ANCIENT LEGENDS – food for thought

This article is a simple collection of different data sets that defy explanation through conventional history.

There is a point where archaeological evidence staring at us in the face seriously contradicts conventional historical perspectives.  Religion, mythology and history then become one hazy mixture.

The examples are many :

·         The Pyramids and Sphinx of Egypt : While some pyramids were built as tombs for the Pharaohs, the big three on the Giza necropolis do not have any sign of ever being built as tombs. There are books written by modern authors that wax eloquent about the precision with which these three, and the Sphinx were built, and some theorists have tried to prove that these are much older than what conventional historians think. Perhaps older than the last ice age, that ended about 12,000 years ago, as proposed by Graham Hancock in his book “Fingerprints of the Gods”.

·         The statues of Easter Island ; Another major mystery – who built them ? How ? Why ?

·         The precisely cut stones at Pumapunku – championing a technology we are yet to develop.

·         The Olmec ruins of Meso- America that precede the Inca and Mayan ruins by a few thousand years. And we do not know who these people were, or what they were called.

The biggest challenge with these giant megalithic monuments lies in the fact that we cannot date stones through the conventional radio-carbon (C-14) method. Dating something lying beside a stone does not prove the age of the stone itself.

Some more examples :

·         The documents / tablets of ancient Sumer and the epic of Gilgamesh in particular.

·         The globally used symbol of divinity in antiquity – the entwined snakes – bearing a striking resemblance to the double-helix DNA molecule

·         The ruins of the Indus Valley civilization where bodies have been found as if they were killed in an instant, with substantial radioactive levels even today, and the sand around them fused into silica/glass, leading scholars to suspect a nuclear explosion

·         Sanskrit – that highly evolved language that does NOT NEED a glossary to describe modern technological discoveries and inventions – this alone could fill a whole book… And there are other contemporary or older languages – Tamil in India, three of the Chinese group of languages (not Mandarin), Akkadian in ancient Babylon, to name a few. How did these evolve ? There is no prior history.

·         High precision astronomical charts, calculations and calendars all over the world, including India.

o    Ancient India had over thirty calendrical systems that stretch over several thousand years. The Whitaker’s Almanac reduced this long list to seven calendar systems, where the oldest – the Kali Yuga calendar – has the year 6001 corresponding to the year 2000 of the Gregorian calendar. (Source : The Argumentative Indian by Dr. Amartya Sen)

·         Old maps of the Antarctica created at a time when people were not supposed to know it existed. (Example : The famous Piri Reis map).

·         The philosophy of the Gita (I refuse to call it a simple religious book) – that includes all notions of modern management in all spheres

·         Innumerable buildings, temples and other structures that align with the sun’s movement during the equinoxes and solstices…..

In many cases, archaeological evidence shows these civilizations “just appeared”, without any evidence of a gradual social / evolutionary / technological progress. Then there are astonishing similarities between the fables / myths / legends of cultures widely dispersed across space and time.

People thought the battle of Troy was the stuff of legends, till ruins of a city was discovered that scholars think, belong to Troy. If that is some day proved correct, then that was the last recorded battle where “gods” took sides and participated in it.

****

In the book “Twelfth Planet”, Zacharia Sitchin talks about four eras :

1 – When only “Gods” walked the earth;

2 – When they created sterile clones (supposedly the first humans) to work for them

3 – When the clones developed the power to breed and began to outnumber the Gods

4 – When the Gods left this planet to the proliferating humans

Compare that with the 4 “yugas” described in the Vedas : Satya / Treta / Dwapar / Kali.

Even today, across all religions, celibacy is considered a virtue; a virtual, first stepping stone to be closer to the “Gods”. A fall-out from Era 2 ?

