Gnostic Embrace of Warkaris in the Monsoon Season around Pune: I Early Worship

In the early parts of July the main arterial roads in Pune would have been blocked for vehicular traffic because of the Sant Dnyaneshwar palkhi procession from Alandi to Pandharpur the number of worshippers being huge and counted in hundreds of thousands . It’s a wonderful sight (see, http://fiveprime.org/hivemind/Tags/palkhi, for instance) even when you are caught in the traffic because of the procession of "warkaris". The tradition of these warkaris is to emphasize community service and they empathize/harmonize with each other through musical group worship, the ektara or dotara being their most common instrument.

The warkari procession from Alandi goes via Pune where it stops for a night and then goes on to Saswad for another halt before it goes on to Pandharpur. The route to Saswad is taken by the Dive ghat when the image of 100s of thousands of worshippers (warkaris) in very simple clothes, carrying saffron flags, and shining brass vessels with tulsi plants, singing songs of devotion and dancing to it remains etched in your minds.

You long to participate in it.

By the time the palkhi comes to Pune, the monsoon has usually set in. The warkaris walk regardless in the rain. The green hills and the wet drizzle adds to the atmosphere. You promise yourself to join the procession the next year each year, the palkhi procession moves on.

The warkaris could perhaps be better described as gnostics even though they may not themselves have heard of gnosticism. During this period the warkari literally frees himself from the material world and seeks only spiritual awakening. They are not agnostics. For the duration of the palkhi they became very lovable people. It may not matter what became of them after they leave the palkhi when they have to lead their daily lives.

Before and after the palkhi procession groups of warkaris carrying their most simple living essential and their most congenial/spiritual essence would be converging from (they always walk) or diverging toward various parts around Pune where they live. These fragments form the living parts of the swarm intelligence of the united palkhi and they are as bewitching to see as the palkhi itself.

There are three blogs planned in this series and trisects my earlier blog. I have removed that blog from the site as my daughter insists that it was impossibly long. These three blogs will deal with the a-religious gnostic aspects of pre-religion and will not deal much with the syncretic aspects. The words Gnostic, Gnosticism, gnosis, used here do not seem to have a definite meaning. Among the definitions I intuitively like is that in the first paragraph of the website at http://www.gnosis.org/gnintro.htm. I think Gnosticism is based on Gnosis which is based on personal religious experience which transcends the trained language of theology or philosophy and depend on narrating stories that take the form of myths. It is, I think, similar to the panchali or katha tradition that I will allude to later in the blog.

The blog (click to expand images) will start with a simple prelude with vada pav and dargah then go on to stone worship on the Marimmai ghat where we will hear of a 60,000 year old Brahma mandir which we would see and make some interpretations here and later.

Prelude

It is always of interest for self-imagined hyper-educated/hyper-civilized people like us to find out what their background are that make them what they are. To us self-styled “hyper-people”, it seems almost certain that modern politics/television would soon reduce to nothing these ways; it would be called modernization or uplifting by the advertising agencies who would love to sell them instant noodles rather than their native jawari bhakris. So much more would be gained we would say if they had applied themselves to their fields of labour instead of indulging in the “opium of religion”. But ... this is no religion! It is their way of life with a long history behind it!

Some of these swarm-parts are seen on the way from Pune to our hill-house near Varve gaon in Khed. Many of them emerge from the hills beyond our farm house. I had no idea of what Maharashtrian life existed beyond the hills. Maybe the soul of the warkaris would be better understood if we visit more those places.

There is a lesser-known road which slinks off into the hills to the left while going away from Pune. This is another of the road to Saswad although it is less frequented and therefore more likely to preserve the warkari style. On the right is the road to Simhagad and another to the should-be-famous for the dargah on the tomb of Hazrat Kamar Ali Darvesh from north-india who settled in Shivapur more than 800 years ago (so it is said). This dargah (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjCVsHhnX6U&NR=1 for instance) is better known as the place where there is a heavy stone that can be lifted by a group of 11 people with their little finger working simultaneously while shouting the name of the saint.

In the rainy season, the stream by the side of the tomb looks especially beautiful. One can appreciate the wisdom of this saint on choosing his final resting place there.

Mariammai Ghat and Temple

Among the simple pleasures of life of the Puneri people is the vada pav which is best enjoyed piping hot in the rain. One of the shops we like particularly is the Shri vada pav shop just after Shivapur on the way back to Pune. Whenever we stop at this shop and look at the hills we see a rather flat range with a prominent dip and the tower of a temple in the gap (Fig 1, click on figure always to expand image). The road to Saswad goes through this gap. On the rainy season of this year 2010 we chose to drive up this road to the inviting silhouette of a temple. Once we reached the top the view down was not spectacular there being too much industrial development of the non-conserving kind. The highway was distant and not straightforward to locate (Fig 2 left).

The temple silhouette turned out to be that of a new structure made with cement and concrete and probably of political import; it did not and could not emanate an essence of god that the old temples do with their incense-burning and their chanting. There was however a (what looked like ficus variety) tree by the side. Beneath this tree there is a smaller structure of brick and mortar. On the other side of this small structure lay some worship stones which were daubed with orange colour of the enamel (certainly not vermilion) kind that is so common to these parts of modern Maharashtra.

We did not examine the structure closely the first time but came back the next day. There was a man cleaning the temple site (Fig 2 right) the second time we visited it. It seemed quite romantic , if that is the right word. There was a crutch resting by the side of the temple. The man had obviously used the crutch to come to the temple from a distant village. He had spectacles. He was in no hurry and when he looked at you over the top of the rims of his spectacles (Fig 3, left) he seemed fully at peace with himself. For some reason, he reminded me of my late brother who in turn had always reminded me of Peter O’Toole in Goodbye Mr. Chips.

The inside of the structure held a orange stone (Fig 3, left) to which the man had offered coconuts (he gave me a piece) and had lit an agarbatti (incense stick). There were some plastic garlands hanging on the wall and covering an image inside a glass frame which I did not go close enough to examine. The goddess is that of Mariammai, the location and the stone is several hundred years old, which we have to accept even if the man said it himself.

The road by which we ascended the hill is known as the Mariammai ghat. It is probably named after the temple.

Mariamma is a family deity for a very small percentage ( ~ 1%) of families in Maharashtra which have a family deity; this would seem to be reasonable considering that she is the goddess of death by cholera, small pox and so on.

It is very likely that Marimmai is of Tamil origin, when mari could come from marai which means rain in Tamil. If this is true it shows the Early Dravidian influence on the Deccan. In india it is usually seen that the earlier the history of a tribe the lower is its allotted caste, by succeeding invaders. By this logic the Mariamma deity would have an older and more natural ideas of worship. She is thought to be worshipped primarily by a lowly untouchable caste descended from the çandala or Matanga tribes of history.

Mariamma (amma means mother in Tamil), is a name by which Tamil Christians used for Mary, mother of God. I heard it first in my school St. Marys’ (started for European orphans in old Madras in early 19th century) at George town Madras.

The name “Mariamma” had been in use before the Portugese at least. In Kosambi’s “Introduction to Indian History” there is a footnote for Mariamma in which he adds “ A comic, unintentional, but historically justified tribute was paid to this goddess at Calicut by Vasco da Gama and his companions. They entered the local Mariamma temple, were sprinkled with holy water by the priests, genuflected before the image, under the impression that they were paying homage to the Virgin Mary.”

Who came first, Mother Mary or Mariamma? Does it matter? Mariamma! Of course?

The worship stone painted in saffron colours inside clearly has, what seems to be, a pair of eyes (see bottom inset of Fig 3 left). Carvings with such fixed staring eyes are characteristic of 5000 years old pre-Egyptian styles (see top inset in left of Fig 3). Kosambi writes about such worship stones “The aniconic image has a pair of eyes which are not in the stone, but in the red coat which has reached a thickness of about 30 millimetres. Sacrifices are occasionally made here too by those who do not mind the hard walkup a steep hill and a couple of miles into the scrub jungle.” Pune has such worship stones with eyes implanted in the red coat in primordial temples spread all over the city. The various deities which include Vetala, Mhasoba (a demon to some), Kalubai (“which later becomes Kali”), Mariamma (goddess of death by cholera) are all coated with red and one cannot tell whether the stone is a god or goddess.

Kosambi calls these stone deities as “lower deities” as presumably the higher deities are housed as recognizable human figures in "properly" built temples with an architectural plan and so on.

Deities represented by various stones, with or without eyes, look alike to the eye and are only identified by the worshippers, says Kosambi. This lack of grammar in our worship, is typical of our countrymen who improvise is all kinds of ways, the most sublime of them being in their music.

This freedom to worship a deity without recognizable shape or form and with an identity chosen by you is the true freedom of worship that seems to characterize the indomitability of the pre-religion Indian mind which is so difficult to shake.

There is a fear of the unknown when we choose to worship.

The deities we choose to worship would depend on the nature of the fear; the stone would represent the deity. The only point of importance is that we worship for the moment for the fear of the moment. This would be our ingrained secularism, where the physical identity of the god we pray to and the actual prayer we offer is not the dominant factor.

With every worship we syncretize until it becomes commercially powerful to idolize the worship. Then kings and priests and higher deities come in quite anti-agnostically in a metamorphosis of the religious bent.

