Manners and mannerisms

I am not sure why Jane Austen never wrote a book titled manners and mannerisms. After all, she wrote pride & prejudice and sense & sensibility. In any case, I'm glad she didn't, because in this copyright observing, plagiarism fearing world, I can happily write a blogpost titled "manners and mannerisms."

It will forever be beyond me why a certain republican congressman felt so compelled to call president Obama a liar. This is not because I adore president Obama. I am as yet undecided about him. And this is mostly because I am new to understanding how large nations work, be it India, where I come from, and where it is equally outrageous but not necessarily unlikely to call the prime minister a liar on live TV or be it the US, where, I have been raise to believe, that it is pretty unlikely for anyone to behave like such a brute.

At this point I see nothing that can be called civilized. I do not see how a set of people so divided, so unwilling to talk, so doggedly blind to reason can hope to govern a nation or can believe that they have earned the right to tell other nations what to do. Unless of course, the entire human population, through mutual consensus decide to behave like another species. Apparently, that if anything, can get an easy "bipartisan" support.

I know for a fact, due to the nature of my work, that loud monkeys will climb up the social hierarchy pretty quickly and establish their dominance. Sitting on that clumsily obtained , lofty perch, they will proceed for the rest of their lives, to earn the respect of many, many monkeys. They of course, do not have a well developed brain. But we do. Of course, we have inherited from them the need to climb ladders of hierarchy. And because of the strange way we think and perceive, we have very complex ladders of hierarchy. Indeed, life, at times feels as though it's an escher painting, where every attempt to go upwards only makes us one step closer to going downwards. And perhaps that is true. In trying to move away from barbarian tendencies, we have deftly achieved an uncanny simian similarity.