The “do-nothing-time” between end of exams and the closure of school was also a fantastic time for a chap hell bent on having a barrelful of fun in the process of getting nowhere fast from an educational perspective.

I did play one season of under 14 cricket but the experience was far from joyful. Predictably, once again, that idea of “competing” took all the wind out of my sails and all the flight out of my spin bowling. Scouting was fun while it lasted – or rather, while I lasted as a scout. I joined up because “Katuwa” Guneratne was me best buddy at the time and sat next to me in class clad in the same sort of worldview on things academic. I was not in the least interested in the deeper ideas of Baden Powell. Come to think of it, there was another person who joined the troop from our batch for dubious reasons. K.B.A. Silva. Seems like there was an “inter schools scouts cricket tournament” and well, the scouts suddenly woke up to the fact that they had spent far too much time getting badges and had paid almost no attention to wielding willow against leather. A quick check around the bunch of junior cricketers and the best bowler from amongst them was promptly seconded into the troop and from that day, the nickname “Bolaya” was how everyone knew K.B.A. Silva. He, unlike me, actually started to like scouting and continued to be involved for many years after leaving school. I stopped the very next year.  Katuwa was sitting in a completely different classroom you see.

About this time in my journey through college I suddenly realized that Royal was slipping by rather fast and I was sliding along without quite knowing the reason why. The whole experience felt like wet ice on wet ice which is to say in felt like nothing. It took me a while to realize why this was so. The spirit which three generations of my own forefathers had lived and breathed and transmitted to me – was hardly ever apparent. Maybe I was in hiding for too long, maybe I was too sleepy to see it when it was in full force, maybe I was too confused by clashing ideas of life and living – whatever the reason (and I am sure many of me college buddies would have diametrically opposite views on this) - I just couldn’t get a fix on it. The “spirit” of a school is ingrained in every student and in every teacher and it really shouldn’t have been too difficult to see so - if I wasn’t knee deep in it and surrounded by it as far as me eye could see - then I don’t think it was really there. Sad. 

 The only incident of significance to the “spirit” of Royal that I remember from that time was based on the circumstances of a boy in the immediately lower grade eating the detention page off his SRB in front of a prefect. The boy happened to be my brother so I had a grandstand view of the whole episode. While the details are best left to the actual “players” I know it was the result of him owning up to the prefect for some misdemeanor or other and then flatly refusing to squeal on his fellow class mates who were also part of the trouble. The prefect made the unfortunate decision to tell my brother to write out the reason for detention in the SRB and when he took it up to the prefect for signing, it read something like this: “detained for not selling out my fellow royalists”. BOOM. The prefect was up close and personal with something he may never have known existed. The Royal Spirit. Neither of them was willing to back down, one thing led to another and before long, one unit of official SRB was minus the detention page which had begun the process of digesting in the stomach of its owner. Unable to face the fallout of that supposedly brazen act of insubordination, the poor prefect went howling up to “Kuts” who, with all the sense of fair play and Royal spirit behind him, almost took the unprecedented step of giving detention to the prefect!

I just could not live that episode down. Not because I didn’t find it a jolly good example of both how a Royalist should and shouldn’t behave but because I don’t think I would ever have had the courage to do what me bro did. I, and a whole bunch of us, was far too obsessed with being “goody-two-shoes” to do any such thing. I am not talking about run-of-the-mill general mischief which was all around us but rather the way in which a “Royal attitude” addressed such issues. The feeling of guilt was compounded by the fact that I never took kindly to that later day addition of the SRB into the lives of Royalists. Instinctively, I felt that it was an affront to the very spirit of Royal to have a personalized board on which to mark brownie points. “Red” says great and “black” says late? Oh please. Royal are a few cuts above Hogwarts surely? I kind of feel bad for the collective “us” that none had the balls to eat the whole misbegotten book with special emphasis on using exotic recipes to mulch the detention page. The episode, sadly, also indicated to me that the standards of student leaders were slipping very dangerously from a “Royal” point of view.

I passed the O/Ls – despite myself and almost entirely due to the efforts of my mother and Mr. Munasinghe who taught me mathematics. That’s about the best I can say about that apart from the fact that Mr. Munasinghe was probably the reason why I became a pretty fair mathematician in later years.  

Mathematics and chess for the A/Ls. Remember, it was really not the eleventh grade but rather the first year of the A/L. This outlook, in a nutshell, put the whole senior college existence in horrible perspective. Study till you drop because we are really not here to enjoy school but to think beyond it. My school buddies were hitting the tuition classes in droves and in brief bursts I was dragged along on this mad bus ride to nowhere. Some of them decided to say to heck with it all and played their sports and joined their clubs almost on a full time basis and I say cheers to them for their plans did not involve getting their brains fried by attempting to pass an exam as opposed to acquiring skills that would be useful for the rest of their lives.