Overview of Yugas as per the Sanskrit texts :

·         Satya Yuga (Krita Yuga):- 1,728,000 Human years (average human life-span : 100,000 years)

·         Treta Yuga:- 1,296,000 Human years (average human life-span : 10,000 years)

·         Dwapara Yuga:- 864,000 Human years (average human life-span : 1000 years)

·         Kali Yuga:- 432,000 Human years (as of 2015, 5,117 years have passed; 426,883 years remain). Kaliyuga started in 3102 B.C. (average human life-span : 100 years)

(Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu_cosmology )

Why would an agrarian society, as conventional historians want us to believe, have the need to calculate and write about this kind of numbers ? Where did this information come from ?

In almost all ancient texts there are stories of people living for 600 – 900 years…. Were they from the “third era” ? (The ancient Egyptians too, talk about a “first time” when “gods walked the earth”).

By the way, the number 432,000 (or its sub-multiples 4320, 43200) is represented in all ancient cultures from the Mayan texts to Egyptian ones. (Source : “Fingerprints of the Gods” by Graham Hancock).

Most discoveries currently attributed to the western world are already explained in the ancient Sanskrit texts :

MEDICINE & SURGERY : Sushruta Samhita - The oldest Medical and Surgical Encyclopedia known to mankind. It is supposed to have been written sometime between 1200 & 600 BCE, but I think it is much older.  The Sushruta Samhita contains 184 chapters with descriptions of :

·         1,120 illnesses,

·         700 medicinal plants,

·         64 preparations from mineral sources and 57 preparations based on animal sources.

·         Its author Sushruta, is also considered to be the first ever human to perform medical surgeries on humans. It is impossible for an individual to compile all that knowledge in a single life-time. Perhaps he drew from even older sources of information to accomplish the feat.

·         The book also has vast details on embryology, human anatomy, along with instructions for venesection, the positioning of the patient for each vein, and the protection of vital structures (marma).

·         The “Ayurveda” consists of the document described above as well another ancient text on medicine and medicinal plants and concoctions.

·         The oldest documented evidence (9000 years) for the drilling of human teeth of a living person was found in Mehrgarh along with the evidences of orthopedic surgeries.

The ancient Chinese school of medicine is another brilliant example. The map of the human nervous system on which the principles of acupuncture and acupressure are based, is knowledge that we are still discovering.

Cloning / Test-tube babies :

In the Mahabharata, Gandhari was blessed with 100 sons. The birth story of those 100 kids runs like this : Gandhari, after two years of pregnancy, gave birth to a “single, hard lump of lifeless flesh”. Rishi Vyas cut up the piece of flesh into 100 pieces and put them into 100 separate jars or “kund”. Thus, each ‘Kaurava’ was created by splitting a single embryo into 100 parts and growing each part in a separate kund (container). Is this not identical to the cloning process of today ?

In fact, none of the major characters in the Mahabharata had a normal birth, in the sense that their parents were their biological ones. The five Pandavas too, were born through “blessings” of separate gods, to King Pandu’s two wives – Kunti & Madri.

Draupadi the common wife of the Pandavas, and princess of the Kingdom of Panchal, “emerged out of a sacrificial fire as an adult”. Some versions say she never aged. She was not, therefore, a human female in the conventional sense. Some versions say that she was “created” to bring about the downfall of the Kauravas.

Space Travel : The ancient Sanskrit texts talk freely of “three worlds” (tri-bhuvan) and people travelling between them in “vimanas” or flying craft. “Swarga” or “heaven” was a place where people went even when alive, to learn things.

Arjuna (one of the central characters in the Mahabharata) did so. He went to “Swarga” to learn “the arts” and how to use “special weapons” that the “gods” had gifted him. And then he came back to earth to fight the war.

Distance between the Sun and Earth : This is captured in the Hanuman Chalisa composed by Tulsidas in the 15^th century C.E. It runs thus :

“Yug sahasra yojana par bhanu,

Leelyo taahi madhura phal jaanu”

The sloka translates to: ‘[When] Hanuman travelled thousands of kilometers to swallow it thinking of it as a fruit’. The word-to-word translation of the same excerpt reveals the distance that Hanuman travelled.

1 Yuga = 12,000 years.

1 Sahasra Yuga = 12,000,000 years.

Also,1 Yojan = 8 miles.

