I hope that you enjoy reading another post of the Friday Loose Bloggers’ Consortium when eleven of us post on the same topic chosen by one of us. Today’s topic has been chosen by Grannymar.
Please do visit Ashok, Conrad, Grannymar, Magpie11, Maria, Gaelikaa, Helen, Judy, Anu and Ginger to see ten other views on the same topic. Some of these bloggers may be preoccupied with vacations, examinations, family problems and/or romance, so be a little indulgent in case they do not post or post late.
That photograph published widely in India in 2003, caused a nation to ask itself some very disturbing questions. It is of Qutbuddin Ansari, a tailor of Ahmedabad in Gujarath who was pleading for his life. Read about it in an article in the BBC News here.
That photograph also buried from India’s conscience another story. There were no photographers around to take a shot of a crying human being with tears in her eyes pleading for mercy.
In some parts of India, we are not allowed to express grief in public. So we have professional mourners like in the famous film Rudali.
According to a custom, in certain areas of Rajasthan, women are hired as professional mourners after the death of a male relative. These women are referred to as a ‘rudaali’ (roo-dah-lee), literally translated as female weepers. They in turn publicly express the grief of family members who are not permitted to display emotion due to social status. The rudaalis make a scene crying out loud. The impact of their mourning also compels other people at the funeral to cry.
Tears come easily to me. Unfortunately, they never do at the right time nor right place. They come in torrents when I am alone or with people I can trust to understand and share my grief with. That is conditioning at its best!
Tears also come to me in torrents when I am joyful and laughing. I used to wonder if something was wrong with me till I read this little paragraph. “Darwin thought that monkeys, like humans, laughed. In this, he disagreed with Aristotle, who claimed that humans were the only creatures who laughed. Darwin’s purpose was to show that the expressive facial muscles had evolved from animals and that therefore man was not a separate, divinely created species. Duchenne kept a pet monkey and reported to Darwin that he’d often seen it smile, but Darwin relied on his own empirical experiments to argue that they laughed as well. “If a young chimpanzee be tickled—the armpits are particularly sensitive to tickling, as in the case of our children—a more decided chuckling or laughing sound is uttered,” Darwin wrote, “Young Orangs, when tickled, likewise grin and make a chuckling sound and. . . their eyes grow brighter.”
More recently, people are spending time and money on this very enigmatic practice about which you can read here.
I bet that the paragraph on Darwin will generate tears in Mayo’s eyes. Does it in yours as well?