Authors: Jose Thekkumthala
2
KERALA’S ORIGIN PER AMBALLORE UNIVERSITY
Homo sapiens sprang into existence some 250,000 years ago, riding an evolutionary cycle that resumed after being interrupted when an asteroid hit the earth sixty-seven million years ago and exterminated dinosaurs. It was fifty thousand years ago when Homo sapiens made their grand entrance to Central Asia. The land called Kerala and its inhabitants, Malayalees, appeared in the evolutionary hierarchy after this landmark; that is, less than fifty thousand years ago.
Malayalees descended from a breed of Homo sapiens called Homo malayalees, and this happened toward the latter part of the evolution—in fact in the very final phase, qualifying them to become the most developed humans at birth. This intriguing discovery took its origin not only from Amballore University’s Evolutionary Science Department but also from a reservoir of Indian mythology that links Mahavishnu’s incarnation intricately to the Malayalees’ birth.
The general public may be unaware of this, but Amballore University’s anthropology faculty was staffed by a bevy of famous misfits. The department was chaired by an intellectual who erred on the critical theory of the keralasaur, a native of very ancient Kerala and a far-removed maternal uncle of the dinosaur. Contrary to the widely held theory that the keralasaur is the ancestor of the dinosaur, the chair propounded a theory in which the animal was postulated to be contemporary of the dinosaur. The demotion of the keralasaur from its esteemed ancestral status was not looked upon favorably. This critical error made him qualified to chair the famous department. His task as a chair was to rewrite his controversial theory.
Yet another faculty member proposed that when dinosaurs were obliterated, keralasaurs who lived in ancient Kerala survived the cataclysmic collision with the asteroid. This faction lived in isolation, and refused to set foot outside Kerala. When Homo
malayalees arrived in Kerala, they were baffled to see that a piece of ancient history was surviving intact on its soil! The ensuing battle when Homo malayalees threw barrages of the coconuts at the native enemy stamped out the keralasaur once and for all. If the outcome of the battle were the other way around, Homo malayalees would have been history today and it would have been inhabited by keralasaurs.
This controversial and widely refuted theory made him eligible to get a faculty position at Amballore University.
As a matter of fact, each and every faculty member of the anthropology faculty was on a long-term appointment to complete the task of rewriting his or her doctoral thesis.
***
Amballore’s anthropologists delved deep into Kerala’s history and civilization. Though controversial, their theories on the keralasaur and Homo malayalees captured widespread attention. As if these controversies were not enough to catapult the famous temple of knowledge into stardom, another professor came up with an eye-popping theory on the Kerala civilization, which awarded the malayalees the incarnation status of Mahavishnu. This unbelievable theory involves, of all things one could think of, Charles Darwin, the father of the theory of evolution!
This renowned professor’s theory became controversial and was widely challenged by authorities in Indian mythology and adherents of the incarnation theory. Profound thinkers of evolutionary science were not amused either. The theory soon ceased being a valid scientific hypothesis and rapidly deteriorated to folklore in Amballore. In spite of this decline, the heyday of the theory was still commemorated fondly by a set of ardent followers, and hence it merits knowing what the professor came up with.
When Charles Darwin, the father of the theory of evolution, died, the resident God in heaven refused to let him in. God, in his infinite wisdom, had originally planned that Darwin become a creationist, but he disappointed the Creator by becoming an evolutionist. This infuriated God. He transformed Darwin to a frog as soon as he
arrived at the gates of heaven after his eventful life on earth. He was asked to return to earth to do penance for his sins by becoming a creationist and repudiating the theory of evolution. He was also challenged to make a giant leap into mankind from his measly froggy existence.
Just so that the famous evolutionist was not overly disgraced and degraded to the depths of the oceans, God named him a frog prince as a consolation prize. He was given a promise that he would change into a prince if he ever was to be kissed by a beautiful princess. With that promise, he was sent to Amballore University to take up a faculty position there.