 Hence, “Yug Sahsra Yojana”, the first 3 words mean 12000*12000000*8 = 96,000,000 miles,

or 153,600,000 kilometres.

Interestingly, the actual distance from earth to sun is 152,000,000 kms. Bafflingly, there’s error of just around 1%. It is believed that he received this information from the monkey-god Hanuman himself.

This list can go on… speed of light, value of Pi, explanation of eclipses, the heliocentric theory, even the elasticity of time and space, are all described through various stories / couplets in the Sanskrit texts.

One of the Vedic stories runs like this : There was this beautiful, learned, accomplished princess for whom no man on this earth was good enough. Suitor after suitor got rejected and her father, the King, in sheer desperation, decided to consult the Lord Brahma. Father and daughter got into a vimana and took off.

When they reached the place, the Lord Brahma was meditating. When he opened his eyes, he listened to the King and advised him to go back to earth, to a particular village beside a river. There, he said, would be the son of a “rishi” (sage), who would be the perfect match for the daughter.

The King said that he knew that village, but there was no sage living there. Brahma explained that the time interval between the King’s leaving the earth and returning to it will be about 21,000 earth years and the King and his daughter will not be disappointed.

How do you explain this story without the concept of elasticity of time and theory of relativity ?

****

It is said that Kali Yuga started the day the great Mahabharata War ended, which is why every Hindu worship ritual today invokes the standards set in the Kurukshetra War.

Warfare :

It took more than 3000 years of savagery and brutal battles for mankind to come together at the Geneva Convention and set rules for warfare, some sixty years ago.

The Mahabharata War had strict rules along which it was fought, barring a few transgressions. The transgressors were annihilated.

Can we even imagine the level of socio- political- religious evolution those people had, to define rules and protocols even for a “winner-takes-all” war ?

****

I am beginning to believe that the truth lies somewhere between the theory proposed by Zacharia Sitchin and that by Graham Hancock…

I think the Great Flood, circa 10 – 12,000 years ago, completely destroyed a highly evolved global civilization. Ancient Indian stories, Sumerian texts, monuments all over the world, numerous other artifacts, bear testimony to this.

With due respect to their lives’ works and efforts, conventional historians chose to ignore a lot of the above evidence. If they thought independently, they would be marginalized, or even ostracized.

And conventional history cannot explain the above.

[Compiled from diverse sources…]

A Facebook Dilemma

Wanda Round, like 500 million people all over the world, is a Facebook addict. She visits her page first thing in the morning. So many exciting things must have happened during the night – so many “like it” signs, so many comments – they are more important than brushing teeth.  Of course, there are personal and household chores to attend to – she logs off in about an hour but needs to keep re-visiting her page for one-hour periods at approximately few-minute intervals throughout the day. This continues well past mid-night, till sleep – that unwelcome but necessary habit – intervenes.

In other words, her marriage consists of three entities – she, her husband, and her Facebook account, not necessarily in that order. A perfect ménage à trois, if ever there was one. Of course, there are the kids, but they were born in that primordial era when people looked at each other instead of at Facebook. Lucky for the kids, I must say. (There are rumours that kids are in short supply in this era of social networking…. But that merits an investigation..)

They say the average Facebook user has about 130 friends and I say they are lying. The average Facebook user would have a list of friends running from here to Timbuktoo, with more pouring in by the hour.  A spaghetti-style cobweb of people who never knew that the others existed, till the other day…..and now they are hopelessly entangled like flies in blobs of marmalade, in pursuit of commenting excellence…..for there is nothing else to do on Facebook except write comments on each other’s pages for no particular reason. Pretty much the IT equivalent of chewing gum.

The only variation to that activity is the changing of profile pictures and uploading some others. Comment, upload an album, change picture, comment again, change picture, comment, change picture again, upload another album, comment…. goes the cycle. Stringing your personal pictures on the Net. Like laundry.

