Welcome to the Friday Loose Bloggers Consortium where Akanksha, Anu, Ashok, Conrad, Delirious, gaelikaa, Grannymar, Magpie11, Padmum and I write on the same topic. Please do visit the linked blogs to get ten different flavours of the same topic. Today’s topic has been chosen by Delirious.
No, I do not intend to trace my ancestry to an ape. I shall leave that to the experts.
What a topic! Delirious with all her experience in China can write a tome on it, but I have to let my Muse really go into overdrive for this.
If, as it is believed in the East, our Ancestors are watching over us, mine would be spinning like tops after reading the first paragraph. Poor things, they must be wondering where they went wrong producing my kind of a descendant.
From all accounts that I have been able to source from various aunts, uncles and my parents over the many years, my ancestors, bar one, were all very colourful men. Sadly, there are not any stories about the women ancestors as, presumably, they played insignificant roles in the lives of those grand men of those days. My generation of siblings and cousins however will leave a lot of stories for our descendants about some stalwart women.
I would like to talk about one man who was not colourful in the traditional way that the others were. My father’s paternal grand father was a very religious person and was highly respected for his spiritual attainments. My father remembers him as being a majestic figure of over six feet height and a regal bearing. What my father remembers most about him was the way he would go for his morning bath in the river Kaveri and perform the morning prayers on the river bank before returning home. On his way back, all residents in the street would await his passing by and bow to him in respect and recognition of his status as a spiritual person. At home, he would spend most of him time in prayer, meditation and study of our Vedas and other religious texts. My father and his brothers maintained that the current relatively prosperous state of our family is due to the austerities that he undertook for the benefit of all beings.
While he was so absorbed, his brothers were more secular in their pursuits of happiness. Some of them were noted for their philandering, and some for short tempers and feudal ways. When I look at my family as it did when all my father’s siblings were alive and as it exists now, I can see some traits of the latter in many and some traits from the former in a few.
Some genes travel in one direction and some in other directions, I suppose.
If you were to ask me what genes I inherited, I should admit that I appear to have inherited both! Now, whether that is possible or not is for the Natural Selection Experts to decide, and I do not intend sweating over that question. It suffices that my ancestors were colourful one way or the other, as I used to be told that I was too, in my prime. I certainly qualify as a holy person, with many cigarette cinder burnt holes in many of my clothes, particularly singlets, my most favoured upper apparel at home.
Comments are closed.