The frog-prince Charles reluctantly croaked and arrived at the university’s anthropology department. The chair-frog of the department croaked from the other side of the pond and promised to give him all the resources that he could muster to make his stay as pleasant as possible.
Charles’s task was to convert himself to a creationist. The famous scientist succeeded partially in that task; he became a creationist-evolutionist! He could not become a total creationist; old habits die hard. He added a flavor of evolutionism to creationism and propounded a theory—still kept in the Museum of Anthropology at Amballore University—that involved the origin of the Kerala civilization.
According to this theory of creationism-evolutionism, the product of the second coming of Darwin, in the beginning there was nothing but void. Then God created the Western Ghats, the famous mountain range to the east of Kerala. This was the very first mountain range in the world. Not even the mighty Himalayans were there let alone the Alps, the Atlas Mountains, and the Rockies.
The Western Ghats became lonely in no time. God then stepped in and presented the mountain with a playmate. Her name was the Arabian Sea. The Western Ghats acted as the sentinel to the Arabian Sea, which spanned the entire world. God complimented himself for creating this pair of sublime
beauty. He had created them in his own image.
The heavens filled with the joy that accompanied the union of mountain and sea. But this happiness was destined to be short lived. Soon, a shadow of gloom fell on the earth. The pair was lonely without a baby. They wanted a baby desperately. That wish was granted in the course of time. God incarnated as Parasuraman. He recovered land from the sea by throwing an ax into it. The water receded, and land emerged, rising from the seafloor. This is how Kerala was born as a daughter to the Western Ghats and the Arabian Sea.
A number of events that accompanied the origin of Kerala were chronicled in frog-Charles’s book. These were, in fact, eerily reminiscent of the rapid-fire transformations that the primordial soup of matter and energy had undergone just after the famous big bang that marked the beginning of time—just ask your friendly neighborhood physicist for details. However, the transformations on the heels of the big bang were unique in the sense that it took unimaginably few split seconds for them to transpire, whereas the biological transformations referred to by Darwin took millions and millions of years to complete.
Mahavishnu’s famous incarnation cycle that originally involved ten stages was modified by frog prince-Charles to have just six cycles. Fish begot Turtle, who begot Boar, who begot Sphinx, who begot Parasuraman, who begot Malayalee. The native of Kerala was the culmination point of the epic transformations. Malayalee was none other than the sixth incarnation of Mahavishnu.
Parasuraman threw his famous ax into the Arabian Sea, and Kerala was born. Thereafter, Malayalee was born to take the helm from Parasuraman. Malayalee was the direct descendant of Parasuraman, who was a divine entity. This enabled every Keralite to claim a piece of divine ancestry.
Malayalee was born to take possession of a beautiful land
and to lay the foundation stone to the Kerala civilization.
Even though this was a spiced-up version of the old theory of evolution, God was happy that some recognition was given to him. He was pleased enough to grant a penthouse in heaven to the famous scientist when he was done with his sabbatical at Amballore University.
As it happened, the frog-prince Charles Darwin was kissed by a heavenly beauty upon his second arrival at heaven’s footsteps and was instantly transformed to a human prince. The pair lived in heaven happily ever after.
***
It was in the year 1920 that Eli applied for faculty member position of the anthropology department at the Amballore University. She was interviewed by all the faculty members. What stood out in Eli’s mind of the interview day was her meeting a female faculty member of the faculty.
She was greeted by the only female professor of the department. The faculty chair and the rest of the faculty positions were all held by males. At the moment she reached the professor’s office, the professor was preparing coffee for the rest of the staff. She mentioned to Eli that it was hard to get a faculty position in a male-dominated department. She had to deploy her dumb-blonde tactics and intelligent-brunette tactics (she dyed her hair blond or brunette per the needs of the day) to survive in the highly competitive academic environment.
It was no surprise to Eli to learn that professor’s field of research was the extinction of womankind—not mankind, just womankind. Her work was to try to explain why women were becoming less and less important in the current world. Her theory, published in the Amballore
Anthropology Journal
, stated that womankind was soon going to be an extinct species. Naturally, Eli was worried. An opinion coming from a sensationally famous anthropologist worried her.