 

Coming back to the original thread – Wanda Round was suddenly faced with a serious challenge to her equanimity. Not that she is known for her “equanimus” – the gentle ripples can be seen from afar – but it now had waves, or rather breakers with white foam crashing on the rocks. This was caused by two men who happened to be her Facebook friends.

For want of better names and in order to not get too personal, let us call them “Adam Sapple” and “Ben Dover”. Now, as things came to pass, Ben did something to annoy Adam, who immediately removed the fellow from his list of friends. It did not stop at that – Adam Sapple wanted all his friends to follow suit and quarantine Ben Dover. Pretty much like a kindergarten bully. And we are talking of middle aged blokes here, well past their mid-life crisis phase, with a penchant for chatting up other peoples’ wives. (The “Love thy neighbour” principle in the Bible – remember ?)

Quarantining Ben Dover as an isolated action would not have been too much of a problem if Ben’s wife, let’s call her “Betty Diddit” had not entered the scene. You see, Betty Diddit, also one of the 500 million we talked about earlier, suffers from a severe and chronic case of Like-it-itis. It is a Facebook-induced condition, where the “I like it” portion of the brain gets severely inflamed and sufferers go feverishly around the virtual world liking everything they see.

As things got unravelled, Betty Diddit is a great fan of Wanda Round. She is also a great fan of a great many other things, but that is another story. She likes everything Wanda does to her Facebook page, and don’t ask me why. If Wanda blocked Ben Dover, then the most likely reaction from Betty Diddit would go like this :

You blocked my husband ? I like it.

That means I should block you. (I like that too)

Now tell me, who likes to block an ardent fan ? Wanda Round thought about it till she got depressed. And did nothing. Betty Diddit was just too valuable to lose.

A few days later Adam Sapple found out that Wanda had still not blocked Ben Dover. He tried to bring up the subject and got a lecture from Wanda on how he should patch up with Ben. Though we are not privy to that conversation, we can very well imagine how it must have gone, having known Wanda Round and her ilk all these years… hauled over hot coals, would be putting it mildly…

The gist of the problem is that Adam Sapple and Ben Dover are still not talking to each other but are friends with Wanda Round, while Betty Diddit is engrossed in doing what she does best - liking things.

(What we do not know though, is whether Betty liked Adam Sapple too…..)

***

The latest update is that Wanda Round has moved to Google+ for the time being and planning for Twitter.

Another blob of marmalade….

(Author’s note : The names are pure fiction… any link to any living person is an act of God)

Wanderlust...re-visited

This poem was discovered among my daughter’s diaries a few years ago when she was cleaning her room….. A scrap of aged, yellow paper, neatly folded into a rectangle, with her baby scrawl saying “Daddy poem” fell out of one of her numerous diaries and would have almost been swept away, had it not been for the scrawled label.

We opened it and there it was…. I had composed it a few months before our final exams in college….

When she was a little girl, our daughter had this habit of rummaging through Daddy’s and Mummy’s papers and stuff, and then store the things that caught her fancy, in her cupboard.  Good for her and for me, I must say.

Looking back, this was composed at a time when our final semester exams were almost upon us; some campus interviews had taken place, no one had yet landed any jobs, my study partner and I had not yet qualified for any of the interviews because of our marks. There was a pall of uncertainty hanging over everyone as we prepared to move out of college and begin a new chapter of our respective lives. After five years in college, many were in the mood to “just get out there” in order to re-live a whole new experience; to try and “do something”….

Wanderlust

 (composed – 16^th April 1981)

I hear the call of yonder wilds,

As if a siren song –

The haunting tune of the living free,

Their pulse of life so strong.

O ! Take from me this fettered freedom

And let me feel them all;

I want not a hearth, I want not a home,

I want to see ‘em all !!

The breaking of the surf on rocks,

The salty smell o’ the breeze –

The seething foam and towering waves

Out in the stormy seas.

The cozy nests that sea-gulls build

In cracks in the high cliff wall;

I want not a hearth, I want not a home,

I want to see ‘em all !!

The tinkle of the little bells

Of cattle homeward bound;

The gleeful sounds of boys at play

In the meadows all around.

