Lama & Mamma

The rains have brought baby bulbuls on the boughs. Adult birds that watch over the dawny chicks chatter at the slightest alarm.

This timeless image has inspired some of the most well-known creations of our Bhakti poets. “Tu mazhi pakshini,” says Sant Namdeo Maharaj, for example, “(Thou art my birdie). Me tuzhe andajah (I am of thy egg-born). Chara ghali mazha premapaane (feed me ever so lovingly, O Lord).”

The mystical metaphor of the devotee as a nestling in the presence of a nurturing mother-deity is based on scientific insight.

Both the bird and the bard belong to species that produce utterly helpless babies at birth.

Because they are incapable of moving and feeding on their own, the babies are called ‘altricial’, from the Latin meaning ‘requiring nourishment and care’.

At the opposite end are precocial creatures. These produce young that are ready to run as soon as they are born.

Extreme helplessness, therefore, is the mother of extreme bhakti or closer bonding between parents and the young. Nature needs nurture, especially when it is unfit or unable to strive on its own. That is how love enters into the Darwinian Game of Survival of the Fittest.

To argue, therefore, for Going Solo, as the eminent sociologist Eric Klinenberg does in his latest book, on the Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone is to confront basic conundrums: 50% of Americans today are single and roughly one out of seven adults lives alone.

How valid or tenable is such a choice? For, as James Thurber once joked, Even the llama should stick to mamma!