TALK ABOUT CREEPS!

When I read the morning paper, "The Times of India", I particularly pay attention to the "Times Trends" page. All the unusual news of recent technological innovations, peculiar individual actions, and so on fill that page, the kind that incites a reaction involving the twitching of an eyebrow and a subtle smirk. It makes my day! Its good to know that the world is a crazy place outside of our mundane lives and our wild imagination.

But today... today's news hit a little harder than usual, enough to stretch both eyebrows and make the jaw drop. First a Russian bishop blessing a city from a hot air balloon (!), then the details of a head transplant (!?!) and as though that weren't enough, an Israeli firm proposing to train mice to sniff people at airports! Mice! Really? Ginormous hounds, with a spiked leash round their necks, occasionally growling and baring their teeth, weren't traumatic enough (especially for a person, merely laying eyes on whom excites a dog's desire to rip and tear)? We shall have mice now? Well, coming from a person in a country where mice infest even first class train coaches and one always wonders how many mice nibbled at the cereal or pulses in the purchased packet, mice at the airport shouldn't be an unusual encounter, right? Well, let me tell you! It is cute when you see Stuart Little in a boat race and driving a car, or a giant white mouse advertising an app called "shine", or even when pet white mice sleep in a cage at a friend's quiet apartment. It is awe-inspiring when you see hundreds of rats gather around a tub of milk at the Karni Mata temple in Rajasthan, India (not that I ever intend to visit the place). But when I am presented with a news article of mice sniffing passengers at airports from security checkposts all around the place, the only comfort given in the fact that they will be sniffing me from within cages, my imagination does not allow for looking forward to a pleasant flight trip. And who is to even say these mice will be white? They probably won't!

A few years back My parents and I had a very entertaining and peculiar experience with mice. Read "A Page Out of the Sniff Memoirs: A Wartale of the Mother and the Mouse" (from the archives of August, 2014) to know more of what happened there; truly peculiar. Mice lost my favour long before the above incident happened, though, when, one night as a little kid of six, I found a large rat creeping out of the kitchen pipe and stealing rotis. Now fancy walking through security check at the airport, where a new stage of checking has been added: the one where you stand behind the curtains and mice sniff you instead of the x-ray machine. All the while you are aware that another mouse is sniffing away at your baggage too!

Bhattacharjee, Saurav. Cartoon. 17/06/2015. 

It's one thing to read about creepy and watch creepy or share creepy tales around a bonfire, and entirely another thing to have creepy lurking around you in real life. For instance, it is okay to read about a man's head being cut off and re-attached to another body,... erm... actually, no, it's not okay. In some countries, people are beheaded as punishment. People all over the world have been beheaded for crimes for centuries. And now there may be a radical medical breakthrough which allows people to have their head shifted to new bodies! It will surely be an unimaginably brilliant achievement in the field of medical science. Nonetheless, the eeriness of the situation cannot be stamped away into the mud like a beetle in the desert. I mean, what if a 50 year old's head were being put on a thirty year old's body? The person gets 20 years younger? I thought Amitav Ghosh's The Calcutta Chromosome was fiction; apparently that may not be. When, a few days back, I read about Rebekah Aversano, the sister of the man whose face Richard Norris is now wearing, meeting him, it gave me creeps. Though undoubtedly it was an incredible story and an amazing transplant. Although I suppose, if I were to get a new body, but not become a different person mentally, I would definitely know whether the heart is always as insensible and childish with its advice or not. 

Talk about creeps! All this is real, and some people dwell on one liners such as "The Lannisters send their regards" (from Game of Thrones, the TV series.) or the noises of the wind and shadows in their dark room after a horror movie, to talk of uncanny. The real world out there is creepy! Many times more than fiction, clearly.