The drone of bees in summertime,

The rustle of leaves in fall;

I want not a hearth, I want not a home,

I want to see ‘em all !!

The solitary eagle in a turquoise dome,

The petrified waves of sand;

The garish beauty of cactus flowers

Adorning the desert land.

Braving fiery storms that blow,

Stand hills so proud and tall –

I want not a hearth, I want not a home,

I want to see ‘em all !!

The bugle call o’ the early bird

Heralding the dawn of day;

The rustic tunes the farm girls sing

While loading their wagons with hay.

The beauty of the Indian summer

The rain-and-thunder squall;

I want not a hearth, I want not a home,

I want to see ‘em all !!

The sparkling rivers of endless flow,

The fields of golden grain;

The fiery beauty of a lonely sunset

O’er a desolate plain.

Never was born an artist whose

Hand could paint it all –

I want not a hearth, I want not a home,

I want to see ‘em all !!

***

Epilogue

My childhood was full of long train journeys across the length and breadth of India with my parents and sister. I guess the long hours spent by the windows of trains as they sped through myriad landscapes find their reflection in the poem above.

Reading this poem after more than three decades of service, involving travels to many a distant land, and matching it with the events of my life during this period, I guess I had this wanderlust in me since childhood….

The thoughts of the sea and voyages were perhaps born out of the numerous stories I had read as a child; I had then never imagined even for once, the amount of air travel that I would undertake in the years to follow. (I am yet to set my foot on a ship, by the way…)

Wanderlust - revisited

(composed – 8^th Sep. 2015)

Night flights under starry skies,

Velvet, diamonds and fire-flies –

Pearls and gems laid out below

‘Tis the cities, as I watch them go;

But my home and hearth; they

Beckon me, wherever I go !!

Airport layovers – day and night,

People rushing to catch their flight;

Shops and cafes in fluorescent glow

Lovers and dreamers taking it “slow”;

But my home and hearth; they

Beckon me, wherever I go !!

Deep blue night o’er a sleeping land;

Blood-red dawn across desert sand –

Flying high with the sun so low

That quickly turns into a fiery glow;

But my home and hearth; they

Beckon me, wherever I go !!

Two-hour sunsets and four-hour nights;

Endless days on morning flights –

Over forests, plains and coasts we go

Over burning deserts and mountain snow;

But my home and hearth; they

Beckon me, wherever I go !!

The joy of visiting some place new

Is a privilege granted to very few;

A smile and a nod with eyes aglow,

People turn into friends from long ago –

But my home and hearth; they

Beckon me, wherever I go !!

All those people, everywhere

Similar thoughts and fears, they share;

Bound by their lives’ high and low

Does not matter which God they know.

And my home and hearth; they

Beckon me, wherever I go !!

***

A CULINARY JAUNT (or The Wrath of the Spices)

India is a diverse land with a huge variety of cuisines.  The range is mind-boggling, although only a handful of them have earned reputations across the world.

It is also the land that lends credence to the word “pure vegetarian”, in the sense that if you order “pure vegetarian” food, you will get “pure vegetarian” food… whatever that means, because I am yet to fathom what “impure vegetarian” food means.

And the range is mind-boggling… If one were to divide India into four regions – North, East, West & South, one could easily allocate fifty-odd dishes, unique to each region, at initial count !! But I am sure that list is much longer….

That is unlike many countries where they cannot think of such stuff. They would perhaps serve you “pure vegetarian” fried kang kong (water spinach) initially boiled in beef broth. Or only vegetables stir-fried in pork oil. They say it “adds to the taste”.  Then there are places where if you order vegetarian food you will get sea food – say, vegetables and lobster in a tasty concoction served in lobster shell…. The logic is simple…. Anything from the sea is “vegetarian” !!

Spicy food in any part of the world is MILD compared to the fare available in this country. Mexican food is hot in parts – but that is due to red chillies. One of my European friends, who came to India for the first time, spent two months here, tried the local cuisine, has promised never to tell anyone that he is OK with spicy food; the tastes here, as per him, are just too strong.

