Symbiosis

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Our blogpost of a couple of days back: Ms Buffalo & Dr Crow:

http://gpsastry.blogspot.com/2011/02/ms-buffalo-dr-crow.html


reminded me of the lovely biological phenomenon: Symbiosis:

................meaning: "a cooperative relationship": online Webster

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See: http://www.google.co.in/imgres?imgurl

The crow pecked and pecked at every tick

That Ms. Buffalo’s tongue could not lick;

Ticks that her long tail could not flick

And ticks that her strong legs could not kick.

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Well, Symbiosis is nowadays not confined to Biology but spans all other -ologies except perhaps Topology, I don't know.

There is even a Business School of that name...

The entire Biosphere we live in on the thin rind of our minuscule planet is one incestuous mess; no doubt about it.

I often read with a smile the Evangelistic Nonlinear Dynamics Slogan:

"When a butterfly (ahem!) decides to flap his tiny wings here in Hyderabad, he may provoke the onset of a thunderstorm in an Alpine Tundra"

....Do I recall a Bengali girl named Tundra Banerjee? I wouldn't be surprised; if Ishani is fine why not Tundra?...anything can happen in Bengal....all the seasons like Basanta, Barsha, Sarat, Hemanta and Sisir are quite common first names...but I haven't heard the mid-Summer Ritu: Grishma...have you?...certainly not as common as the others...maybe because he/she could turn out to be unbearably HOT!

.......Oh, yes, now, there IS a Grishma Sen as well as Grishma Reddy...I just Googled...We had a classmate named Tanya way back in the 1950s in Vizagh, daughter of a CPI MLA (no CPM then); and every Teacher corrected her spelling as 'Tanaya'...a Bolshevik Blasphemy!..........

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So, let us examine the other '...logical' samples of Symbiosis:

I think the Author and his Literary Agent cohabit in a symbiotic relationship.... like between a race horse and his jockey....one can't flourish without the other....

Thus spake the Autocrat:

"----Apropos of horses. Do you know how important good jockeying is to authors? Judicious management; letting the public see your animal just enough, and not too much: holding him up when the market is too full of him; letting him out at just the right buying intervals; always gently feeling his mouth; never slacking and never jerking the rein;--this is what I mean by jockeying.

----When an author has a number of books out, a cunning hand will keep them all spinning; as Signor Blitz does his dinner-plates; fetching each one up as he begins to 'wabble', by an advertisement, a puff, or a quotation.

----Whenever the extracts from a living author begin to multiply fast in the papers,without obvious reason, there is a new book or a new edition coming. The extracts are ground-bait..."

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In Vikram Seth's Poem: Frog and the Nightingale, the unscrupulous Frog usurps the role of the Sole Manager of the gullible Songster Nightingale and drives her to death by demanding ever MORE & MORE pop-songs day in and day out: a case of over-management (somewhat like that in the Goose who laid Golden Eggs)

Nothing so cruel and tragic ever happens in our blogs which are all sweetness and light: our Ms Buffalo happily gets rid of her Depression albeit at the expense of her lifetime's savings while our smart Psychotherapist Dr Crow loses his bed and breakfast for a few days.

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I often fancy that the Prolific Research Guide and her Team of Graduate Students bear a similar symbiotic relationship:

The Guide is like our Ms Buffalo: she constantly is victim to so many 'ticky' ideas that "her tongue can't lick and her long tail can't flick and her strong legs can't kick".

So, she is hopelessly dependent on so many young and clever birds who, with vaulting ambitions to become Dr Crows, keep pecking at and swallowing their Guide's itchy ticks; sometimes alone and at other times in collaboration.

The end result, more often than not, is a happy one like in our poem; although an over-ambitious or over-burdened Guide may end up like Vikram Seth's Nightingale, particularly if resort is taken to unbecoming short-cuts.

And once in a while some picky bird, like me, after pecking at a few ticks here and there he doesn't relish much, migrates to other more inviting Buffaloes...not a very pleasant thing...till he lands on a Big Buffalo who has so many sumptuous ticks crawling all over her, but who keeps licking, flicking and kicking constantly...

...only adroit Crows can outsmart their Big Buffaloes tick by tick and avert mishaps.

Have a Great Symbiosis!

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