IM CIVILIZED. ARE YOU? What do we mean by Civilized? That we live in houses? That we store grain in stainless steel containers?

That we know how to heat food by providing a stimulus so that the food molecules rub against each other at the microscopic levels & get hot aka knowing how to use a microwave oven? That we can read, write & be very cultured? That we have gone to the moon? That we can sing, dance or perhaps pray? If so then thank God, Im not civilized! And if you dont think I am civilized, then it makes sense, because to me, you may not be civilized. Hmm.. What then is this civilized? Whats civilization? Is it being civil with one another? Is it being non- military? - As in civilian?

Civilization began with that fine invention of mankind known as farming or agriculture. As we all know, in the beginning, man was a hunter & gatherer. He gathered whatever food he could find in the forests around him, hunted only what he needed & subsisted on it. He used all four limbs to carry himself from place to place. It was only when the ice melted away & the global climate changed that he stood erect & began to hunt for food, primarily because he couldnt se through the tall & thick Savannah grass. It also helped him spot his predators first before they could make a meal of him. Man learnt to stand up & this wondrous event quite literally made him stand apart from the rest. Any right thinking anthropological enthusiast (The father of Anthropology Aristotle called Anthropologists ..the gossiper who talks about himself so think twice before you look down on someone & call them gossips. Apparently we have a mighty father of all

gossips!) will tell you that three epoch making events made man the king of the animal world: The upright /erect posture The ensuing approximation of the thumb Cultivation/ farming/ agriculture Sorry fire doesnt make the cut here because in spite of all the hoo haa that surrounds this erfire-y topic, fire only aided his cooking style & spoilt his primitive & tough digestive system. The P.T.Gs (Primitive tribal Groups) of the Pacific islands, lose the ends of their bodies toes, fingers very often due to this fire by the way. So much for the all smoke and no fire ismsSo, while important, fire doesnt cut epoch making. All the lovely weather gave man some wonderful ideas & he began to cultivate. With this then, began all civilization as we know it. Food is one of the basic necessities of man. He has consistently evolved himself in his pursuit for a steady source of food. Because in those days of savagery with saber toothed tigers & mammoths running around, water & the ozone layer were the least of his worries. So were nuclear bombs & satellites. Man, the nomadic animal became stationary. He settled down. He now needed to move around in hunt of food no longer. The food was there for him to take as when he needed. Once he learnt the art of producing food at will, all he needed was a stable source of water, which was in un-limited abundance in those happy days of yore. Thus, you will see that all ancient civilizations, were ALWAYS found around a water source. This made life easy for him & man gave up the spear et al & began to breed safely & without fear. Soon his group became a community, then a hamlet, a village, a town & finally a city. Man, an animal by all means was never meant to lead a sedentary life and his body, built for action - to run, climb trees & hunt for food began to modify & adjust itself to this new lifestyle. Thus, his forelimbs which apropos were used for walking, now became free to be used for other things. The hand was born! What a life changing event! Man, destructive as usual, found a fantastic tool to fight with. No longer needing four limbs, now he learnt to use two limbs to walk. This is also why, to date man is prone to & is plagued with back aches. He was never built to walk on two limbs. This is when the epoch making thumb was born. Thums Up!! (Post liberalization, I, a non-cola drinker, was rooting for our home grown Thums Up & drank it down like nobodys business, till they sold themselves to Coca Cola!!) The humble thumb is one finger you cannot do without. I could write pages about its use one simple exercise will suffice though try growing long, long nails. If all your other fingers wont let you down, your thumb will. You will see that its always the thumb nail that gets chipped, broken off etc. If you are a leftie, then the left thumb it is. If you are a rightie, then the right thumb. So unless you are a supermodel or the Queen of England, then you will find yourself opening doors, lifts, holding a pen etc etc & losing bits of the thumb nail. In fact, to my humble mind, it is the thumb that has contributed the most to culture (one of the most dangerous words known to an Anthropologist, it strikes terror in the hearts of any exam going student nobody has been able to define culture to date, though Kroeber came close to being considered an expert after spending ONLY a lifetime

on the subject! Me? Ill just take my chances & go with the relatively safe territory of related to high thinking, fine thoughts & in confluence with nature) as we commonly know it, because, to me, nothing in culture is independent of the written word and all writing came about from the humble thumb apposition. The feather/quill giving way to the nib, to graphite to ball pens & so on All this, however, made man lazy, gave him more time on his hands & rewarded him with a paunch, diabetes, heart attacks & other epidemics & that mother of all that an idle mind is the devils workshop brings about war! Since he was now safe from the other animals, he began to hunt & kill his own kind. We still do. A wise man, Jawaharlal, one of the stalwarts of Indian history, its first Prime Minister had enquired if the tribal ways - their ways were not better than ours? He wanted that the tribals continue to be left alone & allowed to develop along their genius. I must say that his intent was correct. It is the tribals of the jungles who have clung to the trees & the animals and made their peace with them. They have found a mutually beneficial & acceptable way of life to live at peace with nature. They have kept their ways of old with them and lived pretty much as their ancestors have point in case being the Jarawas of the Andamans; though their entire kind has dwindled to a very countable 150 or so today, even as we relentlessly plough our civilised way into their ancestral lands which have remained untouched, virgin & precious thanks to them, insisting on building a grand trunk road that will run right through their lush lands, which, I guarantee will lose all lushness post this majestic grand trunk road that you and I insist on building in order to save transport time, even as we throw food at them pretty much as some tasteless un-cultured asses do at the monkeys and hippos in our zoos, making us wonder who really is on the wrong side of the fence. Here, I would like to speak about the Tsunami that struck India off the Tamil Nadu coast in 2004. Many died & the damages were huge. But does anyone know that not one man, woman or child living in the primitive Andamans where the Tsunami wouldve been the most devastating was hurt? All the science we pore over taught us to kill ourselves, while their un-civilised ways & a healthy respect for nature saved every one of their lives. This then is civilized? To go from living active, healthy clean lives to sedentary epidemic -riddled, ruthless, life that will ultimately entail the destruction of each & every one of us? Now, here I exaggerate not. Ever since that wonderful man Albert, better known as Einstein, learnt how to split the atom, in-between marrying every so often & being a terrible parent, its been touch & go for our kind. I have no doubt that a nuclear explosion will wipe out most of the worlds population, though I cannot say when. But that it will, I am most certain. We used to live in relative harmony in the jungles where an egalitarian society was a must. We ate of the fresh produce of the forests & shared with one another ever gone hunting in a group? Try it. The question of not sharing doesnt arise. We took what we could eat & not more the idea never occurred to us. Mother nature was allowed to replenish. We lived in structures that did not require us to molest the earth or its produce. We lived well within our means. Some still do, though their kind is rapidly diminishing. And yet we INSIST on dragging them out of their forests to civilize them. We enter their homes, go to their jungles & push nonsensical papers that some bespectacled idiot miles

away has typed disinterestedly, forbidding them henceforth to cut their trees or take the produce of their own land because they are now a part of some government that owns their land people they have never seen nor want to see, people who have never seen an inch of the land they know & have nurtured so well?? Im not trying to romanticize the nomadic forest life, which will certainly be tough by all means, but I do know that something is wrong with the world today & that you & I do not have the answers. Whos civilized then? You? Me? Us? them? Depends dont you think? On what you mean by civilization? Do you think these people call us civilized? Which side of the proverbial fence are we on? are you on? Are you looking in or are you getting looked at?! And should I choose to agree with these morally honest, simple living souls & call myself cultured, may I call you un-cultured?