Bin Laden is sitting on the world's VID

DATELINE: : Mehrgarh

One goal of vidiots.us is to shed some light on the earliest common bonds of language that can be traced. Some call this "Mother Tongue" . . . other "Ursprache" (which incidentally was the winning word at the 2006 Spelling Bee!).

Our specific interest is VID, a primal utterance that was central to early Sanskrit writing (4,000 or so years ago) . But long before mankind was writing down language, they were communicating with language. VID, and it's derivatives, "video" and "avidya" have always referred to "knowing", "understanding", even "sacred or holy knowledge".

The influence of this primal term spread east & west along the trading routes that passed through the ancient Indus Valley. That is why Mehrgarh is of such interest.

Conventional wisdom among linguists is that the benchmark technology, which may have coincided with the development of written language was the wheel - yoke - axle. Without demeaning the importance of the wheel, we speculate that there may have been more primal technologies that prompted sophisticated language before the wheel. One example might be the relief of pain through dentistry. Which brings us back to Mehrgarh.

This ancient trading and supply center serviced the needs of caravans traveling along the Silk Route. As we can see on the map of the ancient Indus Valley at left, this area includes the Pakistan, Afghanistan, Kashmir borders. Try to imagine an early human in the middle of his/her journey across the world with a painful toothache! Relief is needed and there are townspeople in Mehrgarh who have developed tools to ease the pain. In order for such action to take place the pained person has to get the "dentist" to know his/her pain. By all reasoning they had to share their VID of the condition with the "dentist" and the dentist had to share their VID that they had a way to drill away the pain. How else could such a high level of human interaction have been transacted?

According to artifacts discovered in Mehrgarh many such transactions took place in the area where Osama bin Laden has avoided capture from just about everybody.

Research into the roots of our common "knowledge" may be contained in archaeological sites that are near ground zero of the battlespace to get bin Laden. So, as our cartoon above points out, Bin Laden is sitting on our VID. All of our VID! Even his own VID! Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Christian and most every other modern human once shared a common reverence for their own witnessing and understanding of life.

This is a common bond!

Vidiots.us recalls with great sadness the destruction of the Buddhas in Afghanistan by Taliban in the beginning of this millenia. We also despair over the loss of precious world culture because of the Iraq War and other conflicts in the Middle East.

But it's not too late to save our vid! The spread of information technology, which we call videography, allows all people to present their issues and develop solutions to problems that were (in earlier times) only possible with violence.

Please note: this post is just the first draft on this subject. This article will be regularly updated based on technology breakthroughs and Comments which are enabled here.