The Real Story

Forget about rockets, nukes, missiles, bombastic egos, skyrocketing sensex, high rises, malls, fashion, militaries, cars, bla bla bla. To me the tiniest story of love and compassion is bigger than any other story on earth. The stork with a plastic ring on its beak, an apt testimony to our crimes on Mother Nature.

There are people who aren’t looking too high. They just look around for simple things. But their eyes are special. They have love and kindness. So this good soul clicks a two-and-half year old, male black-necked stork at Basai wasteland, some 34 kms from Delhi. On zooming the picture, the birder found a plastic ring stuck around the bird’s beak.

The Wildlife department set up three teams involving their own officials and people from Bombay Natural History Society. Apart from this, nature and bird lovers from Delhi and Haryana also volunteered. Hundreds of compassionate souls actually roamed around hundreds of kilometers in all this heat to undo a portion of our plasticized sins. It took these soldiers of love 5 days to save the bird. In the last leg of the search, two young boys from Haryana, Rakesh Ahlawat and Sonu Dalal, ran for 4 kms to catch the bird just before the jaws of death waiting nearby in the form of hunger and thirst. Aren’t they and the others involved in the search real heroes? They didn’t do it for a small news item in the newspapers. They did it for love. To them a bird’s life matters. As long as there are such people, hope remains.   

Look at the two pictures. The transition from tragedy to motherly care. This, to me, is the real story. But then somebody is eating iftaar delicacies and mocking the well intentioned fitness video of the PM. World is full of idiosyncrasies. High time we start undoing some of our collective sins. Look at the pictures: the ring of death and the cradle of life. The first, our own doing, the second, some undoing on our part. Which one is preferable?