Parliaments & Assemblies

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Six months ago, fish were swimming into our blog.

I didn't see much of live fish...except in aquaria. Dead fish I saw aplenty in the KGP fish market and fried ones on the dining table of our Faculty Hostel. Marlins, sharks, and barracudae in novels by Hemingway and Alistair MacLean.

Not so the owls that have been flying in recently.

During the six-month monsoon and post-monsoon period, my son and I used to take late-night walks, around 11 PM, on the 1 km long road to Gate Number 5. One side of the road was jungle, full of trees flush with rain-soaked leaves glistening in the diffuse light of about 40 equi-spaced street lamps.

The lamps (mercury and then sodium) were hoist on posts with overhanging metal tubes on poles about 25 feet high. Their shades cast shadows on the tubes just enough to hide an owl perched tight on each post. If you don't notice closely, the owl sitting on it would look like a metal fitting.

The road was deserted at that hour. As we walked chatting nonchalantly we could feel in our bones that our owl was staring at us unblinkingly. As we approached the lamp post we would halt as if we were taking rest. And the owl would glare at us. Then we suddenly turn our heads and stare at her. In a split second, she would fly back into the depths of trees behind.

Shy to the core.

We noticed a few things:

1. Her flight looked labored with lots of flapping of her wings, but absolutely silent. A flamboyant flapping like it on any other winged bird like a crow would rattle the wind all around. I read the other day that the wing-tips of owls are serrated, as if their edges were like the borders of lace curtains. That muffles the sound completely. For a night-hunter silence is of the essence.

2. The owl would first take off in the forward direction towards us for a couple of feet before taking a graceful right-about-turn mid-flight; just a lovely bit of aerobatics we never tired of watching.

3. No lamp post ever had more than one owl. Very unsocial birds, unlike crows, parrots, starlings and such 'birds of a feather that flock together'.

So it was amusing to learn that a group of owls is known as a Parliament of Owls.

Well, why not? Let us invent some more:

An Assembly of Pigeons
A Bar of Crows
A Bench of Woodpeckers
A Senate of Parrots
A Cabinet of Doves
A Party of Peacocks
An Opposition of Geese
An Electorate of Sparrows
A Bureaucracy of Falcons
A White House of Nighting-ales
A Kremlin of Eagles
A Pentagon of Hawks
etc etc etc....

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Pratik told me that her school-going daughter reads our crazy blog off and on and remarked that the Piece: Bitter Surprises is a Blogful of Gul.

Like a Mouthful of Lies?

That reminded me of the poem my son had in his school-book (parodied):

"I blew a gul into the air
It fell to earth I know not where
For so swiftly it blew, the sight
Could not follow it in its flight

I breath'd a Blog into the air
it fell to earth, I know not where
For who has sight so keen and strong
That it can follow the flight of a Blog?

Not long afterward in KGP
I found stripped the gul of GP
And the Blog from beginning to end
Ripped by the daughter of a friend"

..............H W Shortfellow

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An year and half ago when I just started blogging, I posted this hindsightful verse:

Tuesday, March 3, 2009                     

Blogger's Illusion

"His next blog,
The whole world
Awaiteth
With bated breath"

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I would only change Illusion to Delusion after all these months.

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