Of justice and flashy tails

I was reading some of my old posts today; there is more to the posts then what comes across..my posts remind me of where I’ve been; intellectually, physically and emotionally. They are a like a photograph album, only with more dimensions.

People who either have a lot going on in their lives or nothing at all, it seems practical that they write posts. I confess I have no such excuse. But I’m sad there ain’t an ideological justification for the hiatus either. If I said I had better things to do then I’m only telling a conscious lie, one that I’ll be saying to justify the premise that there was a hiatus because there deserved to be one, and that it deserved to be replaced by a “superior” activity of CAT conquest. The real formula of the story is much simpler. I ‘actually’ neglected my blog and I feel like a fool of the first order, now. I shuddered as I was reminded of the saying, “"A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.” The words hung heavy in the air as if in suspended animation. My blog deserved better. It deserves poetic-divine justice in fact..so here I am; writing again. This is a very emotional moment, may I add.

I was writing a mock CAT yesterday. While doing a Data Interpretation set, I looked at the guy sitting next to me; beneath a fringe of moussed hair and few millimeters of the skull was a maelstrom of stress, of tension, of competition actually- the only substantive difference between us and the species we regard as food or pets. Competition??

This fact is seductive not only because it tells us something about ourselves but also because the answer could give us insights into things that’d help lash age old misconceptions- you thought intelligence was the differentiator, didn’t you!

I don’t say animals don’t compete, but we are evolved because we compete at higher, sometimes scarier levels. When a lioness catches a deer, she’s likely to snag one of the dumb ones. The lioness has a meal, but the level of competition among the deer has been raised for the next day. Result? The dumber lions will have harder time finding a meal, and the lions have to either compete at a higher level now or just drop out of the leonine gene pool. This way, the competition ratchets up with every single sun-rise. Like my dad says, “As is true of all growth, a seedling bursts forth into a sapling and thence into a giant colossus, offering, as it were, succour and nourishment to its teeming millions..”, competition has also evolved from the food-chain days to relative grading in acads to percentiles in CAT, and believe me its tentacles are only fanning out faster each day..

Why does a girl pitch for a brainy boy? Brainy boys as in boys with brilliant grades and IIM call getter profiles? It’s not a quirk of her youth nor is it a rush in her adrenalin, it’s a good reproductive strategy! So when a peahen spies a male with a flashy tail, she can be sure of passing down good genes; their offspring will have survival advantage! Survival in competition=good brains=good genes; flashy tails that’ll be!

The game is simple. Guys strut their stuff by crooning, being witty, speaking glibly, while girls use these as clues to sort out the best one to take home to Mom and Dad. The girls here have to be smarter, there are at a higher evolutionary pressure; they have to invest smartly to pass on good genes to the offspring. So competition returns to where it started off from; genetic code!