Chaturmukh Mandir

The man at the temple told me about a chaturmukhi temple a kilometer or so into the hills away from the road. This temple, he said, is more than 60,000 years old. It is the place, he said, which is the Southern version of Uttarakashi (in the Himalayas), and which my wife interpreted later as the kashi of Benares. He pointed the way to the Chaturmukhi temple.

We took a left turn a kilometer down the road going to Saswad. This left turn was towards the village of Warwadi, we learnt later. The chaturmukhi temple was about a kilometer away, I was told. We saw a freshly painted temple tower about a kilometer away and went towards it. On the way we saw a small neat freshly painted Shiva temple with a painting of what seemed to be a man riding on a Garuda (sworn enemy of snakes since they had enslaved his mother), the kite-like or eagle-like bird which is the mount of Vishnu. The features of the man riding the snake seemed to be that of Tukaram, the much loved, admired, venerated, early seventeenth century Marathi poet who left for “Vishnu’s abode” on a garuda-like bird. The painting on the temple may have borrowed from a celebrated Ravi Varma Press print of early twentieth century.

The presence of a Krishna-devotee riding Vishnu’s vamana (vehicle) on the walls of a Shiva temple is not at all perplexing to an all-embracing warkari. They embrace every good thing just as they do Tukaram and his public discourses in song (kirtaney) that came in his poetry that emphasized love for fellow human beings and his environment rather than the mechanical following of orthodox rituals. The greatness of Tukaram is his awareness and resonance with the greatness of the warkaris. Many religions have later incorporated Tukaram’s teaching, including Gandhi who, translated some poems of Tukaram during the fortnight he was in Yerawada jail during a fortnight in October of 1930.

In a verse entitled Pavitra te kul paawan to desh jethe Hariche daas janma gheti Gandhi’s translation has… 'The Puranas have testified like bards without reserve that those called untouchables have attained salvation through devotion to God. Tuladhar, the Vaishya, Gora, the potter, Rohidas, a tanner, Kabir, a Momin, Latif, a Muslim, Sena, a barber, and Vishnudas, Kanhopatra, Dadu, a carder, all become one at the feet of God in the company of hymn singers. Chokhamela and Banka, both Mahars by birth, became one with God. Oh, how great was the devotion of Jani the servant girl of Namdev! Pandharinath (God) dined with her. Meral Janak's family no one knows, yet who can do justice to his greatness? For the servant of God there is no caste, no varna, so say the Vedic sages. Tuka says: I cannot count the degraded'.

It was very soothing to sit by the temple with a stream flowing by its side. There were obvious burning piers of stone in front with evidence of a recent ritual. The stream prevented my access to its interior, and a local resident informed me that it was a kalubai (Kali) temple although a later investigation of Wikimapia showed a kalubai temple at a different location in that region.

We thought (wrongly) that the chaturmukhi temple was further down the path behind the trees and guessed it to be the pink-painted tower which we could make out. We were directed elsewhere when we reached that spot going through a happy neat village.

The drive to the chaturmukhi temple was very pleasant skirting two hills that act as landmarks at a distant. When we reached the spot, it was terribly disappointing. There was a modern structure (Fig 4 left) very much like the structure at the marimmai temple earlier.

There is a quasi-saffron painted figure (Fig 4 centre) probably representing (in the imagination of a local official) the saint 60,000 years ago, flanked by two photos in a glass frame who reminded me of vaishnavite Ramakrishna missionaries (probably bengali).

In another enclosure of very recent origin there is a new shaivaite lingam decorated with fresh shiuli flowers from a tree which grew nearby (not more than ten years old).

I could not find any four-faced evidence for chaturmukhi which indicates a Btahma origin. It was disappointing even if we should not have really expected anything else.

What was interesting was the enthusiasm of the caretaker who said he was the assistant to the head priest. He spoke only Marathi and I understood virtually nothing. Lalitha understood a bit. He and the head-priest had plenty to tell us and they did. We understood what little we thought we could.

The assistant pointed to a tree behind the modern structures (Fig 5 left)with some obviously old carved figures at the base. That tree, the assistant said, was 60,000 years old. The assistant was perhaps privately worried that we would ask him why the ficus tree had no large aerial roots like the large banyan trees (ficus benghalensis) near the temples in the plains. Without our asking he said that there were no aerial roots because of a curse.

Among the four sacred trees (Nalpamaram) trees which are planted near temples, I thought the cluster fig tree (ficus racemiosa) which has little or no aerial roots most closely resembled the tree. The ficus racemiosa grows in the Deccan plateau. For a ficus racemiosa tree, the tree behind looked old; it certainly perhaps looked much older than the rest of the trees around.

There were very few other big trees around. There were some recent eucalyptus trees planted invariably by the forest department because of their deep concern for the rayon industry. Perhaps the oldest living species there was the head priest (Fig 5 middle) who had appeared by this time. The oldest tree had perhaps been recently felled or had fallen (Fig 5 right).

There is a shiuli (to Bengalis) or paarijaata (night-flowering jasmine) tree from which the flowers (Fig 6 left inset) for the shivlinga obviously came; there was a flowerless frangipani or Indian temple tree (Fig 6 left).

The shiuli flower is much loved by Bengalis certainly. The flowers are commonly used by the worshippers in the east of India; the medicinal properties of these plants are also mainly exploited by the tribal populations of the east. I mention this here since it may be important to find a bengali connection with this place when I discuss the Kanifnath shrine later

At the monsoon time of the year, the place had a lovely undulating country side (Fig 6 left) that our dog (Bruno) loved, especially when he had the opportunity running around chasing his ball.

The hills around the chaturmukhi temple are seen from the NH4 highway as one comes out of the new Katraj tunnel (Fig 6 right). The flattish hill on the left is actually a bent ridge and the chaturmukhi mandir is located in a dip in the ridge at the bend. The conical hill on the right (Fig 6 left) actually looks like a volcanic hill with concentric rings round its peak and starting from its base in the wikimapia figure (Fig 7, left; the figure is large so that the claimed crater-like features can be seen better). The diameter of the major semi-circular vehicular path is nearly 150 m. The dark strips are ploughed land awaiting planting.

There seems to be a few crater-like objects in the wikimapia map which are about 10 m in diameter. These circular object could be shadows of trees or brushes. That would not be interesting. If there are four such crater-mouths one could call them chaturmukh, I suppose. That will be interesting!!!

Otherwise there is little that is directly suggestive of a four-mouthed evidence for chaturmukhi near the spot.

The senior priest was very keen to communicate to us about the miracles of the place. He could not convey anything that he wanted us to hear and believe. The first point I think, that he wanted to impress upon us is that the spot is like kashi of Benares. It is even more sacred, he said, since you require to visit this spot only once to get your sins washed while your require visiting kashi of the north thrice for the same purpose. This story was also told to me earlier by the man at the marimmai temple.

One story that we got some gist of is that the rishi of 60,000 years ago took some of the stones from the hill to Brahma and told him that there is no gold in those hills like Brahma had said there will be. Brahma then turned the rocks in the rishi’s hand to gold.

There are some evidences for an older monument there. Some pieces of sculpture like those under the “60,000” year old tree (Fig 5, left) look like sculptures that can be dated back to at least a few hundred years. Somewhere around there is a cluster of stones which seems to be well-weathered pieces of some decorative stone panels as well as perhaps even of a face (Fig 8 left). I guess they would be called swayambhu stones (sculptured stones that appear by themselves without human intervention) at some later religiously proper time after some orange colour is placed on them (why not?) . There is also a collection of stones covered with a few slabs of rock (Fig 8 middle) with gaps through which the sun shines through. There are signs of recent worship. The small bottle (much smaller than a “quarter” bottle of spirits) at the bottom of the picture was used for oil, the priest informed us. Icould not figure out the identity of the deity or deities represented by the stones.

The junior priest took us to a shrub behind (Fig 8 right). There is a copper vessel typical of a kalash suspended on a stone hung over a siva lingam as in Fig 4 right. The place has several very-weathered stones buried in the ground which could be imagined to remains of ancient lingams exposed to nature. There is a cluster of such objects (see also inset of Fig 8 right). The assistant said that the mud due to the rain water has covered up the stones. He started digging out the mud with his hands, but we stopped him. The covered stones in Fig 8b, middle, would then be another lingam. I did not remember to find out the orientations of such lingams. These clusters of shiva lingam and the peethams (circular base supporting the lingam) as a manifestation of parasakthi representing the creative power of the almighty. In this case these lingams would be Swayambhu, which is likely since there could have been a flowing stream there. Could these be the chaturmukh?

Santo Pablo and Swarm Intelligence.

The remarkable thing about Paul the octopus predicting the results of the World Cup Football matches is that Paul does not --- I should say ‘may not’ perhaps --- find it remarkable (borrowing from Bertrand Russell’s view of the amoeba: A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known.). Paul was probably a bit bored and played the simple games that football lovers understand.

Ours is a win-lose world of the instant without the perspective of the future in the past. It’s a simple binary logic that is restricted to the show-business, computational and electronics world predicated on monetary gains, most times. The strategies in the Spain-Netherlands match was either the tika-taka of spain or the thud-thud nether approach of the Netherlands. It spells out a beautiful game of orthogonal non-overlapping opposites of strategies, once you know the strategies…but without a symphonic melody if you knew other beauties.

