Trivial Pursuits

If you ever happen to be passing by the inner lanes of Nizamuddin just short of dawn, you might hear a desperate, heart-rending chirping: it is the sound of chicken realizing their karmic destiny and beginning their journey towards becoming tikka.

It was with not a little nostalgia that I responded to similar saliva-inducing twittering last week, emanating from inside the forbidding walls of the Smithsonian Institution. I still had a quarter of the bottle of Napoleon VSOP with which the night had begun left, but food was not to be found for love, for money, or by begging. So I walked inside, hoping not unreasonably that some fellow desi might be preparing breakfast.. What I saw shocked me sober, which takes some doing: the sound was not of pre-tikka chicken, but of dozens of parrots in the throes of having thermometers stuck up their buttocks.

Now why on earth would anyone be doing such a thing?

I wanted to know, of course, but no one would tell me until I threatened to dial 911. Knowing full well that zoophilia is frowned on in Washington, D.C., the Smithsonian’s scientists finally talked. A great epidemic, I was told, was sweeping our planet, an answer to which had eluded the best scientific minds of Jesustan for years. At the end of last year, the last known example of the Po’o-uli, a bird discovered three decades ago, died in captivity. Thirteen other species of a type of bird known as the Hawaiian honeycreeper had also become instinct. Apparently, a form of malaria transmitted by mosquitoes which had made their way to Hawaii from East Asia was responsible for the decimation of these birds.

Jesustan’s scientists, who like their fellow countrymen seem to have trouble comprehending that the appropriate place for beast, fowl and wives is inside a tandoor, wept at this great calamity. Eric VanderWerf, of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, described the loss of the Po’o-uli as a tragedy similar to the destruction of “the Mona Lisa or the Sistine Chapel”. George Fenwick, President of American Bird Conservancy, went one further, claiming the extinction of the Po’o-uli was “a global tragedy which is being ignored”. So they coughed up a few million dollars, and brought in the world’s leading authority on avian malaria, the Fabulous Dr. F., Ph.D, to find a solution.

Dr. F was a little reticent about discussing her work with me, despite my obvious charms and the offer of what was left of the Napoleon VSOP. I do not blame her, for the task she had been handed involved a certain, well, indelicate procedure. As all Hindustanis know, the principal symptom of malaria is a fever. For the Fabulous Dr. F to test the efficacy of her remedies, she had to be able to know whether the fever of her avian patients had diminished after her minstrations. Now, it is no use telling a bird, even if it is born in Jesustan and might therefore be expected to be English-medium, to open its mouth and say ‘aaaa…’.

And so there was just one thing to do, although Dr. F. did assure me she had done her best to choose birds which actually liked having thermometers rammed up their buttocks.

To us Hindustanis, of course, this smacks of excess. Sod birds: we’re for the most part unconcerned even about children dying because of Japanese encephalitis or tuberculosis or chronic malnutrition. Apart from that depressing rag Frontline, I haven’t come anyone whinging about what is in fact euthanasia, albeit involuntary. But the Jesustani, you must understand, isn’t moved by compassion either. You’re no more likely to catch Eric VanderWerf complaining about Japanese encephalitis than most desis, nor about Beloved Leader’s unfortunate enthusiasm for bombing half the planet.

Truth is, Jesustani science has become a trivial pursuit. Try raising funding for finding a cheap, one-shot cure for tuberculosis. Or real malaria, the kind people get in the third world. On the other hand, think of some suitably bizarre project, ideally involving rocks on a distant planet, and the loot will come rolling in.

An excessive assessment?

In 2003, scientists at Paignton Zoo attempted to test what is called the infinite monkey theorem, which states that there is a miniscule probability that the text of Hamlet could be assembled at random. The logical is as follows: ignoring punctuation, spacing, and capitalisation, and assuming a uniform distribution of letters, a monkey has one chance in 26 of correctly typing the first letter of Hamlet. It has one chance in 676 of typing the first two letters, and one chance in 19,928,148,895,209,409,152,340,197,376, of typing the first twenty. To test the math, the good scientists left a keyboard in the enclosure of six Sulawesi Crested Macaques for a month. As might have been predicted with no great scientific training, the beasts produced five pages consisting of little other than the letter ‘s’, in addition to which they destroyed the keyboard with a stone, and proceeded to urinate and defecate upon it.

The monkeys, I’m sure you’ll agree, had a point. Most Jesustani science, sadly, doesn’t.