Cancered Farmer and Beggared Peacock

 

With progress, we have created more miseries for countless human beings and other species than we have brought comfort to the few. The trophy of progress stands on a mountain of miseries. Just that we stare and clap at the shiny crown and take the rubble at the base merely as the cost of production and efficiency.

How I wish that our policies were directed by a collective sense of consideration and empathy. The world would have been materially advanced with far less suffering and far more happiness and joy. There is a tendency for a selfish task to go into regression after a point to start eating into the original cause it began with. Then you are not just a creator, you are basically fighting to ward off the evil effects of the heartless deeds. This is not progress. It’s a mere struggle. And struggles never get to happiness and joy. They rob the smile of your face. They turn you more prone to get angry.

I just need to look around the life in general in the countryside and see through the flimsy veil of progress and development. The birds are rapidly vanishing from my village. As tractors take angry mechanized burps, cattle bellow, buffaloes bray, still-remaining house sparrows tweet, still-surviving flocks of pigeons coo, irritated crows croak and pigs snort, the peacocks add their voice to the rustic humdrum. The peacocks scream. Is it a mating call or distressed cry of plight, I’m not sure.

I don’t think our national bird, occupying a lofty position in the rule book, likes humans as such. It’s a punishable offence to kill a peacock. But the killing should be direct, specific, with the proofs of blood and slaying visible on the spot. However, indirect killing, the slow killing over a period of time, in the form of loss of habitat and introduction of poisonous inputs in the farms, goes unpunished—as usually happens with slow crimes that unfold over a period of time, losing the track of offense and the perpetrators spreading over whole groups of society and institutions.  

The farmlands are poisoned. Nothing survives there except the mono-cultured crops of wheat and paddy. The peacocks risk their lives to enter the human habitation. It’s a forced migration. A feathered riot of colors, they are the latest beggars among the species who can no longer sustain for themselves and look to mankind for survival. The irony is, it is the same man who has grabbed their share from nature. But then the robber can very well impersonate as a philanthropist. It massages the conscience for a mushy-mushy feeling.

The peacocks look forward to get survival crumbs here. The nature is dying, so how will its offshoot, this feathered riot of colors, survive under the onslaught. They prefer to run on their paws in a forest. But that is perilous in a village street. Dogs chase them, cats stalk predatorily and urchins throw stones. So the peacocks with multi-hued splendor of their trains have to heave their huge feathering from roof-top to roof-top, looking out for grains and chapatti thrown by their enemy to salvage some punya from the basket of sins.

Their trumpeting peehoo goes vain like rest of the species’ role in making nature what it was and brought mankind to this level. The peacock even holds the copyright to the best of colors that we humans boast about in our designs and aesthetic portraits. But the poor thing doesn’t have the right to encash the royalty born of this copyright. Its metallic blue, bluish-green, iridescent greenish blue, bronze-green, black and copper markings and glossy green shading is no longer a wonder for the modern man. It does not create awe anymore. The long train made up of elongated upper-tail bearing colorful eyespots is just a pattern on a bird.

Whenever there is a chance for courtship, the train is raised into a fan and shaken to impress the females. Love in times of war. There are risks of being caught and preyed upon. At least the male attracts some iota of appreciation due to its colors. Poor peahens, on the other hand, with their greenish lower neck and dull brown plumage hardy get noticed. If there is a crumb to be thrown, people prefer the peacock and shoo away the unattractive female.

The land under cultivation, where they forage for grains, snakes, lizards and small rodents, is under poisonous assault. That land is no longer for them. In fact, it is not even for the farmers—in the medium term. With population blast, decreasing land-holdings, increasing costs and decreasing returns, the farmers delve deeper into their pockets to buy more killer pesticides and poisons. They just cannot afford to lose a crop. A season’s loss and their fates go down the drain. So the survival comes at huge costs of injecting insecticides, pesticides and weedicides.

The poison not only kills the small world that sustains birds like peacocks, it enters the ground water and goes into the food chain as well. The cases of cancer in the villages are on the rise. The numbers are far more than the cities ill-reputed for life-style diseases born of pollution and lack of physical activity. The farmers die of slow poison, dozens every year due to cancer in almost all the farming villages. The peacocks roam around the villages screaming ominously. It’s a gloomy shriek. The world is but too busy in short-term gains, even if it comes at the cost of slow, painful death some years down the line. 

You may call it an advanced world, but the evil effects of our hardened selves, shrunk hearts and ironed souls are too glaring to ignore. We may try to pass them off as mere throwaways in garbage dumps, but how long we will be successful in looking away? Let’s build a culture based on love that boosts healthy excellence, instead of unaesthetic competition that robs us of the best quality we have, conscious levels of love and consideration.