You should ask the Bengalis of dacca and kolkata how to play football in the monsoon rains when swarms of strategies shower down faster than the speed of the ball, rotating without translating in the Hooghly mud. The imagined past easily makes contact with the aniticipating future and only poetry can emerge for a truly virtual appreciation.

So how did the octopus know which team will win and predict correctly seven times out of seven?

One may devise a very academically correct, mathematically complex answer using complicated words which have no real world significance.

I had a friend, Rajasekhar, who used to enthusiastically raise his hands for any question asked in class. He would start with all seriousness “Sir, as per the theory of relativity, you see sir,…”. Since he did this every time, the lecturer would oblige him by asking him to leave the classroom, which he did with enthusiasm every time.

I wont be using relativity or spacetime concepts like the ancient people of the Incas may do in local culture or as in Belafonte’s song “From the beginning of time and creativity there existed the forces of relativity” in the song Man Smart Woman Smarter. The lyrics of this song could perhaps be re-written to the title “Man Smart, Paul smarter” since Paul did conceivaly consistently better than most of us who went by the hype.

We could be attributing Paul’s successes simply to luck… after all we are rational… at least as rational as we are allowed to be. You see, since you don’t see, Paul was not tested with the French and the Italians and the Brazilians!. Even my most trusted expert, my son, failed with that!

I will be using instead the modern catch-word in computer science, which is “swarm intelligence” although, it is my un-informed interpretation of it. This term is not to be confused with mob mentality although the latter has principles that are related to that of the former.

We need not ask any serious questions on what seems obviously to be a silly/trivial subject; especially when “so many people are dying of starvation” or when people are killed in Uganda for watching world cup matches! But we will ask the question which may be taken seriously just for the lark of it, even if it may seem to some as …whatever.

So we go ahead … to spend time. I am not responsible for any ill effects should my theory prove to be wrong.

Let us assume Paul did understand the game and did understand the question and did understand the necessity to take part in the game by making a choice that we require to visibly understand, and not teleptathically, for instance. The point of importance was that Paul is an octopus.

What’s so special about the octopus? What extra-sensory perception was involved? Or was it extraordinary intelligence. We do not use the word extraordinary in the sense of exceptional but more in the sense of bizarre. Is it possible that the octopus’s response were dictated by 1) his being sensitive to the questions being asked and his need to response and 2) the most intense spontaneous or primitive wishes of the supporting masses that influenced his decisions with or without his knowing.

As for the first question Paul was required to simply eat a mussel (so we are told, the majority of us Indians who are vegetarians will never understand an octoupus’s mind in this regard). He was to eat one from two boxes to indicate his preference. If he was hungry his choice would not have been a considered one but rather a spontaneous one. He would have chosen at random. He had to go through this exercise seven times and to be correct each time the unbiased probability of coming at the final correct decision was 1/(2^7) which meant he had roughly 1% chance of being correct on everything, provided he did not know anything about the game.

The more analytical or passionate considered decision leads inevitably to more bias, and invariably takes one away from the right decisions since most analyses turn out to be wrong. So the probability of making the correct decision decreased with increasing analysis or passion.

This could explain why Bejan Daruwalla is the leading Indian astrologer in predicting as well as Paul the world cup outcome!

But what about question 2? Was Paul answering the wishes of his most ardent supporter, since he was convinced that whoever he chose would influence the final decision? just as the flapping of the butterfly wings could influence the direction of a typhoon because of changes in initial conditions? Just as god does when he is divinely interfering and influencing a decision? Was Paul’s decision a conscious one or was it the effect of the unconscious. Was there an extrasensory influence?
Us ancient Indians and other Ethiopians or Tibetan bon people are (or used to be) familiar with telepathy and extrasensory perception without technically abbreviating it and validating it as ESP due to Rhine and his non-believers in the late 19th century.

The simplest way to account for telepathy is to think of people in a train having the same thinking as in the cartoon (Fig 1) which I found on the internet and which I am reproducing with the warning. What is interesting is not the thought “I am in the train” but the feature that they are looking in the same direction and associating various thoughts in their mind with what they see.

Some of these sights could make a common connect. For instance there may be something which looks strikingly similar to a very popular character, say popeye (maybe salmon khan, if readers are not familiar with popeye) and one of them start talking about spinach since popeye is associated with spinach. Another would say “Strange! I was thinking of the same thing!”. Will it then be telepathy?

I happened to give a similar analysis in a story I had written in 1990 or thereabouts (see my website http://www.materials-chemistry.com/SIMPLE%20DITTIES%20OR%20NOTHING%20AT%20ALL.pdf ). In this story I was trying, among other things, to impress upon the reader the way simple ditties keep us going. In the advertising world they try to influence people through catchy jingles for creating mostly unnecessary and unhealthy needs.

But how does this mass-appeal work? Is this feeling of goodness, the jingle in the ditty, due to the mind or something more spontaneous, more extrasensory in as much as it does not depend on the five senses that influences or is influenced by the mind? More importantly, how did it influence Paul? Or, alternatively, how did Paul influence it?.

The “scientific” search for ESP involved finding its place in the mechanism of the mind. But this is the wrong thing to do if the mind is separated from consciousness. This will be the case, for instance, when there are sensors in the body which operate on muscles and nerves independent of the body as in instinctive reactions.

This is where the octopus could score. The way the octopus moves its limbs using its brain is thought to be radically different from the way we understand the movement of our limbs. It then becomes a question of conscious and unconscious or instinctive activity.

The conscious mind does the conscious part such as presenting ones thoughts in a seminar, or moving parts of one’s body purposefully to carry out a brain-determined function such as swatting a fly in whatever form.

This is not so for the octopus!

According to a discovery aorund 2000 by scientists trying to make a robot with a flexible arm like an octopus, it was found that the brain of the octopus can only give a command to its arm and then the octopus can figure out what to do. This they did by cutting the nerves connecting the arm of the octopus to its brain and finding that the arm behaved exactly the same way.

So, one can have an independent decision making part in a body that can be influenced by its own concerns and not by central command. The arm would then seem to make an unconscious response? The advantage now may be that the unconscious control of the arms is not dictated by the limited experience of the brain but by the very variable and very unlimited nature of the environment of the arm.

Where does ESP come in?

It turns out that there are theories in which cells present in connective tissue, lymph nodes, and bone marrow and tied to nerve endings which may be hypersensitive enough to decode signals below levels accessible to the brain. These cells may be the body's ESP unit in which extra sensory would mean “very sensitive”. They are organs of the body, sending and receiving impressions below the normal perceptive level. Such cells are more sensitive and active during childhood, but is said to deteriorate without proper use, encouragement or diet.

Nerve endings are nociceptors, which respond to external forces, usually through the feeling of pain or some other discomfort, and then signals the response for evasive action.

I don’t think a nociceptor detects only pain but abnormal surface or skin changes that spells danger before the brain has time to analyze.

I must thank my nociceptor for saving me from at least two sure deaths. Once when I held back miraculously to avoid being pushed over by a speeding train with my hands, held back in surprise, grazing the passing train. Another time, I held back jumping over a bridge into a river, when in the moonlit night the river bed gave an illusion of being a pedestrian’s parapet.

I also remember waking up one night when I realized that my brain was amplifying a noise alarmingly as if somebody was ringing a giant bell on my head. After I woke up I realized that it was the noise of a dripping tap which I could just barely hear after I had woken up. There was some unconscious amplification mechanism which impressed me no end.

The point that I am trying to make is that there are unconscious acts that are not dictated by the brain, but by effects of the environment.

I don’t know how this leads to understanding Paul’ s behaviour. But we continue regardless.

In a recent (2010) article in the prestigious journal, Nature, it has been noted the nociception (if that is the word for pain perception) relies on a sensor that has been conserved over 500 million years of evolution and is a common ancestor to both vertebrate and invertebrate species. If the nociception sensor for detecting pungent and irritating noxious electrophile compounds arrived on the scene before invertebrates and vertebrates evolved (as reported by Kang et al in Nature, 2010) we may imagine a swarm of such sensors (olfactoceptor?) or other nociceptors which then attach themselves to nerve endings of other evolving species.

Perhaps we can imagine such a swarm behaving like colonies of ants or bees having the flexibility of breaking up and self re-organizing in a robust manner as per the needs of the colony in an instinctive manner, where each individual member acts locally to fill the demands of the entire swarm.

Like the arm of the octopus nerve-severed from its brain.

It could be these sense-senors (sensusceptors? which could be a general term which includes nociceptor) if that is the word that plays a role in controlling the animal’s behavior without the direct or conscious participation of the species. The influence of this swarm could be over long range with an effect which is negligible in the individual scale but magnifies over the swarm to a distinct and substantial effect.

This is the basis (I think) of Swarm Intelligence as distinct from, say, artificial intelligence.

Swarm intelligence is defined by Bonabeau et al (1999) as “The emergent collective intelligence of groups of simple agents”, or by Kelly “dumb parts, properly connected into a swarm, yield smart results.”

Paul could have been responding to, shall we say, the more powerful of the Swarm Prayers from the more dedicated and intense fans and by making his decision he fed back this intensity to where it came from and moved his hand.

We should be now having a Santo Pablo and a True Hand of God in Spain.

Believe it or not!

Maybe it requires some more working. This is after all an unrefereed blog!