The professor excused herself, served coffee to all the male staff members, and came back. She was exhausted. She and Eli sipped
coffee and engaged in an interesting conversation on the Amballore dynasty and its genealogy going all the way back to Kerala’s origin.
In the middle of the conversation, there was a knock at the door. The professor opened the door and let the visitor in. He was a male colleague. He closed the door behind himself and joined Eli and professor.
Eli had this funny feeling, a strange uneasiness, the moment the door opened and the male professor stepped in, that something was odd about him. Her female intuition told her so. She could not place exactly what it was. However, these thoughts soon drowned in the interesting anthropological discussion that the three had. She thought no more about it.
Then a strange thing happened. While the discussion was going on, the man suddenly stood up, approached the closed door, locked it, and while both Eli and the female professor were watching, started stripping! Surprise of surprises! Lo and behold, he slowly started removing his shirt and pants!
Eli was afraid that he was going to rape them both! She just did not know what to do; her thinking machine lost its ability to function; she was probably seeing things, she told herself. She just sat there with a half-open mouth, overwhelmed by the preposterous act. Her eyes popped out of their sockets, transformed into five-foot diameter spheres, gravitated toward the stripping man, and started staring at the incredible scene. Finally she managed to regain consciousness. She pulled back her staring eyeballs to their habitual habitat, her eye sockets. She turned her back to the scandalous act, refusing to see it further, still afraid that rape was on the way.
As if this shocking experience was not enough for her system, she was further aggravated to see that the famous anthropologist was sitting at her desk, watching the entire scene of the stripping man with an absolutely neutral expression on her face. Eli was afraid she came to a strip joint instead of the venerated halls of a temple of knowledge.
“Eli, look back and see who my male colleague is,” the professor told her. Eli looked back. There was no man there. Instead a woman
was standing there! She was wearing a green sari.
The female professors owed it to themselves to explain the mystery of the stripping man to Eli. They did.
The visitor explained that she was that male professor who stepped into the room moments ago. She was staging the fraudulent act of impersonating a male faculty member! She had been previously working as an anthropology professor at Kerala University. She was fired on technical grounds for making an unforgivable error in her PhD thesis, discovered during her annual review.
She then started job hunting and approached Amballore University for a position, but could not get one, by virtue of her being a woman. She approached the university again for a second time, this time disguised as man, wearing a mundu and shirt and sporting a moustache. This time, she/he got the job.
She knew that the moment news was out that “he” was a woman she would be booted out of the university.
Eli always fought for women’s rights, and her heart got saddened to hear of the poor plight of women. After her interview with the faculty members, she became resolute to try to uplift females as much as she could, if and when she could. There could be brainy females, talented and skilled but unknown to the world for lack of exposure. Half of all human talent was unused and wasted by skipping women, and Eli was determined to make a change in her own way, whenever occasion arose.
Eli was not offered a faculty position.
***
Parasuraman’s ax-throw maneuver and the consequent emergence of Kerala from out of the Arabian Sea’s waters was in itself a bone of contention among anthropologists. Some believe it was a fairy tale belonging to the realms of mythology. However, most of Amballore University’s anthropology faculty members were ardent followers of this theory and elevated the status of this myth to an axiom, thereby bestowing infallibility on it. Elevating the status of a blind belief to a dictum took a lot of arm twisting, but every bit of
the effort was worth the final result of universal acknowledgment of the supernatural feat underlying Kerala’s formation.
Difficulties remained with the famous theory, though. For one, the legendary ax was not found at the shore of the Arabian Sea, where it was supposed to have landed. Its discovery could have infused some credibility into the fairy tale–like fib, and therefore researchers who searched for it were disillusioned by the lack of supportive evidence. These dedicated anthropologists decided to leave no stone unturned and visited every nook and corner of the world in search of the Holy Grail—the ax. The far-reaching search locations were to account for the continental drift.