The only teacher in the A/L classes that I had the good fortune to meet and who had any sense of proportion about any of this was Mr. “Hara” Nanayakkara. The only reason why I think so is because of the totally creative punishments he would mete out to errant students. It was not uncommon to find a pal in a dustbin with the cover over his head or curled up in a ball under the teacher’s table or groveling and worshipping a teacher he had just insulted. “Kuts” of course, was a phenomenon - but that goes without saying - and I think every single Royalist of his era has at least a dozen personal “Kattaya” stories to relate to his children. Too personal to expose to the general public and too precious to share with any but the closest. Apart from his cane and his strong belief that he could use a bottle of Dettol as a viable alternative to a phone handset for communication purposes, I think those wonderful stories are best left in the individual hearts and minds of a whole generation of students who were fortunate enough to be there at the same time that he was.

I continued to play chess as a senior member of the team and came across a phenomenon during that first A/L year that I never thought I would experience at Royal. Favoritism. Yuck. The proven Pradeep Jeganathan and Samath Dharmasiri were hoofed out of the team for not having that special talent that was required to lick the relevant rear end to the satisfaction of its owner. We fought. Yuck again. Kuts intervened in what I believe was one of the best pieces of diplomacy and arbitration I’ve ever seen. Despite the happy outcome, I felt like I had swallowed a toad and washed it down with earth-worm juice. I never was the type to gag in public but I couldn’t get the horrible taste of that episode out of my mouth for months. The happiest incident that I can think of in terms of my college career in chess (winning was not even in the picture here – we expected to win, we played to win and we won – no trick to that) was that I stopped playing chess the day I left school and never touched a chess set again – chuckles.

Other than that… well…

I didn’t understand races much and rat-races not at all so I used up the time that I was not playing chess as constructively as I could by indulging my love life to serious levels of distraction. Rewarding though that was, mark you, I hid my many amorous forays from my parents, my teachers and my fellows and at times, I suspect, even from myself and I am kinda proud that  I was, throughout my A/L years,  earnestly considered  by all to be a committee member of the “Honda Lamayge Sangamaya” if not its president – hah!

This feeling of supposedly “positive non-neutrality” towards me was the reason why I was appointed a prefect in the later part of my second A/L year and that, I am sorry to say, was what really got me goat. I was appointed a prefect not because I was a “nayakaya” but rather, because I was a “honda lamaya”.

Looking around me, I was horrified to see that many of the new batch of prefects were of that same shameful group. As prefect material I was definitely a terrible choice.  I knew I had never ever shown any true leadership qualities throughout my years at college people. It was not in my nature to be such a person. This should have been easily recognized by the powers that were at that time and I should never have been considered to be “made of prefect stuff” but the appointment was not entirely unexpected.

Teachers and students were far removed from each other and that rift was increasing with each passing day. Students rarely connected with each other due to their obsession with passing exams. I never knew half the guys in my own class let alone any other class or grade for heaven’s sakes! So, the worst possible scenario for making choices about leadership were present and the only way that a teacher could do so was by the mechanical means of saying “that guy is the president or captain or secretary of some team or club or society or other so he must be having some leadership qualities so lets reward the nut by sticking a piece of metal on his shirt”. Sheeesh. I ask ya? 

There were about a dozen blokes in our batch that were capable leaders and they should have been quite sufficient. Unfortunately, circumstances and social pressures were dictating otherwise and so, I was, miserably, made a prefect. The amusement that was just below the surface of students in lower grades when a dozen “prefects” descended on their class rooms make the mockery of “leadership” all too apparent and thus, I never did much “prefecting”. Stayed away as much as I could and excused myself by saying I had to study – study? Laughs. Frankly I couldn’t have cared less. My journey was almost over and I realized that when one has been slowing down from the first grade, thirteen years down the road one is moving at much the same speed as the slug one compared oneself to so many years earlier. There wasn’t going to be a bang. Just a gentle petering out of a questionable sojourn in a relatively safe place.

All my batch mates were moving on to other things. Entire class loads of us (including me – unfortunately), were on our way to those great portals of universal learning or in a strictly Sri Lankan context – portals of universal striking where happily, I had a six year vacation courtesy of the general political climate of Sri Lanka.