The octopus is very intelligent and well known to play games as in the very remarkable video footage of an octopus’s movie footage with a movie camera stolen from one Victor Huang (http://www.mahalo.com/octopus-steals-camera) who was free diving in his environment. What is remarkable also is the way Huang behaved.

In the meanwhile I came across this 2005 cartoon (Fig 2) on the net with a riddle (Posted on: January 15, 2009 9:38 AM, by PZ Myers)
.
There were various answers. Among the ones I liked is the one below (Posted by: Cuttlefish, OM | January 15, 2009 10:13 AM)

I looked up to the heavens and I wished upon a star
Though I knew it couldn’t hear, from unimaginably far,
I wished two arms to hold me, two arms to keep me tight,
Two arms that I could cling to every second of the night,
Two arms to keep me safe and warm, two arms to share my fun—
I meant “two arms in total”, but that star’s a silly one.

For that we will not need Santo Pablo, right? Or even a saint?

Whether we have evolved towards the better from swarm intelligence to human intelligence through octopus intelligence is something the human mob may not be able to decide.

Divinity and Divining: The Fluid in our Veins.

This blog is due to a string of unusual occurrences of what could have been unlikely events. It is centred on the experience of water divining and the way it became connected with a supra-emotional unity of blood ties.

The fluid in the water veins deep in the earth and those in the blood of our veins are a result of many thousand years of assimilation and change. We can expect the two veins to be connected only through these prehistory years of change which are way beyond our daily ambits of experience or residence times of memory; it perhaps reveal themselves only through the occult.

As a result, the blog could seem to be a bit personal and provincial, but, finally, it transcends, I think, parochial interests and underscores what would seem to be beyond a sophisticated scientific analysis. It concerns the divining of water; the very medium of our existence, of our lifestyles, of the blood in our veins, the very last drops that you seek to quench your dying thirst.

It is only to be expected that the divining of water has to be traced back to shamanic times when various life-experiences of sensitive people made them associate the various twitches and itches and fever of their bodies and the response of their senses to the presence/absence of different features of different forces in their environment.

The practice of dowsing seems to rise above the present practice of science and technology, which seems now to be concerned with more humdrum approaches required, say, for selling soap and soap operas or saas-bahu TV serials or in selling cricket IPL. The cold analytic minds of scholars or experimentalists, prejudiced by their self-styled superior logic and the requirement for commercial funding dismisses things, which are beyond their training and funding possibilities; just as a shaman or a tantric would perhaps dismiss as incomplete the conclusions of the scientist with equal illogic.

It is difficult to form a "baseline against which a diviner's performance may be compared" and controlled testing (see http://www.skepdic.com/dowsing.html) of a dowser’s performance has usually been considered to be negative as compared to a geologist’s or engineer’s performance. However even the most skeptic critic like Jim Enright would write “ … there may be some dowsers who have an intuitive, subconscious understanding of underground topography that permits them to choose a better spot than just a random guess; and they may even use a dowsing rod to confirm what their subconscious tells them. Even I would, I think, be able to make a guess about better and poorer places to bore on the basis of obvious superficial landscape features: don't drill at the top of a hill; look for a gentle valley with a large potential drainage area behind it, etc.”

In an article (Consciousness and Cognition 12 (2003) 684–694) on “Voluntary Involuntariness” Wegner and Erskine begin with the questions “Can we intend not to intend? Try not to try? Voluntarily behave involuntarily?” They continue in their first paragraph “The capacity of the will to cancel itself may underlie phenomena in which people experience involuntariness for actions despite external indications that the action has arisen voluntarily.” The article concludes with the sentence “Mental control of thoughts about action can influence whether thoughts occur in mind relevant to the action, and so can create significant transformations in the experience of will.”

I certainly would not understand the full implication of the last sentence but I could certainly voluntarily submit myself to an involuntary understanding.

This article is about one such individual dowser. It is about an experience which I, as a “scientist” deem to be, as far as the particular diviner is concerned, beyond the logic we have learnt and the system of proof that we require.

The blog will have basically three parts, the introduction of the diviner, the “proof” of this particular diviner’s clairvoyance, and some thoughts on the success of divining in particular and the way events that are beyond the range of modern human senses can still be perceived by the way events are determined, if not controlled.

We (‘we’ would always mean hereafter Lalitha and I, in this particular case it includes our children, although our dog, Bruno, could claim the hill-house to be exclusively his) have a house on the hills behind Varve gaon near Khed Shivapur, about 35 km from Pune on the Pune Bangalore highway, NH4. The land has been named by us as Amitaboni after my mother Amita and my father Aboni. This year, 2010, marks the passing of a hundred years of my father’s birth, on 1st of May, 2010. It seemed important to me, as the only surviving son, that I mark my father’s 100th anniversary of birth to formally christen the place as Amitaboni in the presence of family members in what should have been a joyous reunion of the entire family.

This was not to be.

We also wanted to add permanence to Amitaboni as a place where future generations from Amita and Aboni would be attracted to visit, stay and relax in an atmosphere worthy of my parents.

The first requirement for this is water, we thought.
We require, above all,for the survival of trees that we plant … and for the shower and the bathtub that seems to be necessary for the modern IPL-image-fed younger generation. That requires a lot of water! The best environmentally friendly approach would have been to have harvested rain water. We did not do that.

Where do we get the water, especially in the summer months preceding the rains? High on the hill of the lonely goat-herd or lonely buffalo-herd or lonely cow-herd, there are also very lonely, dwarfed trees, stunted further by the requirements for firewood among the local inhabitants and the ever increasing migrant labour communities among displaced farmers.

The hill slopes are really barren in summer around our hill house (marked by red spot in the figure on the left of Fig 1, click to enlarge) compared to the green flat-lands around the hill. There is no sign of greenery indicative of water on these hills, which look very parched and often-times burnt in the early parts of the year.

Looking for water by sinking a bore-well here would naturally be considered to be quite foolish. The first water diviner we brought to the land, did not hesitate to reprimand us. However, this water diviner very grudgingly did find from his machine indications of half- to one-inch water (enough for daily cooking and bath, he said) at 300 feet depth.

The second water diviner was well known, more because he was the son of the divine Dharwad singer Bhimsen Joshi. The diviner (not more divine, perhaps) son divined with a copper tube and found water at roughly the same place as the first diviner, but at a convenient depth of 180 feet.

Actually, the spot they chose was the only place at which any bore-well machine could comfortably reach. There is a stream that flows down the hill (marked by a yellow line in the right of Fig 1, click to enlarge) and the only place that one could hope to strike water is at the junction of the stream and the kuccha “road” in the front of the plot.

Many professional diviners are committed to the convenience and availability of bore-well operators. They usually recommend spots which can be easily accessed by bore-well machines that are available for the day and they find water at depths for an optimized profit-loss scenario involving the operator and the client. This second diviner said that there was water that would easily be enough for bath and cooking every day (15-20 buckets, is what they actually meant). He recommended a four-and-a-half inch bore-well.

The operator was contacted, the machine came, the bore-well was drilled, water was poured into the bore-well while digging (for cooling, they said), and almost the same amount of water was recovered while boring at 180 feet. The operator announced a successful borwell. A pump was installed almost immediately and the bore-well water dried up within ten minutes of pumping.

We resisted attempts at announcing complete success of the bore-well by the purchase and installation of a pump. We counted the savings on our total financial losses and left it for another day.

We were told by our well-wishers in the bore-well trade that we should perhaps flush the bore-well again as we could always see considerable amount of water (by hearing the noise on throwing a pebble inside) at 100 feet even in summer. We decided to flush again.

We also decided to go down to 300 ft remembering the first diviner.

There was no sign of water to 260 feet and all we got was hard rock which seemed to be more than 150 feet thick. At 270 feet the rock seemed to become wet. At 280 feet the rock turned reddish and wet. At 290 feet water was gushing out. We could not proceed further because of the heavy pressure of water, (so we were told).

The bore-well was considered to be a definite success. A rope was tied to a submersible pump, a plastic tube was connected and water was pumped out the first time for more than four hours continuously. 5000 litres of water could be pumped out in a day for the next two years even in the middle of summer. We usually pumped once a week.

The success of the bore-well seemed to have got to the head of our garden help. He became a big man among his friends, became an alcoholic, did not look after our plants most of which died.
We sacked him.
One day, in revenge perhaps, he must have cut the rope that held the pump.
We could pull the pump up with the plastic pipe. We did not get to attach another rope, procrastinating to be penny-wise and pound-foolish.
There was a drought for three years.
The bore-well would give only 1000-3000 litre in summer per week eventually.
The pump got stuck in the bore-well when we thought we would get it out to clean it.
It could not be retrieved even with “expert” help. They only managed to damage the pumping system beyond repair.
The bore-well was abandoned.

We counted our losses again. It was sizeable.

The developers of our society, continued to ignore us when supplying water. Successive “garden helps” continued to play truant. My sources of funding from visits abroad after retirement had dried up. It was never much, in any case. Most of the 350 odd trees we planted had dried up. The house on the hill was less visited.

We now learn that the villagers call it “bhoot bungala”, the haunted house.

However … …

The story of the house on a hill is an important part of the continuing story of my life. It has mostly been unplanned. It is always remembered as extremely happy, especially when in retrospection mode, at imagined moments of stress. Most of this happiness must have been expressed in our genes (if you require a modern word for it) or what we have simply inherited from our forefathers, their karma and their dharma. As I had blogged before, I seem to share my father’s wish of ‘asking for sadness so that I could experience joy’.

