The posts on this blog deal with common people who try to stand proud in front of their own conscience. The rest of the life's tale naturally follows from this point. It's intended to be a joy-maker, helping the reader to see the beauty underlying everyone and everything. Copyright © Sandeep Dahiya. All Rights Reserved for all posts on this blog. No part of this blog may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the author of this blog.
The September-end damp, sultry night felt slightly sad, slightly happy. Sad for those who are facing their own tests, trials and tragedies; happy for those enjoying a nice ride on the cart of life.
October 2007
Tau Ram Singh is no more, the square-built old farmer of about 85 years, who saw money almost raining down on his clan, thanks to the blessing hand of Lord Kuber, through the clouds of mushrooms so honestly cultivated by his grandsons.
He died in Brahmamuhurat.
The day before, he had gone to Sonipat, as had been his norm during his post-farming days. He was a genuine well-wisher of my family. Losing him means we miss the support of an aged, blessing heart.
I wish he was still there when something came out of our hugely belated results in lieu of our hard work, because he would have really liked it. Like our own grandpa, he lived life fully, worked tirelessly in the fields during his heydays, saw his four grandchildren making a fortune through mushroom cultivation, and, of course, two big houses in the making, with lakhs and lakhs of rupees spent on them.
He was friendly. He loved going to meet his favourite people, the people who respected him and welcomed him in front of their doors. He had had his goodly share of heated tantrums with his granddaughters-in-law, of course. He threw obscenities in his liberal paternal way, and showered kindness on whom he thought he must. The sturdy farmer would shake with bone-shaking laughter while sharing guffawing anecdotes.
Many a time he seemed to be running out of patience with my success that always appeared 'yet to come'.
“When will your time come? I'm afraid it will come when I am gone forever,” he exclaimed once.
And I convinced him that he would be around when the results of my doings would start coming forth.
But the man is no more.
His loss is redeemed by a few facts: he lived up to a ripe age and died without getting bedridden. He leaves behind a happy and prosperous big family. He leaves behind fond memories in the hearts of those with whom he spent his old days, taking great pains in reaching up to them, if they, like me, the rooted one, did not go to him.
A good life. He definitely passed the test.
May God bestow peace upon his soul.
*****
Benazir Bhutto, the lady in exile, has returned to Pakistan, but all does not seem well for her political future. The ceremonial march of her convoy was greeted with deadly explosions, killing 140 and injuring scores of others.
The attackers are believed to be from among the teeming terrorist groups, ranging from the Taliban to the loyalists of the late General Zia-ul-Haq.
Pakistan is bleeding too profusely now for any humanistic eye to see it through the narrow, stilted, bracketed vision of history, wars, geostrategy, animosity, religion, fundamentalism, terrorism, etc.
But still one cannot escape being caught by the accusative snares laid by the sufferer against their madly supposed and imagined archenemy India.
Pakistan, the nation which for 60 long years fed hate into most of its institutions, which slowly percolated into the quiet, walled alleys of its society, now bears the recoil.
If you dig holes for others, there will be a day when you yourself will fall into one of them.
Those who managed this bloody programme are a tiny section of the whole population of Pakistan, yet for their deeds the entire poor, common, mundane, helpless mass gets branded with fanaticism, jihad and terrorism.
Wishing a bloody consequence upon one's enemy is too short and puny, temporary and farcical a dream, simply for one reason: if our neighbour's house is on fire, you are always in danger of being caught by the angrily lolloping tongues of the fire, because it needs more and more fodder from the surrounding areas.
So the best means of security one's own home and hearth is to help quell the source of the scourge.
India is too big, brotherly, progressive and tolerant to always think in the narrow terms of going gaga over others' fires. We ought to believe, we ought to behave, in a manner befitting our status.
The world has shrunk too rapidly now to permit us to treat the problem in a limited, petrified, single-issue persona. We have to think and devise in a broader, accommodative, calculating, futuristic manner.
The more we help in getting our neighbourhood stabilised, the better chance we stand of pursuing our dreams of developing India into a developed country, playing a big international role, taking up responsibilities as a global power.
Afghanistan is still burning. Communists are on tenterhooks in Nepal. The military is going back on history in Myanmar. The LTTE in Sri Lanka. Bhutan needs support for democracy in its womb, which makes it a very tough task indeed.
*****
In the second half of October, here we have Dussehra, the famous festival of Vijayadashami.
No specific victories for the day, except that I helped my brother, Amit, whom we call Tina, in clearing the field of the last patch of drying jowar, so that oats, barsham and wheat can be sown during the upcoming winter season.
While you put the drying jowar to the sickle, it never gets undone without giving you a few nasty cuts to your fingers and palms, however coarse, calloused and hardened the farming hands might be.