Some would never forget the joy of their college experiences and others would be glad to have done with it. Many would be neutral to the school and more than a few would factor it into their lives only if they happened to have a son they wanted treading in their footsteps. Most would faithfully attend the cricket match, the rugger match and the stag night. I am more than a little worried that I could never find a sufficiently good reason to do any of these things. Not then and not now. I do have warm feelings towards my old school but nothing that reached a point of obsession. So, on the 19^th of September 1983, on that day when, quite shockingly, I earned myself a “B” for Advanced Level Applied Mathematics, I left Royal College – never to return. 

(Apologies to my buddies from Royal, was checking out all me pals on FB and thought of this piece, dug it up and posted it) 

In praise of the young

When was the last time that you shook your head in disbelief at the horror, stupidity, idiocy and stark raving madness of the young? Last might? This morning? Youth are the all time record holders in the use of that set of amazing skills that are needed to make older men and women perform the physical expression of "Oh dear lord, honestly!" They have the ability to do this quite frequently to jaded adults who have pretty much seen a whole load more than they would care to have witnessed and have heard, touched, tasted and smelt more that they would rather forget than acknowledge even to themselves.

As an older man, I too am not immune to such bobble-headed responses to things. I shake my head in disbelief at the horror, stupidity, idiocy and stark raving madness of adults who shake their heads in disbelief at the  horror, stupidity, idiocy and stark raving madness of youth.

As older men and women, let us face an old fact once more. This time, full in the face. The older three generations of humans have so messed with the livability of this planet that, let alone acknowledging our opinions on the specific brands of vodka that floats their boat,  it is a wonder that the youth of the world even want to tolerate us. In fact, for most of them, their only rational acknowledgement of us should be one of horrified amazement that such a group as us actually have the audacity to claim the right to share this planet with them. Instead, they have given us the worst punishment that anyone can give anyone else - the Brahma Dandana - the censure of the Gods, the punishment meted out by the righteous and the truthful, namely, ignoring us completely. If we, the older, have an iota of dignity left, if we, having spent years denying mother earth even the ghost of a chance to make this world habitable for its animals, plants and people, have any smidgen of honesty left, we would be collectively performing a very deep, decades long o-jigi while repeating "nos fuerunt culpabiles" over and over again.

That is not going to happen. In our egotistic clarity, in our overarching self-belief, in our passion for self-promotion, we still naively believe we are the best there is. We still believe we can solve this world which we problematized in the first place. The sheer stupidity of that assertion hangs like a pall, a poisonous, impenetrable fog over the planet and those who will have to inherit it. In our madness, we will go to our graves shouting and cheering as even more muck is tossed into the lungs of the earth by our living peers, gagging, choking and killing of those we had no right to bring into this world in the first place.

What have we done?

What we have done, over time, is to gradually become the older. That's it. That's all. That is the only claim we can realistically make and it is automatic. However, have we become the elder? Emphatically, no. Aging is automatic, eldership needs to be worked for. Elder status is an organic outcome of the insights, wisdom, tolerance, kindness, forbearance and compassion that comes over time to deeply concerned beings who have lived their lives at the highest level of quality possible.  Instead, we have been horrible, stupid, idiotic and stark raving mad in the way in which we lived out lives and continue to live out our lives. From our leaders to our beggers, we, the older, in the most part, are an angry, frustrated, greedy, intolerant bunch of never-should-have-been has-beens who should rightly be ignored, disenfranchised, marginalized and placed in a sealed container labelled "Danger! Extremely toxic material. Do not open". Given our collective track record, there is no automatic ascension to the status of "elder" merely by dint of the fact that we are "older".

I am not being very compassionate to us geriatrics am I? I am smiling here. How can I possibly be? I am part of that older disaster that still, earnestly claims to be human despite the gamut of evidence to the contrary. "Compassion" is a word I have no right to understand let alone internalize. Doesn't leave me in a good light either right? I agree. However, I do have one defense albeit a very feathery one. From the time I was a youth all the way through two retirements, I have never lost my trust in the younger generation and have been stubborn to the point of abrasiveness in my belief in it and its ability to somehow undo the mess that we have created and passed on to them.

The elder Phil Kaye

And it was just a blind faith for quite sometime until I tried to obtain proof of it through my work with them. I was startled by the sheer numbers of high quality human beings I met through engagement in both global development and spiritual development. Their take on life for the most part substantially differed from ours in one very significant way. When we were cutting the keys that would open the doors through which we wished to walk in our lives, our primary concern was whether or not that path would lead to gain for us. While they are cutting theirs, they were looking at the past, present and future and attempting to identify the role that most suited them in their collective push to set to rights from their generation, the wrongs that were visited upon them by ours. While we were looking at how relevant we could be to ourselves they are looking at how they could be relevant to the planet. While we were asking ourselves how we could make optimal use of the opportunities presented to us, they are asking themselves how they can optimally use their skills to create opportunities for all of them. While we were extroverting a perversive introversion they are introverting a pervasive extroversion.