The house looked so sad in late 2009 that we thought t was definitely time to experience more joy.

It was time to drill another bore-well … say, for the occasion of my father’s birth-centenary.
We could not find any bore-well operator in Pune. They were all busy.

There is a government geological surveyor in Pune; a Mr. V-----, who claimed to be fully scientific in his methodology for his water dowsing. He did not claim hundred per cent success, but he did claim a good reputation. Mr. V----- had surveyed for water for our housing society; he had found a spot where a car was not parked. The society drilled for water at that spot; the bore-well machine drilled till water came out of the well and then it went away. Water was pumped for half an hour or less, before the well permanently gave up.

One misses some times. Some miss many times.

We took Mr V----- to our farm house. He would charge Rs. 2000. He drove in his car with us to our farm house. He looked at the spot. Without doing any dowsing he decided that there was no harm in drilling next to the old bore-well. There would be as much chance as striking water, coming to the and diving was not necessary- He looked overhead where a power-line was hung. He decided that six-inch bore-well machine cannot drill there unless the power-line was removed. He chose a spot with his feet almost arbitrarily, where the machine could reach. He asked for and got Rs 1500 for the time spent. “I will use part of the money to influence the electricity board cable man to switch the power off when the drilling machine was operating” and he left. Mr. V----- ignored my SMS to him on how he was not being very honest about the amount of money he had taken without providing any service.

This was the beginning of the usual busy season for borewell machines. We had little success in locating another borewell operator even though we contacted many of them.

One of the more kindly bore-well operators gave me the name of an Amol who operated in the area near our farm house. We contacted Amol. He came promptly to the farm house. He saw the site of the old bore-well. He agreed that there was not likely to be any other place to drill. Amol had a six inch bore-well machine ready to drill the next day.

We had also concluded much earlier that we would strike water at the same place. Access to the land by any vehicle had been disturbed because of a a huge rainwater drain dug in front of our plot by the developers without courtesy or consent. We had spent considerable amount of money to make access to the land by a vehicle by installing two big cement pipes and covering them with soil.

Lalitha and I decided that maybe we should get a diviner before we started the drilling, just in case.

Amol said he had a “scientific” water diviner who charged Rs 3000 and he had another who divined with a lemon in his hand. The lemon man charged Rs 1800.
Amol probably got a 20% cut, I figured out.
Both have the same success rate, Amol said.
We opted for the lemon man.
Amol was not to be heard from for the next few days.

My mother had passed away on 22nd April in Pune and her ashes were immersed at the sangam of the rivers Bhima and Bhama nearby. We thought of visiting the sangam on that date, in case we did not hear from Amol.

We had hardly hit the road on 22nd April when Amol called us and said that the diviner would be at our farm house within the next hour. Can we be there?.

Taking it as a signal of my late mother’s preference we decided to go to the farm house, just for a taste of lemon divining if not anything else.
While I was figuring out the best way one would devise a method for divining for water with a lemon, and trying to remember the formula of citric acid and whether it was optically active or not --- who knows what an L- lemon would do to a D-diviner, for example ---we got a call from Amol to get some lemons.
I thought it strange since a diviner using a lemon should be carrying at least his own lemons.
What kind of lemons, I asked. Just lemons, Amol told me. Get whatever lemon.
Green or yellow? I insisted
Ripe lemons, the diviner informed Amol.

We picked up a few lemons and reached our farm house.

Amol and the diviner were sitting on our water tank at the boundary of our farm house. They have certainly stuck water, I thought. We gave them the lemons and went ahead to park the car.

By the time we had parked the car and went up to them, the water diviner was standing near the Australian accasia tree that the developer had planted to mark the boundary of our plot.

I remember him very vividly standing there. The sketch that I quickly made (Fig 2) is a rough approximation of the image I had formed.
I thought the diviner would start his divining with the lemons. I got ready with the camera to record the process of lemon-water-divining for posterity.
The diviner was standing still near the tree.
I asked him something like how he was going to start his divining. He had a stone placed near his feet. I thought he would smash the lemon with the stone and start the divining process.
He pointed with his index finger to a lemon placed between his feet.
“You will find water here at 300 feet”, he said very confidently, very matter-of-factly.
I was flabbergasted (stunned, astonished, flummoxed, swept away, surprised, rendered speechless, dumbfounded, amazed, astounded, shocked … all that Thesaurus said flummoxed could mean, even though one did not know the origin of the word).
The spot he had picked was not at all near the old bore well spot and was exactly at the centre of the two streams that marked the edges of our plot. No diviner had indicated that spot.
I did not hear anybody else say anything.
The lemon looked very golden and very snug between his bare feet.
The diviner looked apologetic and very modest and humble. “You will get two and a half inch of water in summer”. He said.
With that amount of water one can have profitable agricultural operations!
I looked at his feet more closely to see if there were any sign that indicated a recognition of water.

There was absolutely none.
I was flummoxed (stunned, stumped, baffled, bewildered, staggered, confounded, floored, as per Thesaurus)
The diviner had perfect feet. The only remarkable thing was the positioning of his two feet at nearly 45o relative to each other indicated nearly perfect health.
He looked a very simple man with no air of sophistication.
He had thick hair and features characteristic of the local people. He had a thin moustache. Indeed he had features (see inset of Fig 2) characteristic of the “king and his retinue” in Cave 10 at Ajanta (see discussion on Fig 6 of my blog on Bhuleshwar on the Hill: Interior” posted nearly a year ago). I thought he had spectacles, but Lalitha does not remember the spectacles.
Lalitha is convinced people in harmony with nature do not require artificial aids.
What more could I say?
What did you do with the lemon, I asked him.
The diviner continued in his semi/apologetic and matter-of-fact manner that this way of finding water is something he had noticed from his childhood. He had no explanation for it.
I did not look at Thesaurus to find out how I felt.

I took him to the old bore-well. He showed another spot slightly further away. This is the best spot for this region … but you will get only 5000 litres per day in summer here whereas the new spot that he had indicated would give more than double that. His estimate of the older bore-well was close to the mark when the older bore-well was new.
The diviner had no doubts … even though he was right.

The diviner’s name is Prashant Dumene. He is an Engineer by Profession.

We planned to finish drilling the bore-well by May 1 and dedicate the bore-well if it was successful to the 100th birth anniversary of my father, which was about a week later.

Amol did not see any problem with that. We fixed a date. Prashant said he would come and make the necessary propitious arrangements for the gods after we got the necessary material (coconuts, pot, camphor, kum kum, haldi, oil, wick for the lamp, incense sticks and a matchbox).

Before that the approach to the divine divined point had to be made. There was a big rainwater ditch which had to be filled. Conractors were quickly contracted, JCP machines (land excavators) were required to dig up the soil from around to do the filling and then the leveling, as per Amol’s specifications.

Getting a JCP in summer was a serious problem. Once word gets around that you are helpless, it is made sure that you are really helpless unless you pay a price for being helpless. We did that after resisting for a few exasperating days, and then working late in the night when JCP and tractors were available completing the work around midnight.

The bore-well machine was fixed for the day before my Father’s centenary.

I finished carving “Amitaboni” in Bengali on a log of wood we had bought for the purpose more than fifteen years ago.

The day came for the drilling. Lalitha came with her Sasnkrit vedic chants. I came with Tagore’s poems and a camera. We waited and waited. After much assurance we were finally informed in the evening that the machine had broken down and needed to be repaired … in three days at most.

We hoisted the Amitaboni log with a rope on the door to mark my father’s hundredth birthday and left for home.

The next few days were very exasperatingly spent on listening to the various ways a bore-well machine cannot come or cannot be repaured.

When finally the bore-well machine came to the land, the operator had one look and turned back saying that more soil had to be filled in the ditch and more soil removed from to make diviner’s spot accessible to the machine.

This required another JCP machine that we could not get no matter how hard we tried. It was getting deeper into summer and neither manual labour nor machine was available no matter how hard we tried.

My sisters were to arrive for a couple of days on 12th-14th of May specifically to celebrate the centenary at Amitaboni. Everything was in a state of disrepair at Amitaboni.

To make matters worse, we had hired painters to paint the windows and doors. They made more of a mess of things. Lalitha and I sat and scrubbed the floor, peeled old paint off the important doors and windows in front, and got them painted to our satisfaction juat on the night before my sisters were to come.

We had not yet found a JCP and Amol was yet to contact us.

We picked up our sisters from the railway station early at six a.m. on 12th morning. They had spent more than a day in the train and they surely wanted rest.

We had abandoned hopes of finishing the drilling before they left. We were quite depressed really.

On our way home from the station with our we got a call from Amol.
He had found a JCP operator on the road near our farm house!
The JCP was available only for an hour after seven in the morning. Amol’s bore-well machine was also available. We can finish drilling on that day.

We took it be an auspicious sign. We just thought of the happy coincidence that our parents’ surviving children were to be together on (at least for us) this important occasion when we will be drilling for water based on the feelings of a diviner who used a lemon!

My poor sisters could not have recovered from their strenuous trip at all. But they were game enough, encouraging enough, and curious enough to see the outcome of the lemon diviner’s divinition.