For such a purpose, mine are almost virginally soft, because yours truly is basically a writer and reader. Yet I did the job to the part-time farmer, part-time student's satisfaction.
Now, the part-time farmer and part-time student happens to be my brother.
If you earn a few drops of perspiration with farm work in the late morning, the cool mulberry shade becomes far, far more enjoyable than an icy shelter amidst the hot June desert.
I earned a few, and enjoyed the latter effect as well.
Customs related to Dussehra have almost died in this part of the world. It has now become one more holiday, whose arrival is applauded by school and office goers. But the poor date this year falls on a Sunday, so the school kids even hold a grudge against the festival for losing its effect on a cool Sunday without adding to the latter's charm in any way.
So they look forward to Diwali, which fortunately doesn't fall on Sunday this year.
Elsewhere, in the Supreme Court, the judges are still roosting over our civil-service case. The case was closed with a reserved verdict on August 30. I don't know what more they want to know which escaped their scrutiny during the year-long proceedings.
They are well and high. They must be knowing better. We can't even say anything against them. They can easily put anyone behind the bars, especially the poor and the unprotected who can't spend money on legal proceedings.
But one thing is clear: the cause of justice has been hugely, irreparably dented during these three long judicial years since the case has been pending, denying us appointment forever.
It needs hell lot of hard work to get into the civil services. Then you face this. This is harassment. Plain and raw. Illegality in legal corridors.
Such delays only purport that the judiciary is beyond the laws of the land, almost.
So one more Dussehra goes without doling out the little piece of concretisation of the faith behind the myth and legend of the festival. The myth: The victory of the good over the evil. I can't see it happening anywhere in fact.
The stepmotherly hand is roosting over the illegal hatchers.
The finality, the reality, is too big to raise a voice against it.
*****
Farmers, at least a section of all those who have sown the 1121 sub-variety of the famed Basmati rice in the district, are to gather for a protest and petition to be forwarded to the state government, which in turn ought to forward it to the Centre. And for this, the starting point is to arrive with the petition at the District Commissioner's office.
A fortnight ago, there was a stock-market-type boom, buying and surge in the prices of the 1121 paddy variety. With an average acre producing around 20 quintals, it was expected to fetch anything in excess of 40,000 rupees.
Since this variety is sown about three weeks earlier than the real trademark Basmati, the patrons of this subsidiary jeered with joy at such high returns, which the real branded Basmati would barely hope to match in the coming weeks.
But then the euphoria crashed like the Sensex.
Export was stopped, docks thus dried under the dumped weight. Traders, piqued over such high prices, argued that if the namesake Basmati was selling at such high prices, the prices of the real one would burst through their trading roofs.
A case was thus put up before the legal luminaries.
The price has now crashed.
It is the moment of triumph for the heralders of true Basmati. They gloated over this ill fate of the 1121 paddy variety.
A farmer is the worst enemy of his fellow farmers, as they say.
They will let themselves be cheated by the Baniyas in the mandis. They will forgive the government for all the major crimes against their interests and hard work. But when it comes to things between themselves, they spare no nonsense in hitting each other on the head as hard as possible.
So while the poor 1121-wala farmers gather before the DC office, some real Basmati-wala farmers are heard gloating:
“The fools should be lathi-charged. They must return with their dhotis torn.”
While the worms of despair are eating into the hearts of 1121-sowing farmers, the seeds of hope are sprouting in similar chambers inside the real Basmati-wala farmers.
“The longer the logjam continues, the better the conditions for the stalled market. Our Basmati will then touch the 5,000-rupees-per-quintal mark,” they muse enthusiastically.
*****
Let us now move over to a bit of talk about the heart.
Heart attack is emerging as the biggest killer in the countryside. Even in the rural areas where people's lives are dominated by hard work in the fields, the nemesis has now started to pick up its victims across all age groups and all weight categories.
The news of a hale-looking farming man in his mid-thirties being checkmated by the first cardiac attack now no longer comes as a surprise.
People now have been forced to accept the bitter reality that death is nearer than ever.
Looking at the number of heart-attack cases around in the countryside, one wonders whether the organ, the mythical storekeeper of all the emotions, the soft, sensitive, the soft susurrations of art, culture and history, is on the warpath.
Or are these the death pangs of the rapidly obsolete organ during the heady rush of modern times ruled by reason, ignoring the softer heart?
Traditionally, heart, the organ, has meaning at two levels: in letter and in spirit.
Literally, it is the organ which pumps blood to keep the system going. But this is not what we have known the organ in the chest for.
It is the definition in spirit which makes it the king organ of human anatomy—the keeper of love, truth, empathy, honesty, kindness, spirituality, vibrant emotions.
But all these are becoming the poor tools of laggards in these ultra-reasonable, headily competitive, mammothly materialistic days.
