by Harish Bijoor
CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc.

In the kingdom of Protista (with cousins Flagellates, Algae and Parasite protists), of the Phylum Protozoa (single-celled organisms), of the social class Sarcodina, lies an Eukaryota (organisms with nucleated cells) called an Amoeba. There is an amoeba in each one of us. And I am not talking of the one that got you running to the ‘loo’ every hour last week after that binge on exciting street food! There is an amoeba in each one of us. An amoeba we keep hidden. An amoeba we seldom allow to flourish. An amoeba we marketing people seldom recognise in consumers. The consumer is an amoeba. The word amoeba in itself is an excitingly real one. A word that comes from the Greek word “Amoibe” that very simply means change. The Amoeba is about change. All about this one celled blobby organism surroun-ded by a porous cell membrane through which it breathes. It is about this organism that is never in static form. The Amoeba is all about this entity that has no one shape really. Try defining it in a picture, and possibly whatever shape you draw could be right. At some time or the other, the amoeba has been that...or at some point of time or the other, the amoeba will be that! These single-celled organisms then, driven by their life mission to eat, defecate and reproduce (just as that of the human being at large) are controlled by a nucleus. The function of growth and the function of reproduction are largely controlled by this central nucleus. The amoeba eats. By forming pseudopods and food vacuoles. The amoeba will surround a particle of food and put out its pseudopods. These will then fuse all around the food particle and lo and behold! The food vacuole has happened! The amoeba has commenced the process of eating - its first life mission accomplished! The amoeba will eject waste similarly, using the device of a contractile vacuole - its second life mission is accomplished! The amoeba will reproduce when the nucleus tells it to. Alas! The process is that much less exciting than what we human beings use - the poor amoeba reproduces asexually - by a process of Binary fission, where the cytoplasm, a jelly-like series of folded membranes that form part of its primary body, will divide. The nucleus will divide as well, by fission of the nucleus. And a new amoeba has happened - mission three accomplished! This exciting creature called an amoeba is all about change. And Heraclitus was right. The only permanent thing in our lives is change. There is nothing static around us. Everything changes. Every moment. The human being on the other hand seems to find it difficult to believe and breathe this change. Despite physiology! Human physiology tells us every moment of the day that we are changing, albeit slowly. The body itself is in a change mode all the time. The hair on your chest is growing if you are a man, and those tiny strands of hair on your upper lip are growing as well, dear lady! Growing every moment. Your cells are growing till you reach the ripe old age of 18 and your cells are dying every moment after that till you are totally and truly dead. The lesson your body teaches you is simple. There is either growth or decay in the body. But there is nothing static. The body grows or decays and the mind grows and decays. There is nothing called a human being. All there is is the amoeba in our lives! Change! Just as the body changes every moment, the mind is even faster in its change orientation. The human mind is possibly the most maverick of them all. No computer in the world has been invented which can replicate the process of thinking of the human mind. And even if that is possible, with the best of Artificial Intelligence robots being experimented with, no piece of dynamic software can match the pace of the changing terrain of mind space. The mind changes its moods and decisions every nano second. Every new impulse is enough to get the mind onto an excitingly new track of thinking. You may do nothing about it physically, but you think exciting thoughts in your head that change all the time. The mind is all about change as well! Maybe change that is fifty times as robust as the change that the body goes though in our travail through life.

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