November 12, 2018 Monday
Bedtime Story
Reputation Sticks like a Scarlet Letter
Our transactions with our fellow cousin
apes occur at several levels starting with our close relatives, to our friends
and mating partners and finally with economic and professional encounters.
Reputation then becomes crucial among human
apes to conduct transactions both at present and future and the best way to
build it over time is to be actually honest and diligent.
Reputation is considered as a ubiquitous,
spontaneous and a highly efficient mechanism of social control in all natural
societies that is not limited to the great apes.
Reputation transmission is communication of
an evaluation without specifying who the evaluator is.
The person whose reputation is at stake is
known as the target and once the reputation involves a large number of people
or population then the reputation attaints a status even more powerful than the
equivalent scarlet letter sewn to one’s clothes.
‘The Scarlet Letter: A Romance’ as you may
know or more likely not know is a historical fiction written by American dark
romantic writer Nathaniel Hawthorne published in 1850.
This was one of the first mass-produced
books in America as the book binders before that time used to bind the leaves
of books by hand and sell them in small quantities.
2,500 copies of the book came out through
mechanized printing in the first installment and were all sold out within ten
days by the people of this young nation.
Perhaps this was the first “Best Seller” of
this young nation that would go on to produce endless of them which would enthrall
the entire world in the centuries to come.
It was not just that the sales of the book
that broke all records but it became a subject of much discussion among the
people, a privilege that no other book had had the honor until then.
In a sort of metaphorical way Hawthorne is
recounting the story of Adam and Eve in which a moral sin results in expulsion
through his female character and protagonist Hester Prynne who conceives a
daughter through an affair and is condemned by her Puritan neighbors.
The background is the seventeenth century
Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony in the years of 1642 to 1649 and the major
theme of the novel is the naming and shaming and creating a social stigma
around a woman that has broken the moral code of the conservative New England
society.
Unlike in modern Taliban Afghanistan
fortunately she is not stoned to death among hideous creams and hollering of
women.
One should be aware that Quran does not
sentence stoning for any crime.
You would be surprised to know that the Holy
Scripture where stoning is the preferred method of execution is the Jewish
Torah which is synonymous with the first five books of the Hebrew Bible:
Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy.
Stay tuned to the voice of an
average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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