Incest

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I see that there are now many new readers of this blog, mostly from India. As a mere statistic, the number of page-views from India has now overtaken those from the United States for the first time in 5 years:

India:               18213

United States: 17997

out of nearly 50,000 page- views.

And the number of published Posts has gone up to 1089.

A few readers felt that wading through all of them is impossible and some hints are to be given to the previous blogs that I consider more interesting...which I have been doing willy-nilly by citing them where relevant.

Today I wish to re-quote a quote I quoted from...sorry for so many 'quotes'...an earlier blog with some additional details. The quote is from a book gifted by Supratim with a stern injunction which now reads: "May you never retire from Blogging!":

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"If your two parents hadn't bonded just when they did--possibly to the second, possibly to the nanosecond--you wouldn't be here. And if their parents hadn't bonded in a precisely timely manner, you wouldn't be here either. And if their parents hadn't done likewise, and their parents before them, and so on, obviously and indefinitely, you wouldn't be here.

Push backwards through time and these ancestral debts begin to add up. Go back just eight generations to about the time that Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born (they share the same date and year of birth), and already there are over 250 people on whose timely couplings your existence depends. Continue further, to the time of Shakespeare and the Mayflower pilgrims, and you have no fewer than 16,384 ancestors earnestly exchanging genetic material in a way that would, eventually and miraculously, result in you.

At 20 generations ago, the number of people procreating on your behalf has risen to 1,048,576. Five generations before that, and there are no fewer than 33,554,432 men and women on whose devoted couplings your existence depends. By thirty generations ago, your total number of forebears,--remember these aren't cousins and aunts and other incidental relatives, but only parents and parents of parents in a line ineluctably to you--is over one billion (1,073,741,824 to be precise). If you go back sixty-four generations, to the time of Romans, the number of people on whose cooperative efforts your eventual existence depends has risen to approximately 1,000,000,000,000,000,000, which is several thousand times the total number of people who have ever lived.

Clearly something has gone wrong with our math here. The answer, it may interest you to learn, is that you are not pure. You couldn't be here without a little incest--actually quite a lot of incest--albeit at a genetically discreet remove. With so many millions of ancestors in your background, there will have been many occasions when a relative from your mother's side of the family procreated with some distant side of your father's ledger. In fact, if you are in a partnership now with someone from your own race and country, the chances are excellent that you are at some level related. Indeed, if you look around you on a bus or in a park or cafe or any crowded place, most of the people you see are very probably relatives. When someone boasts to you that he is descended from William the Conqueror or the Mayflower Pilgrims, you should answer at once: "Me too!".

In the most literal and fundamental sense we are all family."

[from Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything", Anchor Canada, 2004]

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When I married my wife who hailed from a totally different sect (not to speak of sub-sect) I felt relieved that ours is not a consanguineous marriage with a close relative which people threatened would lead to unhealthy progeny. But after our marriage (and its consummation) I learned that my wife and I were related before our marriage, after all, though not very closely but closely enough to keep track.

Let me relate how. But I would do so in Indian English rather than any of our Indian languages which make relations too specific for my comfort...like co-brother and co-son-in-law. By the way here is a quote that most of you must have read from Anurag Mathur's book:

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"Cousin sister and cousin brother, mused Sunil. I've really been away a long time. He remembered the wedding and the vast crowds of what were apparently close relatives. He recalled reading somewhere that all cultures developed a variety of names to distinguish the shadings of any element of which there was an abundance in the environment. So the Eskimos apparently had half a dozen names for snow and Indians similarly had names for a nearly endless number of specific relationships. The name for a father's elder brother was different from that for his younger brother and so were the names for the mother's brothers. It probably developed from the joint family system where everybody lived together, thought Sunil. When a kid wanted someone, he couldn't yell for his uncle. The house was probably crawling with uncles. He had to specify which uncle."

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Coming back to my wife, Bless Her Soul.........

My maternal uncle has a daughter who is of course my cousin. This lady married a boy, who becomes my cousin-in-law. This boy has a brother who, of course, is also my cousin-in-law. He married outside our sect a lady who is, well, my sister-in-law. This lady has a father...naturally...who is my father-in-law, no! This gent has a brother, who is also my father-in-law, sort of. This grand old man (Retd Executive Engineer) has a daughter, who becomes my sister-in-law. This redoubtable lady has a daughter who is, of course, my daughter-in-law. Her name happens to be Dr Rukmini and I fell in love with her at first sight and married her...

...and came to know I married my daughter-in-law, forsooth!

So, my son of a gun can't claim he is, well, very 'pure'.

I thought at least my sweet granddaughter, Ishani, is pure.

And a few days back I learned the following: Ishani's mom has a mom and she has a mom and she hails from the same Village, Tummagunata, and has a title, nee, Kuppachi, which is also the title, nee, of my own mom. Apparently my mom's father and Ishani's grandmom's father are closely related.

I stopped my investigations there fearing that the Binomial Theorem may prove that my son married his mother-in-law...Inverse Transform of me marrying my daughter-in-law.

It would then require the computing power of a supercomputer to work out uniquely how Ishani is related to me...

If you had read Bethal Kathas, this is precisely the sort of last question that Vikarm failed to answer and so was released from his bond.

Bill Bryson stopped at Romans and didn't go back to Noah and his Ark and seven pairs of every species fearing perhaps that he had to take a stand on Darwin's Theory of Evolution that may irritate the Pope.

But Hinduism is far more in tune with Evolution...look at the Dashavatars...starting from aquatic to amphibian-reptiles to mammalians to man-lions, to pigmies to upright men and gods...

So, Lord Krishna was not averse to marry the daughter of the bear-king Jambavan who helped him in his earlier avatar as Lord Raam...so it now becomes again too complicated to compute:

 

http://www.hindu-blog.com/2010/08/jambavati-story-how-jambavati-became.html

Wiki tells me that that their bear-hug resulted in ten sons (only):

"They were - Samba, Sumitra, Purujit, Satyajit, Sahasrajit, Vijaya, Chitraketu, Vasuman, Dravida and Kratu. Lord Krishna was specifically very affectionate to the sons of Jambavati, especially towards the eldest one, Samba."

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