Saturday morning! Here I am, sitting on my most favorite piece of furniture in the household - a wooden rocking chair, holding my cup of filter coffee and letting myself go in its aroma. But wait - The reflex act of opening one's mouth wide and inhaling deeply due to tiredness creeps from inside my being. In other words I am letting out a big yawn and resisting the wild urge to get back under the sheets and cuddle away into my world of dreams.
A yawning kitten is an absolutely adorable sight. Babies too!...For that matter, any yawning baby, puppy, kitten, cub, calf etc. looks amazingly cute...err!...wait a minute!....Do calves yawn? I have seen kittens yawn and the wide yawn of a lion is an oft-repeated sight on the likes of Animal Planet and Discovery channel...But horses? Cows? So I meditate upon Google baba and he enlightens me...Except for maybe teeny weeny insects, most animals do apparently!
Yes there are places where yawning can be really dangerous. Like in the classroom, for instance. The Biology teacher would be cursing his fate for having to explain the human respiratory system to a bunch of obviously uninterested teenagers. Yet, a practical display of the same in the form of a huge yawn can drive him bonkers. I had one teacher who used to keep telling us in Tamil " Athu kottaavi illa , athu ketta aavi" ...Well kottaavi is yawn and ketta aavi is bad spirit/ghost. So it kind of translates to "Thats not a yawn, its a bad ghost" . I know it doesn't sound that amusing in English, but in the native tongue, it did have a nice rhyme to it.
Office Meetings of course! Especially after one decides to make it the cheat-the-diet day of the week, and gorge on a lunch solely to satisfy the taste buds. The sales forecast graph on the wall begins to look like a stroke of Ravi Verma's brush. The recently devoured biriyani begins its anesthetic reaction. The words coming from your boss's mouth transform into musical notes and gently float in the air - all nervous links from the ear canals to the brain, totally numbed in your stupor. Some Ilayaraja song that the morning fm in the car implanted in your consciousness starts playing in your head. The body reacts to all this - your mouth opens wide without listening to you and you let out a massive yawn. God bless you if you do it without any noise, and are aware enough to stifle it as much as humanly possible. Especially when the bespectacled guy next to you is listening with rapt attention to every word being said and is equally particular about venting out a flurry of relevant ideas, in his desperate attempts to secure a place in the next promotion list.
The most contagious thing on this planet is not influenza or cholera or chicken pox or bird flu. Its not even a disease or an ailment. Its this simple everyday bodily action this post is about. One person lets out and almost immediately the other person would repeat and its a classic example of a chain reaction. I had no idea that it could spread without face to face communication until a few days back, when I was talking to my brother on the phone. As we were discussing a whole lot of mundane things neither of use to us nor anyone else on earth, I heard his words getting garbled by a yawn and I followed suit in almost a nanosecond. In fact I was just browsing the net trying to find an image suitable for this post. Just the sight of all those people and lions and hippos and dogs and cats yawning somehow infected me again.
This thing is really dangerous!
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| Image Credit www.maxpixel.freegreatpicture.com |
A yawning kitten is an absolutely adorable sight. Babies too!...For that matter, any yawning baby, puppy, kitten, cub, calf etc. looks amazingly cute...err!...wait a minute!....Do calves yawn? I have seen kittens yawn and the wide yawn of a lion is an oft-repeated sight on the likes of Animal Planet and Discovery channel...But horses? Cows? So I meditate upon Google baba and he enlightens me...Except for maybe teeny weeny insects, most animals do apparently!
 |
| Image Credit www.maxpixel.freegreatpicture.com |
Yes there are places where yawning can be really dangerous. Like in the classroom, for instance. The Biology teacher would be cursing his fate for having to explain the human respiratory system to a bunch of obviously uninterested teenagers. Yet, a practical display of the same in the form of a huge yawn can drive him bonkers. I had one teacher who used to keep telling us in Tamil " Athu kottaavi illa , athu ketta aavi" ...Well kottaavi is yawn and ketta aavi is bad spirit/ghost. So it kind of translates to "Thats not a yawn, its a bad ghost" . I know it doesn't sound that amusing in English, but in the native tongue, it did have a nice rhyme to it.
Office Meetings of course! Especially after one decides to make it the cheat-the-diet day of the week, and gorge on a lunch solely to satisfy the taste buds. The sales forecast graph on the wall begins to look like a stroke of Ravi Verma's brush. The recently devoured biriyani begins its anesthetic reaction. The words coming from your boss's mouth transform into musical notes and gently float in the air - all nervous links from the ear canals to the brain, totally numbed in your stupor. Some Ilayaraja song that the morning fm in the car implanted in your consciousness starts playing in your head. The body reacts to all this - your mouth opens wide without listening to you and you let out a massive yawn. God bless you if you do it without any noise, and are aware enough to stifle it as much as humanly possible. Especially when the bespectacled guy next to you is listening with rapt attention to every word being said and is equally particular about venting out a flurry of relevant ideas, in his desperate attempts to secure a place in the next promotion list.
The most contagious thing on this planet is not influenza or cholera or chicken pox or bird flu. Its not even a disease or an ailment. Its this simple everyday bodily action this post is about. One person lets out and almost immediately the other person would repeat and its a classic example of a chain reaction. I had no idea that it could spread without face to face communication until a few days back, when I was talking to my brother on the phone. As we were discussing a whole lot of mundane things neither of use to us nor anyone else on earth, I heard his words getting garbled by a yawn and I followed suit in almost a nanosecond. In fact I was just browsing the net trying to find an image suitable for this post. Just the sight of all those people and lions and hippos and dogs and cats yawning somehow infected me again.
Lovely post Jaish,so very amusing!
ReplyDeleteThanks Indhu :)
DeleteOh yes, a yawn is truly contagious. I have been guilty of yawning so many times during our training programs and meetings. And it is so frowned upon, but I think it's an honest opinion. :D
ReplyDeleteOh yes, definitely honest! I remember my first standard teacher having some simple exercises to get us kids alert after the lunch break
DeleteThat was fun! Not just real yawns, but also fake ones can set off the chain reaction. Have you tried it? It used to be my best stress-buster during boring lectures :)
ReplyDeleteReally? Then you are one hell of an actor hi hi :)
DeleteOne post where one had to sit upright to read without yawning:)
ReplyDeleteYep. Yawn is really contagious. In fact, I read that in case a person who sees you yawing doesn't yawn, then there's a probability that the person is a psychopath ! :D
ReplyDeleteahaaaaaaaaaaa! (yawing)
ReplyDeletehilarious...
I remember my science teacher saying that he will keep a chalk piece in the mouth, wide open, and make us stand till the class ends if we yawn...
Jaish.. you just made my day. Such an amusing (and dare I say contagious) post. It made me go back to my yawning moments (and there are so many of them). I could so relate to the office piece. And "ketta aavi"... that is hilarious. Such a refreshing read. :)
ReplyDelete