What You See

By Mukul Sharma

We read that one of the world's leading primatologists, Jane Goodall, used to say that every time she looked into the eyes of a chimpanzee, she could grasp her humanity. What's unsaid is that the secret is in the gaze.

Yet, hold up a grasshopper or moth and stare into its wonderful compound eyes and no such rapport occurs, which happens so effortlessly with a dewy-eyed dachshund. British zoologist Desmond Morris, author of The Naked Apeand The Human Zoo, had an interesting insight.

He wrote that one likes nothing better than one's own species, and because human infants are born without the capacity to start walking almost immediately —like a goat kid or giraffe calf —we need to bond with that baby at once in order to take care of it till it can take care of itself.

When parents look into their baby's eyes, they see only how to give care. But, says Morris, beyond that, we also like to bond only with those animals with eyes that look like or remind us of our infants.

That's why the enormous popularity of koala bears and pandas and toys like teddy bears that remind us of them, but not a chameleon or an octopus even though an octopus's eyes are almost like ours in a process known as convergent evolution.

The reason is, the moment we move out of the cutesy, the furry or the mammalian, we find ourselves in a strange and alien territory. Which is why most of our gods are anthropomorphic.

The sheshnaagmay have spread its five hoods to protect Krishna from a downpour and we regard it with reverence for that, but it can never replace the god whose eyes resemble ours as a caregiver.