The Quirky Life of P

Origin of the Suspicious

The phone was still crackling a bit and P made a mental note to call in the technician once again. P’s neighbour had phoned him in the morning and the reception was so poor, he could barely understand what was said.  Piecing together the bits and pieces he managed to hear over the static noise and crackle, it appeared to him that P’s urgent help was needed. The neighbour was invited to the local high school to give a talk that evening, and he had sought P’s help in preparing the lecture. P had always portrayed himself to have a questing and scientific bent of mind.

As soon as P finished his lunch, he sat down to scribble his ideas down. The topic was “The Origin of the Suspicious” and P considered himself to be well equipped to take the task head on.

After all he had listened to Elvis Presley’s “Suspicious minds” so many times….

However, when P really set himself to write the matter down, he discovered that he did not have a clue on the science of the “Origin of the Suspicious.”

Then it struck him! “Eureka! May be, they need something fictional as in those Daily Post WordPress weekly writing challenges!”

Without much ado, he gave a free rein to his imagination and started writing….

“Long, long ago, there was no suspicion. People had total faith in anything and everything… For example, if P would stand by his windows upstairs, playing with the curtains, his neighbour would never suspect him of prying… If P would wave and smile at his neighbour across the fence, his neighbour would never suspect P of having devious plans to sweet talk him into lending his Porsche Panamera to P later in the day. And the list went on…

Honest people were happy because they never suspected they were being swindled and swindlers were happy because they never suspected that they were suspected…. In other words, it was Utopia. People trusted each other and animals trusted each other. The deer would trustingly offer its nape to the lion and the lion would trust the deer not to make a life-saving dash any time…

Perhaps you would have by now noticed what was wrong with this Utopia… Of course it was just that the honest and the good were at the losing end. This was totally unacceptable to the Universal Spirit. Something had to be done urgently to help the survival mechanism of all beings. So the Universal spirit blended all the relevant potions and magic and ABRA-CA-DABRA…the seeds of suspicion were created.

Even though the seeds of suspicion were created, it was still a Herculean task for the Universal spirit to get them into living beings. All methods were tried and the universal labs were employed round the clock to come up with answers. Finally there was success as the seeds of suspicion were transformed into pieces of DNA called genes of suspicion.

These genes were embedded as mutations in the genetic make-up of organisms, changing their perspective on survival and they became suspicious, but some more so… (“such as my neighbour”, thought P, but he did not write this down). This is the tale of the Origin of the Suspicious.”

With these facts written down, P took his afternoon nap and at 4 pm in the evening, he walked across to his neighbour and gave him the write-up.

Expectantly he waited for appreciation but he was flabbergasted and his jaw fell open when his neighbour said “Well, you have managed to get the word survival here, and genetic make-up and DNA here. Other than that, how does this discuss Darwin’s ‘The Origin of Species?’”

P reminded himself once again to call the technician to sort out the problem of his telephone as soon as possible.

In the Beginning