The only exception perhaps, is Thailand… I remember ordering a spicy soup in Bangkok once that made me cry and hit the roof, and thereafter never made the mistake of ordering the “hot” stuff there.

Indian vegetarian food, refined and evolved over centuries, is all about vegetables and spices, so much so that all you get to taste is spices in different combinations with vegetables struggling to make their presence felt. Sometimes they float in oil, like those poor creatures did after the Gulf of Mexico oil spill…. This is fairly uniform across the country’s restaurants. All those invasions of India down the centuries only served to add more spices to our cuisines. Some of them fit for military arsenals.

And then there are the non-vegetarian dishes with almost similar spice combinations. Kolkata, my  home town, permanently set amidst the ruins of development that resemble a war zone, has its own range of spices for meats and fish, and a vast array of sweets that explains why so many of us are diabetic. But then, here we use mostly green chillies and mustard…they sting, but do not render you speechless. Party fares here too, resemble the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, while the “float-eratti” could be anything from vegetables to meat and fish.

As you wander south, the spices and chillies get stronger – I think it has to do with the proximity with the equator. Two specific cuisines, those of Telegana and Chettinad deserve special mention… their spices and chillies are weapons-grade… (If you want to experience solar flares on earth, then that comes close). Restaurants that serve those cuisines should be located beside rivers, lakes and fire brigade stations. But they are not, and you are not forewarned, so beware !!

If you are visiting India and have escaped the wrath of the spices somehow, here is a word of caution; while travelling in India, learn to use water like the Indians, instead of toilet paper …..

Toilet papers are not made to withstand Indian chillies and spices… they could catch fire.

THE CITY

Back to the city after ten long years,

The city of fines and unknown fears.

Tall glass buildings that cast long shadows –

Manicured gardens, lawns and meadows.

Sun-kissed days and neon-lit nights;

Computer-controlled traffic lights.

Goodies in shops under bright white light –

The tourist and the shoppers’ delight.

Deep green trees on every side

Adding beauty to a timeless tide.

Wide, paved roads and glitzy malls;

With soul-less souls, like clockwork dolls.

- composed :4/June/2015

DEMENTIA

She was a small, frail, but proud woman.  They were two weeks away from their fifty-sixth wedding anniversary when she became a widow. Not that it was a surprise, she knew it was coming ever since he was diagnosed with cancer. He was pushing ninety and at his age, conventional cancer therapy was almost a no-no, he was put on palliative care, and in such care, he remained until his last breath.

She bid a silent farewell to the body of her companion of more than half a century as the hearse left the house on his final journey. Some close relatives kept her company while her son and other family members performed the last rites for her husband at the crematorium. But she did not cry.  All she said was, “He’s gone.” Then kept quiet.

A few months earlier, when he had been hospitalized for the first time, and she had gone to visit him, he had told her to get used to living with her son. She found that paradigm shift too hard to digest. The proud woman that she was, she had, till then, always fiercely held on to her will to stay in her own house, away from the children and grandchildren, live life on her own terms, and have periodic meetings with the family.

There comes a time in a person’s life, when living alone is impossible, and one has to have a support system built around oneself. Her son tried to build one around her; after her husband passed away, and she had to come and live with him and his family in the apartment in the city. He hired a couple of nurses to take care of her night and day. She resented them – saying her “bouma” (daughter-in-law) and grandchildren were good enough company. But he insisted, and the nurses continued.

She hobbled around the apartment with a walker and spent her days reading books and newspapers, and sometimes, when perhaps, her memories came flooding back, heaved a sigh, and kept on reading. Her grandchildren always made her smile; she would recite Sanskrit slokas – slokas that her son had heard from childhood… most of them extolled the virtues of being a mother, some talked about righteousness, while the rest were about mundane everyday events.

