Today, I have the pleasure of hosting Subhorup Dasgupta of Subho’s Jejune Diet on my blog. Informative and prolific, Subhorup is a blogger who offers something for everyone out there. Over to him for this very different and thought provoking post on gardening.
Three Easy-To-Grow Plants
One day, some years back, I looked out and realized that the garden was overrun. Creepers and weeds had snuck in, and aided by neglect, they had chosen to grow as they pleased, lending a wild yet somewhat artistic appearance. I was reluctant, perhaps lazy too, to fix it since it looked pretty in its own morbid way, like having a scraggy mountainside outside the window.
When I looked next, it looked even more sickeningly real, and almost unrecognizable. The flowering plants had been devoured, and the fruit bearing ones were slowly being choked of their sustenance by the parasitic climbers. The path had been buried to where it was impossible to see. It was becoming difficult to see beauty in the snarling struggle for survival. The landscape resembled a war zone with the victors gloating over the wounded. This madness was methodical yet without any meaning.
After much effort, the garden was overhauled and brought back to the minimalistic, zenlike synchronicity that grumbles but only just, like a well-tuned engine at the top of its range. It was not entirely painless, since some of the shrubs and trees were beyond repair, and some of the weeds and creepers that I had come to love had to be uprooted and burnt. I learned that some fruits were not only poisonous to those who plucked and ate them, but even maligned the air around them. Some flowers were pretty traps while others had pungent acids instead of nectar. In short, like bad teeth, I had to let go of a good number of the plants I had grown fond of over the years.
In the course of this learning, I discovered that there are some plants that grow easily, quickly, and without any investment of your time and energy. This post is my life-hacking gift to all budding gardeners out there. Here are the three easiest plants to grow in your garden.
Avaritia mortalis (Common Greed)
This hardy fellow does not even need to be planted. A cancerous mutation of our natural survival instinct to fulfill our needs, Greed can show up without really showing up, and you might not even recognize it till it has consumed all it can. Like I said, you don’t have to do much to nurture it. Infants learn it from their DINT (double income, no time) parents, who outsource parenting so that they can earn enough to send their offspring to colleges they will not be embarrassed to tell their neighbors about. Adults are fed on a diet especially conducive to this species with an entire industry dedicated to ensure its survival – advertising and marketing. No matter what you procure, there is always something better, newer, larger and shinier staring back at you from the billboards and the webpage banners. The good thing about this plant is that it can kill the you inside you in the most pleasant manner, engulfing you in an illusion of comfort, self worth and even meaning. By the time you reach the most painful part of dealing with your losses, you have been desensitized to the point where it doesn’t matter any more. Research says that this plant might be the answer to all the unrest we are seeing in the recent years.Governments and corporations are working overtime to ensure the widest possible propagation of this miracle plant.
Ira intoleratum (Scarlet Rage)
This plant has been misunderstood and criticized without reason. Most people confuse it with the more useful member of the same family, the one that redresses wrong and wrongdoing. Certain members of this family have strong psychotropic or mind altering qualities and are banned in some countries, but thankfully not ours. Like Greed, Rage does not need too much of care. All you need to do is go slow on compassion and understanding. Do it consistently for a few days, and you will find Rage thriving, and ready to flower at the drop of a hat. Or whatever. Sometimes this plant mimics the mint family, exuding a cool and controlled aggression that can tear into the soul of its target. In all its forms, this plant can appear to destroy that which stands in its way while actually obliterating all traces of humanity from its host. A wonderful plant that has caused wars, terror attacks and counter attacks, and countless broken homes, this is a must for every lazy gardener.
Vanagloria ignoratum (Meadow Vanity)
This beautiful plant can give stereotypes a complex. Closely related to Foolish Wattle, this grows without any effort. With no need for nourishing courage or the water of reason, all forms of vanity imbue a garden with a glow of prettiness that is extremely satisfying. It prevents other harmful plants like wisdom or perspective from flourishing. The great philosopher called this plant the fear of appearing original, but in truth, it is a handy way of merging with nature, facelessly, flavorlessly. It filters out the ability to look beyond and grasp the true disposition of things around you, and helps you to live with a sense of confidence and arrogance that can seem to last forever. It deadens very convincingly the pain of responsibility and taking ownership for one’s own actions. It makes the tedium of life more bearable, at least till such time that consequences overtake you. Till then, and it can sometimes be a lifetime, it is a handy plant that seems to ask for little in return.