So, shorn of the mythical sheen around it, this lump of flesh is going to snooze with more and more frequency.
It is not that, in increasing the frequency of its collapse, it will be successful in punishing human beings for their treachery.
They are evolving too headily, with the pumping of reason in their arteries and veins.
As per the law of evolution, the next generation will learn to live heartlessly.
Maybe the deaths of the heart are an indication of its rapidly upcoming extinction in modern physiognomy.
After all, in this concrete, solid, material-ridden age, what is the need of a poor heart with its dregs of vibrating images, celebrating emotions, unnecessary pricks of conscience, which are speed breakers on the path of progress?
So the system is getting overhauled.
The heart is getting extinct slowly, slowly, with the passage of each decade.
December, 2007
It has been a good agricultural season for the farmers thus far. Rice varieties across the spectrum have fetched them anything between 25,000 to 55,000 per acre.
Unbelievable.
As prices hurtle towards Mount Everest, this similar gallop shown by agricultural commodities does save them from getting too far behind while corporate India hurtles furiously on the fast-wheeled machine of consumerism and capitalism.
Though the farmers' lurching carts and tractors can't whiz past with the same impetuosity, they have enjoyed a ride—fast as per their rickety, slow-paced, nondescript parameters of earlier.
So the Basmati has been sold at 2,800 rupees per quintal on average.
On the back seat of a night bus, I met two young farmers returning from the market. They were drunk. Jolly well, prattling like schoolgirls, for a good reason, I think. After all, the rice had fetched 2,873 rupees per quintal. More is lying in the fields, they said.
“Today we will have a great time in the fields,” they prattled coarsely, one of them smirkingly drawing the fellow passengers' attention to two bottles of English liquor.
But for so many ecstasies, there are agonies as well.
And the agony amongst agonies is that Sachin is still yet to get over that bad habit of getting out before completing the three-figure mark.
In the ongoing second Test at Kolkata against Pakistan, he was batting aggressively, masterfully, and just when the feeling was vaguely sinking among the packed crowd that the maestro would not deprive them of a treat this time, he got out on 82.
This year he has given us almost dozens of 80s and 90s, but then it is considered a failure if you happen to be a Sachin Tendulkar.
The maestro needs to do something about it.
This nation guzzles on his centuries.
Otherwise, we feel starved.
Internet, getting faster and faster, digitally pumps more and more adrenaline and blood into our mechanising systems while we hurtle away to glory in the present century.
We never had such open, almost unlimited, all-pervasive, efficient means to communicate, get knowledge, process it, store it, manage it, manhandle every bit in the world.
No doubt it has done wonders in bringing instant flash to the realisation of our dreams.
But then, like any other technological device, this thing is a double-edged weapon as well. Those who intend to harm society in some way take up any technological innovation with as much acumen as those for whom the thing is really meant to be.
Yesterday at the cyber café, when I opened my email ID, my heart missed a beat.
I took the message in letter, missed its prankish, treacherous spirit. For me, for no fault of mine, it sounded so genuine.
It was a message from an International Promotional Lottery.
I had won more than two million in a draw among the other emailers. Registration of the society was written. It looked technically perfect. Telephone and fax numbers of the dignitaries concerned with the thing were there.
I was required to make a claim to the agent by giving him the file, batch and draw numbers mentioned in the email.
With my heart missing many a beat, all gullibly, I jotted the information down on paper and forwarded it to the required agent.
Like an instinctively drawn flea to a piece of sugar, I was glued to the first message in the inbox.
After all, the dream of making such big, fat moolah in one go is so strong that it paints almost all of us in the same grey, exulting paint.
A toy-shaking kid, oblivious of all the higher, more intricate realities around us.
And then the realities unfolded, because it was too unreal to be real.
There were twenty such messages, all informing me of my incidentally hitting against bigger and bigger treasure troves. Even though almost fully understanding the fundamentals of such junk mails, I kept on sleepwalking under the initial spell of that initial push and responded to most of the emails.
It was done in almost two hours.
During this time, I forgot the concrete, realistic, rational things—surfing for literary agents and job sites.
One guy claimed to be some official from some ministry in China. His only reason for being interested in me was my status of belonging to some other place than China. He wrote that he had some nice business proposal for me.
But the offer of one from an investment company in Africa busted through the tiny computer cubicle in the café.
He informed me that one billionaire had died heirless, and since he had invested millions of dollars in their company, the treasure was lying unclaimed.
Through some divine intervention, he had chosen me to lay claim as the legal heir to the late rich man.
“All the documents have been prepared. All that is left is for you to lay claim to the treasure,” he wrote.
Well, all in all, a great place for such flabbergasting, interesting fables.
They bombard your mailspace with such impetuosity that it takes many minutes before you have slain the greedy ghost to the dustbin.