When we reached the land, it was already quite hot (it was more than 40 C in Pune that day), the sisters looked nice wearing their hats, the machine had already come (Fig 3, left) and was positioning itself at the spot marked by a crow-bar with what seems to be a gul-mohaR flower that may have been a offering from the operators to the machine (Fig 3 right, click to enlarge).

When you start digging for water based on lemon-divining one might as well go the whole way. Prashant had specified some way to do the rituals.
We got down to our worships (Fig 4, top, click to enlarge).
A coconut was broken and the pieces offered all around. Bruno was happy and grinning like what I think is the smile of a Cheshire cat.
The drilling machine was ready, with the new leaves of the silk-cotton tree and the clear blue sky dispelling all hints of dark clouds.

We waited for the machine to start.
There was a small hiccough when it started around noon. Because of the loose soil below, the 25 tonner machine expressed its discomfort by falling out of the support and tipping a bit. The positioning was done once again. By the time they finished adjusting the machine it was past 12-30 in the afternoon.

We were conscious about the inauspicious time which had to be avoided for starting any work. We had sneaked in a look at the calendar. The inauspicious time (rahu kalam) was between 11.00 and 12.30 for that day, Wednesday, 12th May 2010. My sister, Shaila, told me it was auspicious that the machine did not start because we would have started in rahu kalam otherwise. It turned out that the rahu kalam was between 12 and 13.30.

Now can we start?
It was necessary that we finish the drilling before sunset so that we can see the amount of water we struck or did not strike. We wanted to avoid our earlier experience where the operator recovered earlier water poured in ostensibly to cool the shafts. I was very tense that they would drag the process on.

The drilling started. It made a lot of noise. A lot of dust was kicked up. The first fifty feet was to be drilled to put in a casing so that loose soil would not fall in. That was standard procedure.

Considerable amount of fine, dry, smoke of white dust wafted towards us and tended to choke us. We were covered with this dust at 40oC in the afternoon. It was not the most pleasant place to sit around. We went up to the main part of the farm house to escape the dust as far as possible.

My sisters had another important work to do. This was to put up the amitaboni plaque on the front door. This they did happily (Fig 5, click to enlarge). It was to be one the happiest moments of our lives especially after the recent joint-family sundering events.
“Bliss was it at that noon to be alive … When native instinct seemed the most to assert her rights…”

Lalitha and I went back and forth monitoring the progress of the machine. They drilled the fifty feet required for the casing, and fitted the casing.

The operators would have to have lunch. That cannot be denied! They had already cooked their food. We went out for our lunch. When we came back the machine was still; the operators were sleeping under the shade of a sole tree.

It was past three thirty in the afternoon when they resumed drilling. We were nervous, of course. The operator had nineteen shafts, each of which was sixteen feet long. The drill head was about four feet long. The maximum depth he could go to was about 308 feet. The diviner had said there would be water at 300 feet. We required going down to at least 320 feet. There was one defective shaft which could be used, Amol assured me.

Nobody knows what we get where.

We had experience of the earlier bore-well. There would be loose red soil around 180 feet. There would be hard rock thereafter. The rock would soften around 260 feet. Red rock would be found at 280 feet and copious amounts of water would be struck at 290. In the previous bore-well we could not go lower than 295 feet.

We waited. The drilling was going more or less to expectations. There was considerable amount of loose, slightly wet soil between 180 and 210 feet. The dusty clouds would start thereafter.

Since loose red soil persisted to 210 feet instead of the 180 feet in the earlier bore-well, one may expect water around 290-300 feet. We would have to dig the bore-well till 320 feet. We must use the 20th shaft, I insisted with Amol.

It took about fifteen minutes for each shaft to go in and five to ten minutes to add a shaft. Water was expected to be struck around eight-thirty to nine in the evening.

It became dark at 7.00 in the evening. We had to come down as there was no electricity to light our way down from the main house. Shaila waited mainly in the car. Lalitha and Buri (Sagorika, my younger sister) would go back and forth.

We had reached the eighteenth shaft. There was no sign of water at the start of the seventeenth shaft (~ 255 feet).

Amol started his preparations for withdrawing his machine. He had spoken to Prashant the diviner, he said. The diviner had told him that if there was loose red soil and if it was followed by hard rock till 300 feet then the drilling must be abandoned. There was no point of going further. That was the depth he could go to with the number of drill bits that he had, in any case.

I refused to accept this and insisted that drilling must go on and if necessary he must bring more shafts.

Ganesh, our help, who lived in the nearby village and had newly married was sitting and watching intently. He kept assuring me that we would strike water.

At the end of the seventeenth drill (~ 270 feet), when no water was still struck, and while the gloomy pall of dry dust pervaded the atmosphere, Ganesh must have left for home.

My sister Shaila was sitting in the car with her hands folded in prayer, looking very worried.

Buri had phoned her husband, Deb, and insisted that he stand on one feet and do appropriate penance for water. Shaila had passed on the news of probable imminent failure to Nimai, her husband. Nimai was cheering from there.

Lalitha was calm as usual. Buri still looked cheerful.

I was counting till 280 feet. That would be about half way down the eighteenth shaft.

Halfway down the eighteenth shaft dry dust still came out, although the soil that came out seemed to have softened.

I still had hopes.

A little later the fine dust stopped abruptly. One of the boys who helped in cleaning up the rock material that came out, ran up to the shaft, collected some of the material that was coming out and put it in my hand. It was muddy soil.

We had struck water. I spread the mud around my family, still not sure.

By the time we finished the eighteenth drill water was flowing out in a stream. We proclaimed victory of lemon divining.

Happiness had started flowing alongside. Two ladies flashed their V signs, Japanese style, while another preferred to give a thumb’s up sign. Buri’s husband, Deb, took some credit because he had just prayed for us, as instructed. Water was flowing (Fig 6 middle) in a sufficient “torrent” for us. The last ghostly images of that night of spraying, spurting, gushing water (Fig 6, right) lingers.

In the final analysis, it is not clear what benefit we have obtained or have given from this divined water. I remember that while the drilling was on, some chameleon and diverse lizards and birds who have made amitaboni their home seemed to be reprimanding me with their looks for all the unnatural dust and noise. I did feel guilty. After all, we had no business really to wrench water out from the earth in this manner.

On the other hand, we did manage to preserve some greenery. The amount of greenery in the picture on the left of Fig 3 is quite unusually substantial for the middle of May. May be we deserved some water as a gift for our efforts over the last ten years or so.

I somehow thought of amitaboni as Bhishma when he was dying. As is his wont, Krishna had played his role (always with a hidden good behind … perhaps) in deceiving Bhishma so that Arjuna could conquer him. As Bhishma was about to fall and die Arjuna would shoot arrows to make a bed and pillow … and when Bhishma would request for water Arjuna would shoot an arrow--- he put an arrow on the ‘gandiv’ bow, powered it with ‘varunastra’, and shot it into the ground --- into the earth to make a fountain of pure water which Bhishma would relish… .

What may not be well known is that Arjuna would shoot arrows through Bhishma’s body to make his bed and through his head to make his pillow!
One could wonder that Bhishma would have felt severe pain to get his bed and his pillow. The internet does not provide me with a description of Bhishma’s agony as he fell.

On the other hand the perception of pain is dependent on the way the mind is prepared. Bhishma had chosen the time to die and pain on that day could have been ignored by him or even felt.

The internet however provides us (see http://www.enotalone.com/article/14945.html) with numerous examples piercing iron rods or tridents through cheeks, and tongues, or hanging by hooks piercing through their backs without showing any discomfort or shedding any blood. Rarely do the participants later show any sign of such piercing. I have myself witnessed and photographed such events in various parts of India.

Maybe amitaboni also did not feel the pain as the machine bored through it. The good diviner gets his permission from the gods before divining and the striking of water for quenching the land’s thirst could have been similar to Arjuna’s piercing of the earth for the water that would quench Bhishma’ thirst-

In his book of 1920 “Science and Technology. Their common aims and methods.” F. W. Westaway, writes
“That some men still have the " gift " of " water-divining " is an established fact, but no water-diviner is able to explain his power ; he makes his discovery as though he were merely a conscious automaton. … The power is not, of course, supernatural but supernormal, and seems to be an instinct inherited from ancestors whose actions were guided by instinct and not by reason. The power is thus a survival of a faculty prevailing before the evolution of the self-conscious mind."
Westway would then go on to make an interesting reasoning:
“Although instinctive actions are consciously performed, they are performed without necessary knowledge of the relations between the means employed and the ends attained. And they are not accompanied by any form of self-consciousness, for a self-conscious creature could reason for itself, and in consequence would be liable to error, whereas animals do not seem to be thus liable.”

Voilà!
The more sophisticated you try to become in your reasoning, the more prone to error you are!
I think I will agree with that.
It happens most in singles matches in Table Tennis, or Tennis or badminton. When you are playing spontaneously and enjoying the game you are doing well. But as soon as you become self conscious and think you could win and plan your game, you tend to lose!

Self-conscious important people rarely leave a good lasting impression on spontaneous people.

