Do minat

My travel from bangalore to hyderabad has become jinxed of late. On one occasion, I had to survive sharing the aisle of an a/c volvo with a bus cleaner having homosexual tendencies. But on last friday, I got the adrenaline rush of my life in last two years racing against time to catch my train to hyderabad. I have become an addict to the high I get through doing things/reaching places just in time. Be it chasing movie tickets on friday nights or racing on my seven year old splendid splendor to sneak in through the DRDO gate (to my home) that closes at 9pm.

But as I said earlier, the mother of all such highs was felt on last friday. I had planned to start from office at 1:15pm to catch the kachiguda express at Yeshwantpur departing at 4:10pm. Thanks to the thousands of e-mails I had to send to 'close' a few things, I started from office at 2pm. I thought may be I over estimated the time and felt comfortable enough to get onto a city bus to shivaji nagar instead of a direct autorickshaw to Ypur. The bus reached shivaji nagar terminus at around 2:55pm. Last time (on a non-friday!) it took me 20 mins from shivaji nagar to reach Ypur. Even with 2x deration, I would still reach by 3:45pm (assuming 10mins for catching the bus). I managed to catch a bus at 3:10pm and somehow got a seat to sit. Its already 3:30pm and the bus is stuck in the sea of vehicles. I felt stranded and decided to take an auto rickshaw to mitigate any risk of missing the train.

He seemed to be an energetic young man, but his auto was like an old patient; coughing, wheezing and ready to die. I was about 5km away from Ypur and we had 20 mins. The count went from minutes to seconds. It was only at 4:02pm when I saw Ypur address boards. There was a sweaty mix of tension & excitement in the air. The auto-wallah took me through hazaar nooks and gallis and out of nowhere, Ypur railway station appeared in front of me. I had just two minutes to go and I had to let go of the 40 rupees return change he owed me. "Thank you thambi, chillara nuvve pettuko" (Thanks bro, keep the change). With two heavy lugs, a porter's helping hand was definitely relieving. When I finally believed that I made it, my greedy self re-appeared and started haggling for 10 rupees. Blimey, I had just 100 rs notes on me. He was ready to walk away with one of those notes (and I didn't want to repeat my lines "Thanks thambi...."), when for the first time I felt happy giving away 10 bucks to a eunuch (and getting back 9 ten rupee notes!). 4:10pm it was and I heard the signal and felt the chugging of the train.

Phew, my mind was blanked for a minute. My coopey was entirely a non-telugu set. I wondered if I boarded the right train. After having a peek at the next coopey I saw an old man reading "Swati- saparivaara patrika" and thats when I confirmed that boy its the right train. Rest of the journey went on fine, reading 'Afghan' (hollywoodised version of apna "DON"), playing with a cute 2 yr old kid and chatting with an 'IT' engineer from hyderabad. Even this time fate had its way and no F[21-25] in my coopey. Wonder how long thats gonna continue! Anyways that was that.

Why we laugh?

"So this suggests strongly it's hard-wired in the brain and this raises an interesting question. Why did it evolve in the brain, OK, how did it evolve through natural selection? When you look at all jokes and humour across societies, the common denominator of all jokes and humour despite all the diversity is that you take a person along a garden path of expectation and at the very end you suddenly introduce au unexpected twist that entails a complete re-interpretation of all the previous facts. That's called a punch-line of the joke. Now obviously that is not sufficient for laughter because then every great scientific discovery or every "paradigm shift" would be funny, and my scientific colleagues wouldn't find it amusing if I said their discoveries were funny.

OK, the key ingredient here is, it's not merely sufficient that you introduce a re-interpretation but the re-interpretation, the new model you have come up with should be inconsequential, it should be of trivial consequence. It sounds a bit abstract so let me illustrate with a concrete example. Here is a portly gentleman walking along, he is trying to reach his destination, but before he does that he slips on a banana peel and falls. And then he breaks his head and blood spills out and obviously you are not going to laugh. You are going to rush to the telephone and call the ambulance. But imagine instead of that, he walks along, slips on the banana peel, falls, wipes off the goo from his face, looks around him everywhere, and and then gets up, then you start laughing. The reason is I claim is because now you know it's inconsequential, you say, oh it's no big deal, there's no real danger here. So what I'm arguing is, laughter is nature's false alarm. Why is this useful from an evolutionary standpoint? So what you are doing with this rhythmic stocatto sound of laughter is informing your kin who share your genes, don't waste your precious resources rushing to this person's aid, it's a false alarm everything is OK. OK, so it's nature's OK signal."

Picked from Reith Lectures 2003 on Emerging Mind by V S Ramachandran, world renowned brain scientist

They are available (both text/audio clips):
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith2003/lectures.shtml