There is a simple acronym to remember these three easy-to-grow plants: Greed, Anger and Stupidity, or GAS. Tanked up with this GAS, you can make your garden stand out from the rest. You can reside in the home that tells the world who you are; you can throw people behind bars because you don’t like what they say; and you can be the Ghana cocoa bean that makes the finest dark chocolate. In a world that only recognizes the flavor of the month, why be anything less?Pics Courtesy: Freedigitalphotos.net
What an insightful post!
Such weeds do ruin the garden of our mind ! There another particularly noxious weed and that weed is that of negative thoughts.
I read a quote somewhere – your mind is a garden and your thoughts are seeds. You can either grow flowers or you can grow weeds !
And that is such an apt quote, Ruchira! As much as we try, weeds claw their way back in our gardens. You need a determination of steel to keep them at bay.
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From Perfect Shot
Thank you Always Unlucky for your effusive words of praise!
Beautiful satire with amazing insights. Very skillfully done and brings out message very well. On an aside, so much cross posting going on these days, you never know whose post you will find on whose blog.
Thank you, The Fool! Yep, cross posting is good because it offers variety, don’t you think?
A nice post with lots of truth in wraps:)
Agree Rahul!
When I read this post Subhorup, I was stunned by its intensity and depth. It was unsettling because of the reality it touches upon. As a person, it showcases your sensitivity and the turbulence that you feel with the status quo. It is an outstanding satire, and it is an honor to have you on my blog. Thank you!
It is my good fortune to have been able to write this piece. I was not sure it would work out, with the range of issues it tries to address, but it looks nice on your blog now. Thank you, Rachna, for encouraging me and for being the reason that this piece got written.
Very informative post. and what irony : greed, rage and stupidity. They can grow at thier will!
I have a small garden, but slowly I have started neglecting them. Its time to add the trio now. Great post!
Or avoid the trio :).
BK Chowla, has left a new comment on your post “Three Easy-to-grow Plants”:
Makes an interesting reading material.
But,I am not the gardening type
I think these 3 plants are of special interest to all of us.
Well well well.. more to digest , I guess we humans have all this in us some have more some less..
Lots of issues addressed and then the info too
Bikram’s
A lot to digest, I agree.
Hi Subhorup
That was simply amazing….What indepth insights into the negative directions that the human mind can take and your first paragraph kind of denotes how destructive these weeds can be!
Thanks, Jayashree. Like true weeds, they can take over your life without your knowledge.
Shubhorup / Rachna,
Very informative with attention captivating opening. I wish you had given photographs of recommended plants also.
Take care
Both the options, pics of myself and pics of the better half, seemed not viable! Glad you liked the post, Jack.
What brilliant satire and wordplay! Are those real latin translations (the scientific names you used)?
Bookmarking this post, and I think everyone should, since we are all gardeners! 🙂
Thanks, Rickie. The genus are derived from the Latin names for the seven sins, the species are concocted.
GAS and the finest dark chocolate… and then the lovely botanical names with the genus and specie specified… loved reading the post.
Arvind Passey
http://www.passey.info
Thanks, Arvind. I was smiling and boiling at the same time while writing this post.
Brilliantly articulated thoughts. And how it stings!
Glad it does, Purba. And then some.
One of your best posts, Subhorup Dasgupta. Hope all the garden enthusiasts reap the benefit of the insightful practices, hinted, here.
Thanks, Pattu. As a lay gardener, this comment from an organic farming champions like you means a lot. With your blessings, a sane world is a certainty.
Very nice Shubhorp. Such a beautiful analogy of human mind and plants.
Thanks. 🙂 I was surprised myself at the way it turned out.
Beautifully written. It took me some time to grasp that the post moved seamlessly from the gardens on Earth to the gardens of our mind.
Amit, the gardens outside us are but reflections of the gardens inside. Most Buddhist schools of thought say that the environment is like a shadow of the self, that when we address the self, the environment changes.
