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Back to blogging after a while...
Childhood is a funny thing. We remember many myths that touched us willy-nilly.
One of the abiding myths that was celebrated in songs and poems in our AP is that parrots mate happily with starlings...of all things. I don't know nor can guess where they got this idea. This cross-genetic mating is eulogized as the ideal of all relationships. The pair is called:
Chilaka-Gorinka
Just look at this grainy video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzN80lnAh4s
It is a duet in which the heroine calls herself a parrot and calls her hero a starling. Can anything be dumber even for cinema-poets of the black and white gen?
When I was living in my Shakespeare Uncle's home for my college year I wrote a post card to my granpa and grannie at Nellore wishing them a long retired life like the companionship of Chilaka-Gorinka. And I was roundly abused for this simile which was supposed to be referred to only for sexual partners...and retired folks were supposed to be done with sex.
And everyone said that I ought to have written instead, comparing them with:
Gouri-Shankar
I was not yet into sex and its limitations but I thought it silly to banish sex from the poor Shiv-Parvati couple even though they are gods and had issues both in and out of sex.
Another abiding myth was that a cobra was female and its mate was another snake without a hood (but with fury) called Jerri Goddu. And if we happen to kill a cobress when she trespasses into our kitchen, we have to cremate her with full honors...otherwise her male mate would visit us stealthily the next night and bite all of us to death.
Even lions were not spared this cross-mating.
All lions were supposed to be male and their consorts were given the generic name, Ibbandi Gondu...funny that all these exotic names were ugly to pronounce and hear, thus raising our hairs in fear.
Talking of lions there is this other myth that it is invincible and is particularly fond of killing elephants. So much was their urge to jump up and kill elephants that we were told, on authority of the class rooms, that when a lioness is having difficulty with her childbirth, she would go looking for a grazing elephant and stand in the reverse gear so that her lion-infant, who was supposed to be looking out, would see the elephant and jump out of his mom's womb and run to the elephant...
So silly.
This myth was abidingly celebrated in the Bhagavata Puranam of Potana when he compares Lord Krishna jumping out of Arjun's arrow-ridden chariot and proceeding to kill Bhishma as a lion jumping up to kill an elephant.
And that a lion is the king of the jungle...incidentally 'Lion King' was a fiction movie ;)
Anyone who read George Orwell's classic essay or Jim Corbett's 'Jungle Lore' would trash this myth...it is not at all easy for any other jungle-creature by strength or stealth to kill a full-grown elephant. Corbett cites this frightening anecdote where it took all of 8 or more hours for a tiger-tigress couple to kill a shooing elephant:
http://gpsastry.blogspot.in/2010/11/to-kill-shooing-elephant.html
There is this joke about the lion king:
Once the lion of the jungle wanted to reassure himself that his reign of the jungle was unchallenged. And he went to the mouse and asked her:
"Who is the king of this jungle?"
The mouse was frightened out of her wits and answered, shivering:
"Why, your majesty of course...everyone knows it"
The lion then went over to the fox and got the same reply...and then to the deer and the cow and the buffalo. And all of them were unanimous.
Finally our lion found a full-grown elephant grazing in the bamboo field. And asked her:
"Who is the king of this jungle?"
The elephant was too busy to answer.
So the lion repeated his question again and a third time.
The elephant got annoyed and took the lion's slender waist by her trunk and turned it round and round and round three times in the air and threw the lion into the dense bamboo grove.
After three minutes the lion returned, all bruised, and scolded the elephant:
"If you don't know the answer, you can say so...where is the need to get angry?"
...of course this story is a political satire...
...Posted by Ishani
**************************************************************************************************************
Back to blogging after a while...
Childhood is a funny thing. We remember many myths that touched us willy-nilly.
One of the abiding myths that was celebrated in songs and poems in our AP is that parrots mate happily with starlings...of all things. I don't know nor can guess where they got this idea. This cross-genetic mating is eulogized as the ideal of all relationships. The pair is called:
Chilaka-Gorinka
Just look at this grainy video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzN80lnAh4s
It is a duet in which the heroine calls herself a parrot and calls her hero a starling. Can anything be dumber even for cinema-poets of the black and white gen?
When I was living in my Shakespeare Uncle's home for my college year I wrote a post card to my granpa and grannie at Nellore wishing them a long retired life like the companionship of Chilaka-Gorinka. And I was roundly abused for this simile which was supposed to be referred to only for sexual partners...and retired folks were supposed to be done with sex.
And everyone said that I ought to have written instead, comparing them with:
Gouri-Shankar
I was not yet into sex and its limitations but I thought it silly to banish sex from the poor Shiv-Parvati couple even though they are gods and had issues both in and out of sex.
Another abiding myth was that a cobra was female and its mate was another snake without a hood (but with fury) called Jerri Goddu. And if we happen to kill a cobress when she trespasses into our kitchen, we have to cremate her with full honors...otherwise her male mate would visit us stealthily the next night and bite all of us to death.
Even lions were not spared this cross-mating.
All lions were supposed to be male and their consorts were given the generic name, Ibbandi Gondu...funny that all these exotic names were ugly to pronounce and hear, thus raising our hairs in fear.
Talking of lions there is this other myth that it is invincible and is particularly fond of killing elephants. So much was their urge to jump up and kill elephants that we were told, on authority of the class rooms, that when a lioness is having difficulty with her childbirth, she would go looking for a grazing elephant and stand in the reverse gear so that her lion-infant, who was supposed to be looking out, would see the elephant and jump out of his mom's womb and run to the elephant...
So silly.
This myth was abidingly celebrated in the Bhagavata Puranam of Potana when he compares Lord Krishna jumping out of Arjun's arrow-ridden chariot and proceeding to kill Bhishma as a lion jumping up to kill an elephant.
And that a lion is the king of the jungle...incidentally 'Lion King' was a fiction movie ;)
Anyone who read George Orwell's classic essay or Jim Corbett's 'Jungle Lore' would trash this myth...it is not at all easy for any other jungle-creature by strength or stealth to kill a full-grown elephant. Corbett cites this frightening anecdote where it took all of 8 or more hours for a tiger-tigress couple to kill a shooing elephant:
http://gpsastry.blogspot.in/2010/11/to-kill-shooing-elephant.html
There is this joke about the lion king:
Once the lion of the jungle wanted to reassure himself that his reign of the jungle was unchallenged. And he went to the mouse and asked her:
"Who is the king of this jungle?"
The mouse was frightened out of her wits and answered, shivering:
"Why, your majesty of course...everyone knows it"
The lion then went over to the fox and got the same reply...and then to the deer and the cow and the buffalo. And all of them were unanimous.
Finally our lion found a full-grown elephant grazing in the bamboo field. And asked her:
"Who is the king of this jungle?"
The elephant was too busy to answer.
So the lion repeated his question again and a third time.
The elephant got annoyed and took the lion's slender waist by her trunk and turned it round and round and round three times in the air and threw the lion into the dense bamboo grove.
After three minutes the lion returned, all bruised, and scolded the elephant:
"If you don't know the answer, you can say so...where is the need to get angry?"
...of course this story is a political satire...
...Posted by Ishani
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