We had Mackerel for dinner today.
Gouri ma is Bengali, and like all Bengalis, very specific about her fish. That's river fish. Sweet and no smell. She makes sea fish, with her nose wrinkled politely, just for me. Mackerel, a sea fish, just like Seer and Pomfret, is one of my new favourites. So today, as I was wolfing down my fried Mackerel, rice and dal, I asked her a question.
"Ma, what do you call Mackerel in Bengali."
She calmly said, "We don't have a name for it. We don't eat this fish." and walked away, completely unaware of the bolts of lightening raining on my head.
Four days ago, I posted a question on Yahoo Answers! - Has modern science really moved on from what the ancient civilisations already knew and practiced? The obvious answer is yes, and I did get a lot of those.
But what i didn't get was a philosophical take on the question. I was looking for someone to shed light on, what do we, as humans, really need from life. How much of what we have learnt, that earlier civilisations did not know, is essential knowledge? Are we filling our minds with trivia that is not relevant, but merely adds more pages and diagrams to our text books ? Yes, modern medicine has cured plenty of diseases and life expectancy is higher than ever. But are these necessarily good? Would those diseases have existed if we led simpler lives? Would population be such a problem if life expectancy were lower? Are we interfering with nature?
Read somewhere that 'just because you give something a name, doesn't mean you understand it'.
In Grade 1, I learnt that there are nine planets. It was in my drawing book. And I had to paint over all of them. Pluto was the smallest and my crayons could never paint inside the circle. Today, as I read the news, I am told that that little planet no longer exists. Knowing about Pluto, apart from getting me a tick and an extra mark on my exam sheet, never featured in my life. But it has always been tucked away, occupying place in my mind. Now I know, that what I knew so long is no longer needed to be known.
This name changing altered some other lives though. Those that profited by its existence, like the discoverer's wife who was miffed that her husband' discovery is being slighted, and those that profited by its demotion, like Janis Robinson who sold T shirts that said, 'Pluto is a Planet' and others who have "Pluto, we hardly knew ye ... 1930-2006" posters and bumper stickers that say "Honk if Pluto is still a planet."
People on the street, making a living, will get used to it, because it was never essential. It was just a name. But essential things, like walking, talking, friends, parents, sense of smell, sleep. If they were declassified, we could not live on.
Today was my first storytelling class, and Geeta, out teacher, spent six hours telling us stories, and telling us about the most important quality of a storyteller, listening. But as humans evolved, first physically, then mentally, she said, we are getting more complicated in our thinking, and thus in our listening. We are not practicing full listening, instead growing into critical listeners, where we listen more to pick holes in what is being said, than to absorb.
She told us many stories, with her hands, her eyes, her voice, her body...instruments that we've had since we were born, instruments we will have even if a bomb destroys every living possession we have. I have always been too wary of trusting technology to such an extent that I forget how to live without it. I think its necessary to know how rice was made before the rice cooker, how fire was created before matches and
lighters, how to hunt for food, how to grow food, how to cook with the barest minimum ingredients...that is all that we really need to know. Everything else is just window dressing.
If we question ourselves, why do we live and die, what is our purpose on earth and how can we be happy doing that, we'll find simple answers. The greatest thinkers used simple thoughts, simple ideas - it's never about achieve more, learn more, know more, from something external. It's search within yourself, live simple, think simple. Be natural.
A friend of mine told me about expending energy. All creatures that live the longest, breathe the slowest, and expend less energy. They do as much as they have to do, and no more. And that's how they survive. But that isn't true of us anymore. We live to spread ourselves thin, expending energy, far beyond what we need for survival, filling our minds with much more data, our hands with more action, our eyes with more pictures, without pausing to assimilate why.
Coming back to my mother in law and the Mackerel. She seemed to have got it with her fish theory. What she didn't need was not relevant. An entire region and its people decided that they did not need a name for something, because they did not require it. Maybe Pluto would not have been missed if we followed life like the Bengalis follow their fish.
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