And not just a few... hundreds of thousands of them. Believe me, unlike the quality human beings of our generations who are few and far between, there is am embarrassment of riches in terms of quality among the younger. Over the last few years, if I learned nothing, it is this: That while I am being suffocated by the badness of the older generations attempting to force their collective insanity down everyone's throats, I am up to my knees in the goodness of the younger generations that are fighting hard for my sanity while ignoring me completely. I am not content, obviously. That is not possible until this younger generation becomes the older and elder generation but I  am vastly relieved that the earth based continuum would preserve, in spite of the insanity of the last three generations and because of the sanity of the next.

 We are the older. They are the elder. It is still possible for us to learn from them. *soft smiles*

The elder Sarah Kay 

(This post was triggered by these two beautiful videos that were sent to me by my former wife as a sort of online birthday present - thanks Dushy)

The short and unsweet

My sister tells me, dude, blog posts should be short. That is the nature of blogs. Don't ramble on ad infinitum ad nauseum. True. Anything more than five thousand characters and eyes roll up and their owners either faint, drop dead or both. Who needs cyanide these days? Just feed the sucker a ten thousand character blog post and that's that. The perfect crime!

What is in the nature of human beings that has changed over the last decade that makes for such impatience? What in the change in the mindset of our collective selves that lords brevity over verbosity? Why vote for paucity over poesy? What, in a nutshell causes us to think "if it can't be said in 144 characters it is not worth saying at all?". In a nutshell, the answer is 511. Too much info. Actually, too much irrelevant info.

By the time one has glanced through the morning newspapers (read: FB posts), rolled one's eyes, responded in brief bursts at the same level of shallow thinking that the poster uses, whipped one's eyes across the news blogs, worked one's way through suggested reads (one really doesn't want to read anything these days that someone else has not "liked" right?), one's day is done. The rest of the day is spent responding to tweets and texts.

Long sentences? brain freeze. Email? too quaint, too old fashioned. Yahoo news? blah. Research documents? blech - unless you are there for the modern past time of plagiarizing since we are too awash in external info to really think things through for ourselves right? Copulation? Iffy unless the duration of an act is less than three minutes and the number of partners is greater than three. Per day. Eating? Overrated unless its some nameless thing that can be stuffed into one's face without too much involvement on one's part.  Who cares what it is so long as someone else has "liked" the heck out of it. If 50 trillion flies say they like eating excrement it really can't be that bad right? 50 trillion is a big number of "likes" you see and we are, at many levels, flies, nibbling here, sniffing there, buzzing, tweeting and texting all over the place with a zing that is burning up the wires and polluting the world with mindless noise.

Now, this would be a terrible state of affair if it didn't actually work at some level. Question: Does it? Answer: It does. With this many options, opinions, likes and dislikes that we are forced to be "up close and personal" with on a daily basis, we have, strictly for survivals sake, decided to digest our info in short bursts over a long period of time where we assume that time will sift out the grain from the chaff and we would, at the end of it all, be in possession of a few genuine nuggets to take home, like, tweet about or blog into.

What is the fallacy of that argument? At the level of flies, from phonocation to fornication, none that I can see. At the level of human beings who like to consume something less processed than excrement? everything. Human beings by definition are capable of coming to their own conclusions without the help of a hundred opinions made by people whose opinions are less based on considerations of validity and more on how impatient their S-pen, trigger finger or mouse wielding paws are.

Since the peopled earth is in fact more trigger happy than thought happy, those aforementioned nuggets will necessarily be rare. So, I'd rather talk to the thinkers than the likers. I'd rather my blogs establish a problem, break it down, analyze it, dissect it and, over 100,000 characters attempt to outline at least a framework for a solution if not a solution itself. To put it as mildly as I possibly can, I'd rather a carefully baked cake than any kind of quick 'n easy spam. For the rest, well, let the posts be the equivalent of swallowing cyanide. We would be less a few ten thousand "likes" on a matter of no concern to the less concerned.

Still, when all is said and said and said, I like this bunch of curmudgeonly online "friends" who pop up here and there and massage my ego with their naysays and yaysays. Regardless of the fact that they flit from bus to bus, taking non-rides to nowhere from no place to every place, regardless of the number of road kills that result from such activity and regardless of the fact that in essence, such activities ensure that they miss all buses, they are human, after a fashion, and they are subject to human failings, after a fashion.

4,345 characters. hmm... not bad. Not bad at all *winks*