The Banana Theory of Gorillas

Darwin was right about human beings, as the descendants of gorillas. What he failed to predict was, that, some of the stubborn genes are so resilient like a bacteria, that no mutation can improve them. And unfortunately the tropical climate of India is a favourable host for those genes and help in maintaining the heredity, generations after generations.

Let us understand this through a small experiment.

Bring together a small number of gorillas. Let’s say twenty. Now, throw ten bananas at them. What will they do? They will fight over the bananas. This is understandable. There can be a reasonable hypothesis for that. There is struggle for existence, physiological needs, survival of the fittest blah blah.

Now, bring the same twenty gorillas together. And throw ten million bananas at them. What will they do? Each gorilla will eat a stomach full peacefully and preserve the rest for future? Obviously not. They will still fight over the bananas, eat a small number and spoil the rest rendering them waste. Now, how do we reason that? Are the gorillas psychopaths? Possibly not. Perhaps it’s their basic nature to fight without a valid reason. It’s there in their genes, to fight unnecessarily.

Whatever is happening around us is not much different from the hypothesis, I call ‘The Banana Theory of Gorillas’. God made this beautiful world and more specifically this incredible country, with sufficient resources for the peaceful survival of the entire mankind. There has never been any dearth of resources in here, be it natural or intellectual (or may be pseudo-intellectual). We could easily be energy sufficient by now, given the number of rivers in our country. We could have left polio in the twentieth century with the amount of money we have spent there. We could possibly be earthquake resistant by a large margin with the intelligence available in the country. We could have been an ideal country (or a planet) where people use the resources just enough for their needs and pass on the rest for others.

Instead, we are fighting over practically everything that we can think of. Power, money, women, food, energy and the silliest of them all, religion. People from a different part of this world thought, we were a country of ‘Snake Charmers’. Inferring from what I experience all around, I see, we are even worse. 'A band of gorillas'.