If you’re a ‘wide-eyed and bushy-tailed’ individual who is apt to marvel at engaging in most ordinary things in this world - like watching bull frogs croaking by the side of a pond or a lizard walking on a bare wall or ants moving in neat formations in search of food or dogs and cows (shamelessly, for us) blissfully copulating in the wide open, and, further, you enjoy doing fun things like playing carom or ‘dung guti’ or holding a mug of tea in a winter morning and then watching the steam curling up and rising from the mug - then you can count me in your group. I am absolutely that type. I often wondered and still do wonder what the ants coming from opposite directions in search of food or carrying food tell each other when they meet for tête-à-têtes only, and then move on
Our English teacher confirmed my belief when he declared deadpan to a roomful of eager students while teaching simple pleasures of life that defecating in the sands of the banks of the Brahmaputra on a moonlit night was absolutely divine. ‘You can’t get any pleasure higher than that. Even, the story of fabled ‘Gopal Bhar’ will fall short in comparison’, he said and went on teaching the subject. We ourselves couldn’t do that in the sands. But, we did the next best thing - we did that as a group of wild friends under the shrubs in the back of our house while smoking long beedies and discussing the emerging beauty of so and so girls in our town.
The association with the likes of me - there are many more in closet than out in the open - wouldn’t bring you any fame or wealth other than bringing absolute ridicule from your peers. But, it should bring you a lot of simple pleasures like watching ducks, for example. You said, ‘Watching ducks languidly seemingly floating in a pond like Brownian particles, or foraging in a house-side dump of rubbish. You don’t mean it? Do you? Explain it’, you would say… ‘I mean it absolutely, irreversively’, I would say.
Take for example household ducks - the variety, which survives very simply by endless foraging. You let them loose in a pile of freshly pounded rice-husk - actually, you don’t have to let them loose. They will come to forage on their own. The pile will be sifted and sifted again, turned over to gather an elusive kernel of broken rice in the pile. When the last grain is exhaustively mined, the ducks will find something else to forage on. It’s like panning for gold nuggets in a river. But, it’s much more in complexity
While panning for gold nuggets requires sharp eyes, patience and hardiness, the ducks don’t use their eyes. Of that, I’m sure. If you blind-fold them, they will still do what they do. They dig their colorful bills into a pile of fresh husk, take into in a bill-full, shift through that in less than a second (nobody ever took a stop-watch to count the time because nobody knows the complexity of the process), turn them over the again and again in the mouth. If a morsel is found - a tiny bit of a morsel, that’s all right. Then eating that, it spits out of the bill-full what is useless rubbish. Then the duck goes in for another fresh bill-full, performs another systematic search operation with the bill-full for that morsel.
Before long, the entire pile of husk will be shifted though, and whatever is salvageable will be salvaged. The ducks won’t waste their time digging into the old unproductive pile. They will wait for another time when they see a woman in the household come to the dumpsite with a fresh pile of freshly-pound virgin husks in a ‘dola’ or ‘kula’. She does that with a flourish to watch, with a flick of her waist and hands.
Now, let’s consider a honey-bee-hive that forms and hangs from a branch of a large tree. There are millions and millions of swarming and seething bees in a fully formed hive. Most of the bees are worker bees that bring pollen from flowering plants and trees. There are also queen bees that survive on the free labor of worker bees. This is nothing new. Just look around. How is the pollen turned into honey? Don’t ask me! I almost failed in chemistry. I wasn’t at all interested in chemistry.
When my hometown Gauripur was rural, there were two or three beehives formed annually in the huge mango garden in the back of our house. When the hives were saturated with honey, the honey-experts would descend on the mango garden to harvest. One or two experts would light a smoky long ‘mashal’ and approach the hive very carefully. Then, he would carefully swipe the hive of bees by his bare hand. One or two stings wouldn’t deter the expert. He was in business. He would cut the hive into pieces and put them in buckets. For the next days, there would be honey for everything from tea to luchi in the house. The bees would make it to a next hive in a neighboring tree or go away for the whole year only to reappear again.
Why waste you time watching ducks? Watch a bunch of chicken. They don’t have long bills. Instead, they have very sharp skin-piercing beaks. They don’t care much about some half-broken rice in a pile of husk. They will eat them if they are seen on the surface of a pile. The sight of things is important for them. Their first choice is wiggly earthworms. And the second choice is, get ready to read this nasty habit, human phlegm and what comes out of your nostrils, notably from old-folks’. But, unlike ducks, chickens use their legs to scratch the surface of a dump to get the worms.
How about hogs? Their favorite food is soft roots of what grows underground like ‘kochu’ (taro). With single-minded devotion, they forage ahead and dig their spouts into the ground, tear up the ground like a like a tiller, get the roots out and they are done with that patch of land. Now they are ready for another patch. Not an ordinary patch of land but a patch of land where ‘kochu’ grows in abundance!...
Let’s go back to the problem of ducks foraging for a few rice-nuggets in pile of husk. We want to have a grip on the problem. Now, consider that you’re a ‘namjala’ computer scientist, or a computational physicist, or a developmental biologist, or a neuro-scientist, or a robotic scientist and you’re given the task of writing an algorithm on what is happening from the moment the duck-bill goes into pile, sifts through the bill-full, does find a morsel of rice, eats it, ejects what was in the bill, and digs again for another bill-full. There may be more steps than what we have discussed. Anyway, the task is humongous from start to finish. Way too humongous and complex!
If you work for an intelligence agency in Assam, you just reflexively go in a show of force to Fancy Bazar or Bhangagar (most of the crimes are reportedly committed there) in Guwahati to catch terrorists, killers and mayhem seekers red-handed after they committed those crime and gone away from the scene of crime. No, you penetrate their cells, identify who they are, find their financing, who they communicate with. In other words, like a duck, you take a bill-full of them, churn them over and over to get the nugget or nuggets (not in a celebratory sense) in that bill-full. It’s a lot of intelligent, painstaking work. But, who has the time and the intelligence? They are in short supply
Now, we come to the discuss what intelligent agencies all over the developed world do to pick up nuggets of information and piece them together to stay ahead of evil designs of adversaries. It’s called data mining. The US National Security Agency can intercept, monitor and survey all outgoing and incoming communications from and to the country. It basically boils down to looking at the patterns of ‘1’s and ‘0’s in all communications, and interpret them for immediate action.
I will end this lazy form of stupidity of mine by citing another example of knowing small tiny bits of things. NASA has sent a probe named Phoenix into Mars. It took 10 months of travel at 12,000 miles an hour since the launch, traveled 422 million miles, and the cost of the project was 420 million dollars. The Phoenix probe decelerated in the last 7 minutes before landing and made a pillow-soft landing to protect all the vital gear.
The mission was not to find out if there ever existed giant elephants, dinosaurs, large headed humans and other giant creatures on it. But, its mission is to dig into the soil, about 12 - 20 inches deep, to find if there exists water or ever existed water in that barren red planet. Water could’ve hosted primitive but fundamental forms of life - microorganisms, the amino acids, etc. There are fine instruments on board. The data will be transmitted to earth stations for detailed analysis by scientists.
‘What crazy ideas, what a waste of time, talent and money’, you might think aloud. Scientists survive on borderline craziness until one day they die leaving fruits of their labor and craziness for us to enjoy. Science marches boldly on. Religions tentatively follow way behind espousing irrelevant, rejected ideas from the past - long ways past...
Kalyan Dutta-Choudhury
Berkeley
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