Her short-term memory began to fail. She would have lunch and then ask for it again, vehemently arguing that she was yet to eat. By and by people noticed that she would keep reading the same page in a book or news item over and over again, throughout the day, and if that piece of information caught her fancy, kept telling it to everyone in the house. Over time, her long-term memory too, began playing tricks. One day she said that she had seen snowfall – in an area where no snow had ever fallen in history. When her son said that it was not possible, she retorted that it was before he was born.

At the prayer meeting on the first anniversary of his father’s death, she attended the ceremony and asked her son, “Is it one year already ? You must be joking… check your calendar.” When people explained that one year had indeed passed, she said, “I thought he was still in hospital.”

One day her son asked her, “Do you remember Dad always saying that he built the house in the suburbs so that the grandchildren would have a place to play ?” She responded by saying that she wanted to visit that house in the suburbs once again, where she had spent the last thirty years. That weekend they all trooped down to the place, and then emerged a crisis of sorts when she steadfastly refused to leave. “You can take my dead body out,” was her firm reply. No amount of requests, pleading, threats was working. Her son and his family had to leave her there that night, with the caretaker’s family for company.

The next morning came a desperate phone call from the caretaker; he and his wife simply could not make her eat, or sleep the previous night, and given her frail health, things could get serious. Her son took leave from office, and went down to the house – she had to be physically carried to the car and brought back to the city. Curses flowed freely – she cursed her son for the abomination, and said she never thought this day would ever come…she said she would write a letter to the world telling them of the “torture” she was being subjected to by him.

Back in the apartment, she once again entered into a shell, reading newspapers, watching the birds on the trees around, and uttering the slokas…. Her memory went from bad to worse… she would go into the toilet in the morning and forget to come out… over time the nurses had to prevent her from locking the door from inside, and sometimes they had to physically carry her out after the morning’s ablutions.

He talked to the doctor who was attending on her, asking if a few days in hospital would improve things. His response was a clear “no”, and he stressed on the point that dementia patients should not be put in hospitals.

And then she started falling over, sometimes on her back, sometimes on her face, even with a walker around her. One such fall was particularly bad; her face remained swollen for days.

“Do you remember Dad ?”, he asked her one day with great trepidation.

“Well, I am angry that he left me and went away, the only good thing is that it has not been for long, just a few days.” This was more than four years after his death.

Six weeks before her eighty-third birthday, she woke up one morning and said she was not feeling well. She asked her son to check her blood pressure, as she was moved to a chair beside the bed. And, while he was doing so, she passed away, silently. Just like that. Sitting on the chair. Small, frail, but proud, as she always had been.

***

Dementia, to my mind, is perhaps as much a curse as a blessing in disguise.

***

When the Internet broke down…

Like a host of middle-class families across this vast land of farmers, politicians and scandals – both financial and otherwise, including ones involving fly ash and the humble broom  – and of course, industries, we own an internet connection.

It was really as an afterthought that we took one a few years ago – more to address the needs of our kids’ high school projects of the time, rather than anything else. Over time, this internet thingy began to spread in our lives like molten cheese on pizza in an oven. Staring at the computer screen graduated from a need, to a diversion to while away idle time, and then to an obsession where that activity of sitting at the computer table has begun to contribute to body weight and blood sugar. And we hardly have time to watch television; its 99+ channels and 24x7 programs notwithstanding.

A young genius, figured out a way to make money out of people’s idle time, and what a discovery it has been !!! He is now a billionaire !! Most importantly, if a fraction of that idle time was used productively, then the global GDP would have doubled or trebled before you could say “GDP”…. But alas, it merely wobbles and trembles with numbers that actually make no sense – either to the economists who crunch them, or to us.

Life has developed a whole new meaning with the internet ramblings. The spread of SARS, Ebola and their partner viruses are like perfume puffs in comparison to the spread of selfies or “like-i-titis” or the “plus-one-itis” in the virtual world. Ancient Greeks had only one Narcissus. We have them in shiploads.