Once a man becomes sophisticated by being self-conscious, he loses consciously, certain native instincts that he has inherited.
He adopts consciously the fashion of the moment. It is the attitude of a courtesan.
After all, sophistication implies some sort of a falsification if one looks at the way the word has evolved.
Sophism: a fallacious argument, esp. one used deliberately to deceive
Sophist: a paid teacher of philosophy and rhetoric in ancient Greece associated in popular thought with moral skepticism and specious reasoning.
A person who reasons with clever but fallacious arguments
Sophistry: the use of fallacious arguments especially with intention of deceiving
Sophisticate: cause to become less simple or straightforward through education or experience;
talk or reason in an increasingly complex and educated manner;
mislead or corrupt by sophistry (e.g., …sophisticate the understanding and defile the heart)

The point to be made is that as long as one protects one’s self or tries to endear one’s self with sophistication one loses one’s natural sensitivity and a spontaneity that allows one to note changes in one’s environment.

We evolve spontaneously and all our logic/science is a post-facto analysis. Natural events happen anyway at the natural time, with natural consequences. Engineered events, being engineered, are planned and rarely spontaneous even if we think of the motivation behind the events which has all the genes, karma, and dharma. Engineered events, the so-called triumphs of mankind, are always polluting. It is so, even when we are de-polluting.

So why shouldn’t we accept the sensitivities of the non-sophisticated? Why should we use the sophism of our religions (read advertisements) to ignore spontaneous truths from instincts inherited over several thousands of generations of evolution?

After Prashant Dumene had indicated the spot where he had divined the water and after I saw how quickly he had walked across various regions and he had hesitated at various spots, I had asked him on what considerations or feeling he divines water. Prashant had said that he feels very hot and heavy when he finds water. The lemon cools him down. That is why, I supposed, he wanted more lemons to be brought on that first diving day!

I had tried to argue with Prashant about the folds and subsidences in the hills and how one may expect to find water in the natural cracks along which rain-water would form a stream in the rainy season. Prashant said that one does not get water from a single stream. The water reservoir is not stagnant. Two running streams will have to meet and the bore is drilled at that point for getting the maximum amount of water. His ability is based on finding that running stream of underground water.

After the drilling was over and I became more curious about the divining of water, I came across a book on “The Divining Rod: An Experimental and Psychological Investigation 1926” William Barrett and Theodore Besterman write on a Mr. Tompkins about whose divining capacity in the 1920s one “cannot speak too highly …both as regards his finding water and the satisfactory way he has carried out the work”. They continued “If Tomkins had restricted himself to the practice of his art nothing but praise could be given to him, and he could be allowed to rest contentedly on the laurels he has well earned….Unfortunately Tomkins has fallen into that trap for dowsers, the attempt to explain what he does… his notions are absurd.”
Mr. Barrett and Mr. Besterman were obviously from the sophisticated class.
They continued the description of Mr. Tompkins. “He believes that underground water always flows in streams; that these streams if traced far enough, converge to a “head”; and that this head is the proper place for sinking a well. His own perception of the water he ascribes to the magical “electricity”… My theory was the result of many years of careful study and practice…”
B and B quote Tomkins as saying “The moment I cross a stratum of water I feel a sort of bracing sensation, which presses up my legs, back, and shoulders, and down the arms to the twig; when I get off the water course I feel the loss of this power till I cross the water again. When I get over the exact spot the (divining) twig revolves over and over, and I am powerless to keep it still.” It is perhaps something akin to this “bracing sensation” that Prakash Dumene would feel strongly. He did not require a diving rod to amplify such sensations. B. Tompkins himself had written a book, the last edition of which is “Springs of Water” in 1925.
Where do the guiding hand of our forefathers and ancestors come in?
Was all this foreseen in their living alive days and do the continue to guide us in their “living dead” days that some would like to believe persists after their death as long as we remember them, I do not have any reason to believe that this is true. At this stage of my life I could like to believe that this should be true.

The coming and going of my father from his life is somewhat strange.
My father was very happy that he was born in the year of the Halley’s comet as he anticipated that he would go with the Halley’s comet citing his most favorite (after Wodehouse) English Author, Mark Twain ("I was born with Halley’s Comet and expect to die on its return"). His last words, as he struggled down the slopes of Garhwal before his death in the Himalayas, expressed his happiness seeing a particular rare plant before. His last thoughts (probably sadly) must have been “I am dying as I thought I would” when he passed away on 4th June 1986. Halley had returned punctually that year … probably for the last time having thought to have disintegrated in the early 1990s.

We often wondered what it was in Mark Twain, or my father, that they should trumpet their connection with Halley’s Comet, so repeatedly and so triumphantly! What indeed was the “scientific” basis for their confidence? We will never know if we are thinking of a logical rationale for it.

On searching the internet I found one J. Allen Hynek who was born on May 1 1910 (same day as my father) and died on April 27 1986 (forty days before my father in the same year). Hynek was one of the pioneers on UFO research and coined the phrase “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (CE-III - a sighting of actual UFO occupants, i.e. aliens).

My father must have been the least sophisticated of these three who bear some facial resemblance (Fig 7, Twain, Aboni and Hynek). It would not make my father a saint. He could have been a worthy Shaman though, as he was always spontaneous.

My greatest emotions during these water diving days did not come because of the water in the veins of the earth of amitaboni. It came from the inherited feeling of the bonding blood in the veins of us remaining siblings.

We did not need to communicate with each other using the spoken word. We siblings rarely did. But all of us children of Amita and Aboni and Amita and Aboni bonded spontaneously on that divine day at amitaboni.

Just Pontification 3: Indian Power League

It should seem that any blogger or twitterer would have already expressed all that is expected to be said about the Indian Premier League of Cricket. It does not seem to have affected the way IPL is to run except for some cosmetic changes. Nor should we expect it to change.

This blog is not at all much about the IPL, although a few comments would seem to be mandatory. It is more about a meandering, probably logically non-sequitur-ed, sequence of thinking which could lead us to being indifferent to muck of any of the Indian Power League kind, in a positive way.

After all, most of the loveable things in life don’t depend on being powerful. So they say. And so I have found.

The Indian middle class fascination for the sport of cricket is so ideally suited to the physiognomy of the ever so expressive Indian face when it is faced with the opportunity of elocuting (elocution: the art of speaking clearly and well with correct enunciation) in a foreign language on anything that is profoundly trivial. This was particularly true for the longer version of the game when we had time to discuss the finer features, talking about the late cuts, and the glances, and bowling a maiden over, and the cover drives that whizzed along the ground all the way to the boundary, standing at silly point, and at short gully, and the fielders shimmering in white in the cordon of slips, and the drinks intervals, and the tea interval, and the lunch interval. Each of these intervals would see us bring out the corresponding food or drinks containers. Going to a test match was like going to a long-drawn Japanese kabuki theatre performance or a Bengali jatra, or a long drawn out katcheri at the Mambalam Gana Sabha, or listening to poets at a kavi sammelan.

The necessity for a shorter version of the cricket game was analyzed and recognized early by cricket administrators in England who were seeking to revive test and county cricket with something like the tempo of a football match. Peter Roebuck wrote “… From the outset it (forty overs cricket) was a success. Families so inclined could attend church, enjoy their traditional Sunday roast and then go to the cricket. Freewheeling types could sleep late on the Sabbath, go to a pub at noon and wander down to the ground, ready to cheer on their champions, by 2pm. For a few hours, usually dormant cricket grounds came to life, with songs and cheers and gasps and the other accoutrements of dramatic activity.”

The shorter version of the game aimed at being like a rock-concert, all hype and energy and fundamental and vacuous celebration.

In the Indian context, it is the genius of Zee TV’s and Essel Group’s Subhas Chandra that resulted in starting and financing the Indian Champions League of cricket. Subhas Chandra recognized the remarkable appeal the game had for the Indian middle class.

The ICL of Subhas Chandra was truly a private enterprise aimed at a new upwardly mobile IT class raring to let go of their cubicled energy for an expensive all frills night out, with the examples of the exuberance of the football fans all over the world. ICL was the first big effort in which real private money was invested in twenty-twenty cricket and which set up the general format for the game, including cheer leaders.

Add to this the Indian cricket fan and success could not be denied,

Needless to say, it is Pawar’s genius (read Lalit Modi’s genius?) to recognize the ICL potential and to use all their bullying skills to make it their own.

All is fair in love and war. What more love than the love for power? Ask Aurangazeb.

The death of ICL and the rise of IPL is a classic example of how political clout is so important in licensing a business by framing privileged rules in India. It is there in all aspects of achievements in all spheres of Indian life. We always attribute it to our chalta hai attitudes. We have no reason to be shocked or to protest; so scared are we and so reminded are we of losing our non-independent livelihood. We only await our turn in the next life.

The IPL in India is like all power leagues in India. It is dominated by the traditions of a caste system, which now democratically allows all castes to use the hierarchy of the caste system that is measured in terms of the size of their vote banks.

Pawar used (or was made to use) his political clout as an important partner of a definitely minority Congress government to make the erstwhile government-nominated BCCI (Board of Control for Cricket in India) an irrefutably private body. Quite cynically, the BCCI had important representative from all political parties so as not to be accountable to the public. As Chairman of BCCI Pawar got the finance minister to give tax exemptions; he manipulated fickle minded ICC (International Cricket Control) members by using Indian cricket’s financial clout; he then manipulated the rules to fix the ICL, who were denied permission for players, denied use of stadiums, and denied television coverage. Lalith Modi’s expertise in Cable distribution business and Pawar’s son-in-law’s Sony contacts saw to it that the IPL coverage promised more than ICL in revenues. ICL was systematically and maliciously choked out.

