[Assam] banana...

[Dilip and Dil Deka]

O'Mahanta,
That's why the sceptic in me asked who took the picture.
Thanks for your analysis.
O"Deka


----- Original Message ----
From: Chan Mahanta <cmahanta at charter.net>
To: A Mailing list for people interested in Assam from around the world <assam at assamnet.org>
Sent: Wednesday, June 18, 2008 9:49:11 AM
Subject: Re: [Assam] banana...



Thanks for sharing the picture Babul. While it is 
quite amazing at first look, the skeptic in me 
raises the immense possibility of a pretty fair 
Photoshop job.

There are several reasons:

A: Knowing how a 'kolor thwka' develops, from the 
top towards the bottom, this picture looks 
unnatural. The bananas in the lowest 'aankhi's 
are large than those in the middle. While one 
cannot entirely discount the possibility  that 
somehow later in the development of the 'thwka' 
the tree got some steroids
fed to it, but that is a veeeery long shot . And 
perspective  distortion--of foreshortening, as we 
call it ( as in the enlarged nose and fattened 
lips of a man's face photographed with a wide 
angle lens) -- was not the cause. This was 
picture taken with a 'normal' lens.

B: The arrangements of the bananas in an 'aankhi' 
are random, as the uppermost ones will testify. 
But in the lowermost ones certain patterns repeat 
themselves, a tell-tale sign of a liberal but not 
too careful application of the 'clone stamp' in 
Photoshop.

C: The 'kolor thwka' matures top down. The usual 
'thwka' completes its cycle of generating the ten 
or twelve 'aankhi's in about a  month. In this 
picture of about 70 or so 'aankhis', while  the 
lower ones
continue to form from the flowers, the upper ones 
would have ripened and gone, unless, again 
intervened either by divine powers or a mad 
scientist who has gone bananas with her invention 
of eternal youth for banana-life.

D:  In nature, the 'dil' --flower - of the banana 
starts out quite full at the outset and gets 
depleted to a shriveled remnant of its original 
size by the time it is done with its production 
of ten to twelve 'aankhi's.  Here is the fatal 
flaw of the photoshopper, whose ignorance of the 
biology of a banana flower  or his carelessness 
gives the whole thing away. Look at the 'dil' at 
the bottom. It not only does not look depleted, 
but actually has widened, as if by the 
obstruction by the concrete slab and holding the 
promise of keeping on producing for ever, from 
the look of the flowers still in bloom, while the 
sharp conical point of the dil got truncated in 
the 'clone stamping' process altogether.

Assuming the forever-thwka was indeed destined 
to keep producing come hell or concrete slab, by 
this time, the 'thwka' would have taken a slight 
curvature towards the bottom.  Again our picture 
doctor forgot that possibility .

It is all in the details!

At your service,

Sherlock  Mahanta













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