The countryside PDL and PDA

 

The lethal most Public Display of Lust (PDL) I have witnessed goes like this. It was a bull in full heat of the moment—in hormonal terms. Sadly there was no cow in sight. The red-hot excited bull must have had a great sense of visualization. If not for this how would you digest the sight of a bull riding a scooty. The bull visualized  the scooty as a cow. There are always alternatives. Aren’t there? The scooty was parked by the roadside. A nice white scooty, smaller than a cow. So the bull raised its front legs and landed on it for lovemaking, mating, raping, call it whatever. It shocked and jolted the human senses for a moment but then everyone laughed, hollered, guffawed.

The craziest, all-defiant love pursuit I have seen goes like this. It was a massive male buffalo. A free-roamer allowed to graze in the fields in return for mating with domesticated buffaloes to sire colts and getting fresh milk in the family. It would go lumbering across the village streets after grazing in the fields and was cordially welcomed to fulfill the needs of the buffaloes at the time of seeding. The buffalo bull should have treated all the females in the village equally, with identical affection. But then it fell in love with a young filly. It was a very attractive young buffalo. He just went crazy for her. He knew that she would come of age soon and then he would get an opportunity to be the father of her colt. He lost interest in the rest of the buffaloes. She would be there in the shade of the barn and he would wait in the street, sitting in the burning June heat, waiting for the evening to come when they took her out for watering at the village pond. Then he would accompany her to the pond, walking fondly with her, gentling shoving her, licking her skin. He won’t go into the fields to graze and thus was losing weight. Spellbound by her, he wasn’t interested in mating with other buffaloes. The people started calling him Majnu. The owner of the young buffalo took it as an attempt to tarnish his reputation. The people started joking that it was an attempt to malign the family’s honor. The irate farmer then would beat Majnu with well-oiled sticks. But he would bear all this just to be with his love interest.

The grandest fight one wages to prove one’s libido even in the old age was presented by another romoeo, a one-eyed community buffalo bull. We called him Kana, for he had lost one eye in a fight with a rival. He was a massive bull. In his heydays he sired hundreds of colts in the village and was thus the cause of bringing fresh milk to scores of rural houses. But then age caught with him. He but would try to keep his fiefdom still intact. I remember it once when he fell down in an attempt to get onto a young buffalo. The onlookers laughed and made derogatory puns at his vanishing stamina and strength. Maybe the old buffalo took it to heart. And to prove a point that his power was just the same, he carried the momentum right there on the ground. We saw him convulsing with lust on the ground. The poor old bull was trying to drill a hole in the earth to prove a point. It was pretty hilarious that day. When we try to be what we are no longer, we simply turn a joke. Don’t we?

And just today I saw the bravest Public Display of Affection (PDA):a cow and a bull standing right there in the middle of the busy road at the entrance to the town; in full foreplay mood, licking each other with the very same pleasure treasure that each species seems to run after on the earth. We respect cows and the vehicles would divert to the sides to allow them this holy PDA. And here I am going on my scooty marveling at their holy audacity. The only point of mismanagement was that he chose the wrong moment to try to materialize the peak of affection. He went for the heave just when I was crossing over. I was at a safe distance but still the shuffling and movement brought them precariously close. It was a momentary scare. He would have risen in love to the crest of ecstasy and I would have fallen as a fruit of their love. I’m glad not to have become the casualty of a PDA.

Ganga garima

 

Sharper AI wit and duller human brains

 

In an automated and mechanized world it’s not about good and bad; it’s primarily about good, better and best—strictly in terms of numbers. The entire moral façade crumbles and the vast potential of our fabulous brain is as much within the reach of the evil as it’s available for the good. With the equation of good and bad sidelined, the human race enters a hazardous zone. The quest for betterment, for more efficiency bypasses the check-dams of morality and ethics. It’s a blind race for achieving more and more material gains at any cost. When there is no consideration for the costs that we have to pay, we naturally cross the balance sheet. We then beat even the nature in hatching disasters and hazards.