All said and done, it is perhaps true that there are no more men with bones who care to see the Pawar game for what it is ... a ruthless game for Power with a huge booty to boot.

On the other hand, as Lalit Modi’s father seemed to have said on TV something like ‘what is wrong with making a little money?’. There was a good opportunity in Rajasthan Royals as very few could invest on the teams and someone in the family invested on inside information. We have been using inside information in our business for years.

It is futile to add to the already existing literature on IPL. There is enough spin on the subject to frustrate all truth hunting.

The IPL has changed the way the average television viewer looks at his favorite programs. There are some geriatrics like us who are not really dependent on TV even on IPL nights; if only because there is so much else to love life for with the simplest and cheapest things in life.

Do we care? Yes we do. We care because we think there lurks a real danger of the exclusive and intelligent minority of being overwhelmed and marginalized irreversibly because of trivia. This is the danger of the all pervasive television media, who make idiots out of all of us.

WHAT DO SIMPLE FOLKS DO?

Its difficult for some one brought up, say,
 on a Buddhist background of Bengalis, or
 brought up by happy-go-lucky (that’s what I thought ‘gay’ meant) Roman Catholic Missionaries with their catechism and Moral Science classes, or
 brought up on the heady pre-independence days of noble motivating speeches, or
 on radio classical music programs of those days where the harmonium was banned, or
 even on PGWodehouse’s Psmith

to

look at the present Indian Television advertisement programs that are spiced up by gossip channels in the garb of “breaking news”.

EVERYBODY KNOWS THAT
SO WHAT?

Its not that one really wants to watch TV when one has so many other time-occupying things to do with one’s skills no matter how untalented one is; except that you hope that perhaps one day they will show you “Love in the Afternoon” with Gary Cooper and Audrey Hepburn …
Not because Audrey Hepburn’s charm made you fall in love with love

But because of John McGiver (on the left in Fig 1 from a scene in Breakfast at Tiffanys), one of the more harmlessly disgruntled men on screen, who played the cuckold-ed Monsieur X in the movie so well that the rest of the charms in the movie became believable because of him.

McGiver (in Breakfast at Tiffanys, Gazebo, Manchurian Candidate, etc) was the small man who made people believe in dreams so as to avoid being like him.

McGiver, loyally married and father of ten to show for it, died of a heart failure at the young age of 61.

Tendulkar would still be playing cricket at that age!? So would have Ganguly? if he did not look that culpably honest?

McGiver usually represented the totally average, totally honest man, a role most difficult to play with conviction as an actor and more so in real life…

Or, as he did in the “sounds of silence” episode of the television series “The Twilight Zone” where as Roswell G. Flemington, he is “…two hundred and twenty pounds of gristle, lung tissue and sound decibels … a noisy man, one of a breed who substitutes volume for substance, sound for significance, and shouting to cover up the readily apparent phenomenon that he is nothing more than an overweight and aging perennial Sea Scout whose noise-making is in inverse ratio to his competence and to his character.”

How well we know these men who run our public life including the Indian Power Leagues!

THE CACOPHANY AND THE YELP OF TV

So while switching channels to avoid seeing what you might be forced to see, there comes a time when you cannot avoid seeing/hearing the ever-deniable, undeniably juicy, “details” of the misdoings of everyone one you never expected to do any good in any case.

There are these English medium channels which could have been considered to be intelligent had one not understood English. They have, in any case, so much engineered cacophony that the language of their yelps and screeches is really not important. They sound the same no matter what the topic of the discussion is. Some people who have been brought up on gentle and polite old-world household atmospheres, get into this John McGiver like expressions (Fig 2) when faced with such noise.

We tend to be bullied into nincompoopery by these channels --- especially if we are young enough to pay attention to them and be thereby softened for the advertisements.

Each of these channels has three or four of their favourite experts of seemingly different political shades of the same orthodox political base of making apolitical money, whichever way. These channels then smugly conclude that they are the custodians of free speech and offer intelligence to the disinterested on aspects that would enhance their TRP ratings in whatever way that they can. They especially abhor taking a moral stand unless it offers them an opportunity to make money.

For increasing their TRP, what is better than the Indian Premier League and their Shenanigans (things that are deceitful, underhanded, or otherwise questionable – Thesaurus)?

TRP is the root of all evil
( see “Money is the root of all evil”, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVCwBtFHVLo

If you want no income tax mister, Take it easy & relax mister, When they offer work be strong & say, Take it away, take it away, take it away
I got the one I love, I got the moon & stars above, I got my youth & my health, What do I want with wealth?)

Who wants to be a zillionaire … I do … and I do … for that’s all I want to do…

Kyprios sang

I got a bank in the Caymans
Never stay with the laymen
Pay the gods off on Sunday, Amen

We can all make money, or so one thinks. You only have to dance the way they want you to, by exposing yourself the way you have to …

Kyprios sang

O.K. man, first you make the music, then you get the money, then you get the power OK...

TEMPT ME WITH A MILLION: CORRUPT ME!

It is about resisting making money that should be important to us good old (emphasis on old and not on good) Bengali Buddhists who wouldn’t kill a snake or a mosquito. We would not even pluck a ripe mango just because we are tempted, … although one has to reach a ripe old age for that (?).

Why Buddhists? Why not? They seem to have been the first perpetrators of honesty that was so necessary as a survival philosophy. They thought they are strong enough to survive presents without hoarding for a future. It was not only Gautam, the last Buddha, but the many other earlier Buddhas of Tibet who all renounced the world at twenty eight and became enlightened under the Bodhi tree or whatever…

Why one should be enlightened, or why one should admire those who preach after their enlightenment, is not at all clear. It probably helps to spend time and sell time-pass items like tea and ale and tharra.

Animals don’t seem to seek enlightenment even instinctively. I have not seen many examples of animals gathered around and listening intently to another central figure, except perhaps once in an English country side with a bunch of seated Jersey cows listening to a central standing cow who did not have much to say actually since she was chewing fodder and looking as wise as Margaret Thatcher or Sarojini Naidu; much like any other politician ruminating out of turn from the wrong end.

ILLUSIONS OF UPPER CLASS

There are, however, images we would like to have for ourselves. Much of our undoings are due to our efforts to keep up with the Jones’s, especially those of the mundane kind who go by their Main Street (Sinclair Lewis, 1920) standards.

Sometimes we harmlessly imagine we are living a standard that we dream of. There is this 1956 movie called High Society with some of the best looking blue-eyed actors of that time, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Grace Kelly. This was the last movie Grace Kelly acted in before she took up the Role of Princess Rainier of Monaco, which she must have done with perfection.

I saw the movie four times in three days…not for the blue eyes… but because of Louis Armstrong who had a role that was not at all relevant for the story but was relevant for Cole Porter’s music. There was this song “Now you has jazz” sung by Bing Crosby and Satchmore (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2RR9jCh8KM) with lyrics that had you jiving even by reading it. This song would “Wish to show you now, Precisely how, Jazz music is made”:-

Take some skins, Jazz begins,
Take a bass, Steady pace,
Take a box, One that rocks,
Take a blue horn New Orleans-born.
Take a stick With a lick,
Take a bone, Dixie-grown,
Take a spot, Cool and hot,
Now you has jazz jazz jazz, jazz, jazz.

No amount of mula will get you heart throb of the excitement of jazzing about like this in real space and time (at least at that time and that age when I was all of eighteen!)

The other actress in this film is Celeste Holm, who famously said,
"We live by encouragement and die without it - slowly, sadly and angrily.”

She featured as Liy in one of the songs from that movie “Who wants to be a millionaire?” with Frank Sinatra as Mike with lyrics that kept us who would not be rich rather satisfied
Who has an itch, To be filthy rich?
Who wants the bother of a country estate?
Who wants to wallow in champagne?
And have uranium to spare?
Who wants to tire of caviar?
Who wants to ride behind a liv'ried chauffeur?
And sleep through Wagner at the Met?

To which Mike and Liz would both sing
I don’t … and I don’t… 'Cause all I want is you.

That, loving and sharing, was the cheapest thing to do. Celeste Holm looked far less impressive in that film than she was in real life.

Celeste Holm’s first husband of one year, Ralph Nelson, produced a son Ted Nelson, who introduced hypertext and hyperlinks into the computer language without which www may have been perhaps as dead as a mechanical calculating machine?

Holm wouldn’t have had a Nelson if she had not played at 26 the naughty Ado Annie in the first Rodgers and Hammerstein’s play, Oklahoma!

The difference an exclamation mark makes! According to the publicists of the movie the master stroke in making the play successful was on adding the ! after Oklahoma. It seems they even wanted the exclamation mark on the Oklahoma state flag!

Would we have had Ted Nelson and his hypertexts if the exclamation mark was not there?

The more relevant question may be ‘Would Ted Nelson have been born without love?’ and did profits and divorce shape his hypertext?

The Platters would sing later
What good is a song if the words just don't belong?
And a dream must be a dream for two
No good alone, to each his own
For me there's you.

There is no doubt that the cricketers of IPL play hard and straight even if they may be reluctant at times to follow all instructions from people who make the profits.

They must love the game even if they, at times, may love the glamour they gain from it.

When you are waiting for the whistle to blow I am sure, how you won the game, but the way you played the game.