All for a chick, or Charlie and the Prelate Factory!

The Church should wake up, smell the coffee, have a long shower to get over the hangover and make Charlie Darwin a saint. Noone else has ever composed a more beautiful hymn to God, fondly known as the Big Boy.

You see, the Church thinks God bought an assembly kit from K-mart, spent six days making up the Earth, the Heavens and All things bright and beautiful, had a nice nap on the seventh and has since been keeping score of men's sins till the Big Audit comes along. In other words, the Big Boy is some kind of mechanically talented accountant.

Along came Charlie, and proposed the theory of evolution, which essentially says nature, like any other large dynamic system, will constantly go towards its equilibrium, without Big Brother watching it. God didn't have to be a control freak. He just had to make conditions to form the big soup somewhere. From the big soup came bacteria, thence fish, thence birds, worms and Tamil Iyers, thence mammals, thence monkeys, thence man.

It is tempting to say that Charlie just proposed gibberish. After all, no one has really seen a monkey suddenly quote the Vedas, or at least no one officially admits to it. More to the point, Charlie's dynamic system, nature, is hopelessly huge, and it's impossible to write down the steady-state equations for it, leave alone the initial conditions and the transients. In other words, you can only cook up explanations based on Charlie's theories, not realistically predict the result of a Bihar bye-election, leave alone the future of life. Essentially, one might argue, Charlie just did a Fermat, wrote 2 + 2 = The Collected Works of Ayn Rand on his toilet paper, and conked off without giving the proof.

So have all Republicans, Southern Democrats, Evangelicals, Creationists, Baptists, Anabaptists, Unitarians, Protestants, Catholics and other sorts of Jihadi Christians argued. So, too, did your humble correspondent wax non-judgemental till last Saturday when his eyes were opened by The March of the Penguins, a must-see documentary if ever there was one.

The basic story is that Emperor penguins, like South Indian men, defy the elements, dare death, and conjure miracles of patience and persevarance just to get a chick. It goes as follows: Sometime before the beginning of winter, Emperor penguins collect in huge groups walk 50 miles inland in the Antarctic winter to the very spot where they were born. There, they pair up following decorous, well-defined courting rituals. Then they do it, and the she-penguin lays an egg. (Note: Penguins seem to have read too much Tolstoy. They go in for a 20-second quickie, considering sex only a means to procreation, one assumes.)

And here's where the fun begins. The penguin's egg in the sub-freezing Antarctic winter is like a 5-paise coin in Trivandrum. You drops it, you loses it before you can say Babykutti Kunjumon. So the egg has to be balanced on the penguin's feet and kept warm under their fur till the chick hatches, some two months later. Now, mama's already laid an egg and can't starve no more, so she hobbles back to the ocean to hunt for grub, after handing over (OK, legging over) the egg to papa. Here's the killer : the fathers just stand there, all huddled together to keep out the cold, for two months with the eggs under their feathers, on their feet. No grub, no evening visits to Ethiraj college to check out the babes, no booze, no cigarette, nothing. They actually take turns standing on the circumference of the huddle, where it's coldest. Winterstorms rage around them, but they don't make sentimental speeches about dad's unrequited love like King Lear. No, sir: they just huddle a little closer, and swear in genteel undertones.

The chicks hatch by and by, but after a brief dekko from papa, Junior goes right back under the apron. The mothers return after two months, and after a tearful reunion and a censored kiss, papa trudges to the ocean, while mama takes over the tending of munnoo. Finally, after the chicks are grown up enough to demand cable TV and sleepover rights, mama leaves them to their devices and trudges back to sea.

The chicks don't go the ocean. The ocean comes to the chicks. It's summer, you see, and all the ice has melted. The chicks then enjoy fishing, swimming and other junior league sports, and prepare for grown-up life, consisting as always of much ado over chicks, very little sex, wives that leave the hearth untended and hubby unfed, brats that need constant sheltering, and air-conditioning that doesn't work.

Here's where Charlie comes in. Noone who see TMotPcan fail to see the crushing, stunning elegance of Evolutionism and the loserliness of Creationism. To say that all the beauty, greatness, nobility, grace, courage, drama of this tale came because Big Boy chaired an Emperor Penguin Orientation meeting on Day Five is ridiculous. More than that, it's profane and completely blasphemous. Consider, then, the Evoultionary explanation of this is, i.e., that penguins evolved this elaborate rigmarole in response to gradual climactic change as the Antarctic broke away from the equatorial mainland. It's beautiful, spellbinding, uplifting, divine.

It may be that Evolution is the wrong theory. At least, it may be that it's unnecessary, since it doesn't reduce one's hair loss any more than Creation does. But it sure gives more elegant explanations for everything, and that, mes amis, is enough reason to believe.

Note:
This unduly long post was written as my personal birdie to S~, who thought I cannot be serious for more than 5 minutes at a stretch. S~, you blister on bin Laden's bottom, louse on Lalu Prasad's head, pimple on Pol Pot's face, coveter of other people's underwear, you BITS-ian! I've proved my worth again. I've torn your j~. I'm serious, dude. I'm the Crown Prince, Director-General, Program Manager of seriousness. I'm more serious than Terri Schiavo ever was. I'm so serious the liberals want to kill me to prove their kindness and the conservatives want to keep me alive to show their commitment to moral values. Paul Wolfowitz has more humour in him than me. I won't know a joke if it comes and bite me on my arse. Whenever anyone says joke, I think it's a mallu saying chalk. You'll die laughing, you vile comedian, and I'll survive forever with a face like a funeral. After all, the bible does say that the geek shall inherit the earth. Ha, ha, ha!

On this extremely grown-up note, I leave y'all to your petty crimes till the next one. Stay out of jail. Peace.