Deep Throated Growl
Years back, when I was still in school and summers meant holidays, I remember spending a late summer afternoon with my granddad. Both of us had just woken up from our afternoon slumber and were eagerly awaiting grandma’s loving cups of tea to arrive.
It was a typical Indian summer (we were in India anyway, so what else do you expect), temperatures soared well above 45 degrees Celsius. The merciful evening sea breeze was setting in but only added to the languor of the late afternoon.
I was idling my way thru that day’s paper or could have been a Readers Digest from my granddads stash of Readers Digests, I really don’t remember. The fact was, none of us were making any conversation and granddad didn’t really like that. He wanted noise and meaningless conversations that revolved around him and his vast and extensive knowledge about everything and anything... or so he boasted, from time to time.
‘Do you know how music originated?’ he challenged me and thus breaking the silence and taking me by a bit of a surprise. My brain hadn’t responded yet and before I could even produce a murmur for an answer, he rushed forth with the answer. “Echoes! He said “Man learnt music from the echoes”.
“Echoes!” I wondered, but only for a moment, and not to eager to ponder upon his answer for to long and try to make any sense of it, I went back to reading whatever I was reading.
This morning as a sat on the great modern convenience called the potty or a western style closet (as they call here in India), and cleared my bowel, I produced a deep throated growl, a ‘catharses’ noise which I’m sure even the most sophisticated of us produce during the that private and intimate moment called ‘shitting’.
The entire room ‘kinda’ reverberated to that growl and resulted in a nice little harmonic. This harmonic ‘surprisingly’ thru some light upon my granddad’s ‘enigmatic’ answer, which I had dismissed as one of his attempts to sound clever, but still lingered in the back of my head like a tiny little tumor.
Music originated when a caveman, in his desperation to find a cool and secluded place to shit, entered a cave with the right reverberations to harmonies with that caveman’s deep throated growl.
Granddad was right after all, just got a little mixed up between the meaning of echo and reverberation.
It was a typical Indian summer (we were in India anyway, so what else do you expect), temperatures soared well above 45 degrees Celsius. The merciful evening sea breeze was setting in but only added to the languor of the late afternoon.
I was idling my way thru that day’s paper or could have been a Readers Digest from my granddads stash of Readers Digests, I really don’t remember. The fact was, none of us were making any conversation and granddad didn’t really like that. He wanted noise and meaningless conversations that revolved around him and his vast and extensive knowledge about everything and anything... or so he boasted, from time to time.
‘Do you know how music originated?’ he challenged me and thus breaking the silence and taking me by a bit of a surprise. My brain hadn’t responded yet and before I could even produce a murmur for an answer, he rushed forth with the answer. “Echoes! He said “Man learnt music from the echoes”.
“Echoes!” I wondered, but only for a moment, and not to eager to ponder upon his answer for to long and try to make any sense of it, I went back to reading whatever I was reading.
This morning as a sat on the great modern convenience called the potty or a western style closet (as they call here in India), and cleared my bowel, I produced a deep throated growl, a ‘catharses’ noise which I’m sure even the most sophisticated of us produce during the that private and intimate moment called ‘shitting’.
The entire room ‘kinda’ reverberated to that growl and resulted in a nice little harmonic. This harmonic ‘surprisingly’ thru some light upon my granddad’s ‘enigmatic’ answer, which I had dismissed as one of his attempts to sound clever, but still lingered in the back of my head like a tiny little tumor.
Music originated when a caveman, in his desperation to find a cool and secluded place to shit, entered a cave with the right reverberations to harmonies with that caveman’s deep throated growl.
Granddad was right after all, just got a little mixed up between the meaning of echo and reverberation.
posted by Arun Mukkath at 3:46 PM
3 Comments:
LOL.... Hilarious! Is this a real-life experience? Something mysterious about loos. The greatest mysteries seem to be solved there... (Think 'Eureka!')
Anyway, congrats on your discovery... Man has been much enlightened by it, I'm sure! :D
ha ha ha ha ha!!!! brought back memories of grand dad....am sure our grand dad must have be really proud of you..HE LIVES ON NOW...through this blog..:)
The ‘potty’ has been the ‘seat’ of many a great ideas and inventions man! It’s just not been well documented... I’m ‘way’ certain that Darwin too would have got his ideas on the Origin of Species while sitting on a make shift ‘potty’ in the Galapagos Island and observing the finches there.
The ‘Eureka’ thing, the one abt Archimedes and him finding a way of measuring volume happened while he was in the a tub, but still I close proximity of the ‘potty’ I suppose.
Post a Comment
<< Home