I like the DINT part best..most of us NRIs are what it is..:) Didn’t know satire could mean so much and so beautifully expressed.
Thanks, FIF. Parenting is the most critical aspect of building an ethical society. Maybe parents should undergo mandatory training before they are allowed to conceive! 🙂
initially i thought its all about gardening..but a very well written satire and brilliant use of words.
Thanks, Alka. Incidentally, I learn a lot from the words you use too.
Beautifully composed post.
Thanks. 🙂
late here and everyone has said what i wanted to say..hehe..keep up the gr8 work rachna..
When I saw the post title, I thought it was some gardening post and so took my time coming here. A reminder not to read a book by its cover! What wonderful insights Subho! You never cease to amaze me with your range of topics and genres you navigate with such effortless ease. GAS indeed is consuming us today and unless we wake up fast, it can exterminate us too.
Thanks, Zephyr. I logged in to check mail before winding down after a long trip and found your comment, and instead of writing an entire post on it, thought it better to reply right away. Thanks for your lovely words and for pressing an important button. And what better place to do it than away from your own blog!
When I began writing online, more as a personal journal, some years back, I knew nothing about the ways of the web. One of the most satisfying things for me was hyperlinking and titling posts. With an arrogance that only the ignorant can command, I revelled in linking anchor text to pages with my own brand of madness, convincing myself and my six-and-a-half followers that it was creative expression. I also believe that my writing has a purpose, perhaps several purposes, and my readers across time will be varied. As a result, I try and write in a way that addresses several concerns at several levels. It sometimes gets to a point, where pulling an unfinished piece out of the draft folder, I would myself get confused as to what I was trying to communicate and why at certain places. 🙂
I believed then and still do that writing in the digital media allows you to make the readers reflect in many ways, through text and hypertext, through design and images, and through creative use of web technology. So, to illustrate, you had links from words/phrases like honesty, courage, and corporate social responsibility leading you to extremely creatively done “page not found” (404) pages. It would be my own private joke, since anyway not too many people read my blog then. Later I learned that linking “self esteem” to a site selling fairness creams could actually work against you in the world of SEO.
However, it has not stopped me from having titles with personal but hopefully curiosity-arousing subtexts. Some examples from my own blog, 0-0-0 – a reference to a queens side castle in chess, falling down like hail – a line from a robert johnson song describing how the blues get you, drunken elephants and wild horses – a mashup of buddhist metaphor for the invincibilty of the pursuer of truth and a line from a rolling stones love song, and sometimes the more commonplace – like the end of reckoning. I guess I lose some puzzled readers in the process, but for the ones who stay back, I hope they have as much fun decoding as I do encoding! For the ones who do go away seeing the titles, and trust me, several do, I pray each day that they are restored to the larger lunacy at the earliest. End of York Notes (do they still have them?) to Subho’s blog titles.
Ha ha. Now I understand the meaning behind the ‘larger lunacy’ post. Unfortunately, I am still in the nursery as far as SEO and taglines are concerned and the readers are all dedicated ones who either like me a lot or come to my blog out of habit 🙂
Do continue being innovative and having made the mistake of almost missing a wonderful post going by its title, I won’t let it happen again! 0-0-0?? Lunacy indeed 😀
You know Subhorup and Zephyr,I think many people gave this post a wide berth either due to the title or because they did not understand it. I understand SEO but I have never optimized my blog posts. I like to keep my posts spontaneous and titles relevant.
This is brilliant!! Like others, I also thought this blog was about gardening, but this is something so totally different!!De-coding GAS was sort of e-learning for me!!:D
A memorable stuff, Shubhorup..such a beautiful analogy of mind and plant! Wow!
Thanks Rachna for the treat:0
Thanks, Panchali.
This is super..! came here looking for something different and was pleasantly surprise.
Subhorup my compliments 😀
Thanks, Ghazala. I realize that the post title doesn’t set you up for this, but hey, I need my kicks too.
Wonderfully insightful and what a satire! Awesome!
Thanks, Shilpa. Glad you enjoyed it.
Nice initiative, Rachana!
I could learn something useful.
Regards