Amidst all these floating viruses, our internet access broke down – suddenly. It was not one of those wholesome, fit-for-family-type breakdowns, that typically occur on Fridays, where the ADSL phone line goes dead for the weekend because a crow happened to polish its beak on an exposed wire joint, or the wire-junction box fell off its precarious perch on a lamp-post - the weight of a sparrow being the proverbial last straw for the rusted bolt. Neither was it the kind of fault where the world-wide-web becomes the world-wide-wait for minutes on end while the browser goes around in circles.

This one happened in broad daylight in mid-week, right in the middle of a skype-teleconference across three countries, with the ADSL light on the modem going off and staying off. I logged a call immediately, then after about an hour, went down to the local telephone exchange to complain a second time. They called back in three hours to say that they were shifting us to a new network – a new DSLAM – for enabling better service.

For the uninitiated, a DSLAM is a set of trays with blinking lights, and large fat cables coming out of it in all directions like an octopus with genetic disorder. It alone determines whether you are on the Net with a bunch of followers, or slammed into oblivion. Forever. Hence the name.

They did not have the courtesy to inform us beforehand of this major operation – almost a heart surgery in telecom terms – and were unable provide a time line for completing the exercise. Disaster ! Chaos !! We realized once again, after a long, long time, how heavy time is, especially when it hangs on your hand. Almost unbearable.

That evening, we had nothing else to do other than watch television. Like many couples across the world, in a decades-long marriage, we have over time, developed a healthy loathing not only for each other’s favorite television programs, but the favorite channels as well. And were now forced to watch TV. Together.  There were ads and ads and ads, with small breaks in between, for a film.

I, true to my genetic code,  wanted to flip channels, while she true to hers, wanted to watch the ads – soap, shampoo, cereal and all, with portions of film in between. What was worse was that we needed to converse !!!  The art of conversation, we realized,  had forsaken us a long time ago when kids and television entered our home. Now, it was not just lost art, it was a serious archeological challenge.

Those three hours can be described as a spate of nightmares as we watched ad after ad on channel after channel only to return to the film in which “tors” and “tresses” simply talked and walked about this room and that like addle-pated mannequins.  (I mean I would have called them actors... If they could act, that is.) Dinner was taken in merciful silence, a silence that reigned till next morning. The pent up like-it’s and plus-one’s were taking their toll.

The exchange called up at around mid-day to say that their job was done and we could get cracking once again on the Net. And lo behold !! We had only half the access….. that is to say, some sites were accessible while the vast majority was not. I rushed back to the Exchange to complain once again. They provided alternate DNS addresses. Same result. Contacted them again. They said “tomorrow”.

Yet again, we were forced to watch television. TOGETHER !!! And converse. The strain was beginning to tell.  We took turns at rushing off to a cyber café to relieve ourselves.

On day three, a fellow arrived from the exchange to check. He said they had never encountered this kind of problem before. I said, “ditto”. He plugged in his modem and connected to the internet straightaway, then told me that he would send a replacement modem on Monday. That meant we would have to spend an entire weekend internet-less, save those couple of sites that were accessible. Wow !!!

The forehead wrinkled, the brow creased… the lips snarled, conversation was more like machine-gun fire, staccato included. Luckily for them, the couple of visitors who had planned to drop in during the weekend, called it off at the last moment.

More TV, more ads, more machine-gun fire. With staccato. In desperation I called up my hardware supplier and asked him to replace everything – the modem, the router, the works.  He too said, “Monday evening”.

On the great Monday, this fellow from the exchange turned up around lunch-time with a re-conditioned modem. He plugged it in. The problem did not go away. I asked him to go away.

That evening, my hardware vendor arrived with an integrated modem and router. After conducting some tests to satisfy himself that the equipment really needed replacement, he did it. Within fifteen minutes, our internet access was back on again, in full regalia. The router was the culprit – busy doing a bit of the job and ignoring the important and functional piece. Pretty much like a government employee in these parts.  I packed it in a plastic bag and sent it off with him. Relief at last !!!

The smiles are back, sans conversation, of course.  We are still catching up on five, almost six, lost days’ worth of like-it’s and plus-one’s.

Our marriage has survived this cataclysm.