We fly too high in the eternal quest for more and more conveniences and better and better products. In the unrelenting quest we burn our wings and fall down. The unreined and unchecked impulse to go for betterment in every sphere of life churns out such models of production and social norms that come with open-ended potential. These seem to facilitate a process but carry an equal amount of potential for multiple adverse effects that require solutions. For example, artificial intelligence will of course churn out interesting and more and more media content, but it will put challenges in the form of manipulated synthetic media content and deepfakes. For the latter we need more and more technologies to manage the fallouts. After a time, it becomes very difficult to tell whether we are creating more problems or solutions. The confusion results in a melee. Just mere exhaustion and tiredness born of the relentless march makes us believe that we are progressing. While in reality we are simply throwing arms in darkness, caught in the web of our creation, like an over-smart spider spinning a castle of web and then forgetting the way out.

Imperilled democracies

 Capitalism was one of the hands -- that too indirectly -- which pulled the strings of the puppet of democracy. Of late capitalists have begun to pull the strings -- directly. Individual powerful capitalists now are a parallel force in the world's largest and strongest democracies. Democracy is now more or less capitalist democracy. Well, when the entire world becomes a bazaar, and tariffs and profiteering become the geostrategic forces, the world will have major upheavals. Other democracies will be stretched thin in the wake of this reshaping of the two major democracies: India and the USA. Against this background, communist capitalism will be viewed in new light. It might be viewed as far more normal than it has been so far by the world outside the iron curtain. It will no longer be an anathema merely on ideological ground. Democracies will possibly lose the high moral platform from where they have been taking potshots at the communist China. There will be more practical judgment of China and its system of governance. Basically the greed for power, money and authority carries the same muscles, bones and tissues under the varying skins of political ideologies and systems.

Now the sun of blind profiteering will tan all types of skins in the same colour. 

We get bored with what we have possessed for a long time. So don't get too surprised if the equations get reversed in future: democracies taking to communism and communists trying democracy. 😀

Honoring the dynamics of life in others

 

There is an age-old proverb in the villages. Making a child laugh and playful might not earn you a good name, but if she cries while under your care, it will surely earn you a bad name. Negative experiences leave a far bigger impact on us than the positive ones. One sour word very easily undoes the sweetness of hundreds of beautiful words. This proclivity to lock the ‘negative’ in our mind while filtering out hundreds of ‘positives’ is the cause of strife, tension, anxiety and discomfort within. It also very easily sours relationships.

We simply judge people for the ‘exceptions’ in their behavior, ignoring the common ‘mundanities’ of their demeanor. We simply catch the black dot on the otherwise white board. It even seems that we are operating as watchdogs looking and sniffing for the chinks in the walls. I sometimes wonder whether we are actually companions while walking with someone or are we spies going with a mission to catch the other person on the wrong foot. No wonder we feel so vulnerable and insecure most of the time. A spy on a secretive mission will of course be on his toes and full of tension.

It becomes so easy to blame others for all the problems in our lives. But why would we always go searching for the tiny black dot on a white canvas? Why would we simply forget the rest of the white sheet? We are always looking, peeking, searching for those chinks in the armor. It just shows how insecure we are. What breeds this insecurity? It’s caused by the conflicts squirming inside us: the friction caused by our quest for the eternal ease of ‘being’ and the poor ‘becoming’ that we are molded into by conditioning, roles, stereotypes, expectations.

Most of the time we are self-charged on the grand mission of aggravating our own miseries. We are suitably helped all along by our ability to hold onto the master illusion that others are responsible for all the shit flying around in our lives.

We are always pulled in two directions. Then we get scared. We are a scared species. We put the blame on others in order to somehow clear our guilt for not being what we are supposed to be. To have that conflict-free ease of being, we have to learn to retain our vision spread out to still see the surrounding white even though the black dots appear here and there. We have to accept and view situations and people in totality. We have to accept this law that an all-white scenario is impossible to sustain as per the laws of nature. It’s a dynamic canvas. Things and people change and shift in shape, size and color. They aren’t stones that they will retain the same appearance. They aren’t dead. They too are evolving and growing, shifting and changing as much as we are doing the same.

It’s very easy to theoretically discuss, write and understand this fact. But it’s very difficult to bring it into practice. Anything that requires rewiring the habitual network needs a regular exercise. So we can remind ourselves regularly that people aren’t stone idols cast in the mold of our expectations. They are an evolving life. They will grow and change and come out of the mold we have created for them to fit our needs and desires. Accept this fluidity and sanctity of change in a living form and most of the judgments will drop of their own. We then accept the black dots on a white canvas.