But then, who knows? You might end up sending some genuine piece of luck, some treasure, under the all-destroying mace—the simplistic mace decimating all the perfunctory pieces of unrealities.
But then the only way left could be either you read all of them, or none, and move on to more pinching realities.
*****
It is well over three months since the Supreme Court judges have been laying eggs over the judgment.
Now every person with decent common sense is entitled to have some suspicions and make some claims without the fear of moral or constitutional wrong: that all is not well even at the loftiest tower of the Indian judicial system.
The judges have not announced any intention or reason under which the process could have taken so long.
We have every reason to believe that the government is using its all-pervading power to delay the judgment.
Not only are we getting killed, but killed in a halal manner—a blatant cat-and-mouse mockery.
It is as if they want to show us that they not only have the power to deny us water, but they have the power and immorality of making us run after it like a mirage in the desert, to make us run to our death under the fatal illusion of a final spring of water.
The judiciary thus acts, in my eyes, as a subsidiary arm, mercilessly, of the mighty state.
I don't blame the state.
But when the state comes to mean only Mr. Hooda in Haryana and the iron lady forged in Italian mold now ruling in Delhi, then you are always under the risk of being put upon the tormenting scaffold, the chains of legalities tied around you.
The state now becomes the multi-armed centipede.
Even if you get yourself lucky enough to be mollycoddled by one arm, another one will, at some other place, stab through your soft flesh.
For who are you, if not a soft-fleshed caterpillar? If you can't become the hard-shelled constituent of the state, you might cling to some arm for protection or favours.
But how long?
It can't last forever.
In fact, seeking favours with one, you make so many enemies around.
Dr. Mahesh
If not for a few unlucky draws from Lady Luck and a few imprudent steps from the grizzly-bearded, almost blind doctor, his life could have been a storm of recognition, respect and money.
But alas, that wasn't to be the case.
If a man makes or breaks his own fate, then he was the gruesomest of sinners against himself. If destiny plays the tricks, then he was one of the unluckiest fellows around, digging a pit from both sides.
Let us assume that he was the child of both luck—or rather, bad luck—and his own doings, which can safely be put in the bracket of drunkenness.
If ever there can be a case of sheer talent being chained, pilloried by the cold, hard, merciless pangs of drunkenness, it can be none other than Dr. Mahesh Pandit.
Across the dark, gloomy oblivion of gloom and doom of his story, there are flashing, laughing, inspiring auras, giving a clue to his sheer acumen. But providing these clues only becomes a demanding way of finding out what could have been, rather than what emerged in reality.
Most of his story is of this type—what he could have been, rather than what in reality he became.
So, after exemplifying his genius for a flashing moment, if one deprives all the rest of the moments of their share of glory, then the agony of those lost opportunities stares society in the face sternly, accusingly, slamming all and sundry for some collective, common failure.
When such talents are either made to dismantle their future, or bring it upon themselves and go waste, the consequences are far greater and wider than we normally think them to be.
For if a flower is gone, it takes with it many finer things of fragrance and beauty which we might not even be aware of.
Dr. Mahesh from our village belonged to such a category.
He was a concoction of healing properties, cutting across various genres of medication. He was an expert in Ayurveda, reasonably good enough to be called almost an amateur doctor in both allopathy and homeopathy.
And the great thing about him was that he knew where the healing limits of one particular genre lay.
So, in order to handle very critical ailments and symptoms in the countryside, where people had very few options for availing themselves of the best medical facilities, he would prepare a unique concoction involving all three genres—Ayurveda, homeopathy and allopathy.
And Mother Existence had given him miraculous powers of healing.
There were cases where Ayurveda would come in handy, and there were cases where homeopathy would be helpful. And in cases involving trauma, like accidents and all that, where immediate help was required, he would start with allopathy and then come down to homeopathy or Ayurveda to deal with the later stages.
With his expertise, he had arrived at a kind of commingling zone between these three genres, which really helped the villagers.
But he turned out to be a destructive, self-destructive little genius.
He was a chronic drunkard.
You would find him lying like a drunken log beside the open drain by the street, street puppies enjoying his proximity in their full loyalty.
Once, when he had passed out by the village road, I saw a rascally person from the village tie two puppies with a rope and tie the other end to the doctor's hand. The puppies kept licking the passed-out doctor's face.
It was very sad.
But to the people in the village, it was funny as well.
When I look back and imagine Dr. Mahesh, however, what I see is a life of lost opportunities.
He could have done so much for his family.
His family suffered a lot on account of his drunken sprees. They lost financially. They lost socially, because once people find you lying passed out in the street mud, social dignity is the first thing you lose.
People simply do not take you seriously at all.
So he suffered himself, and his family suffered a lot.
But in between, whenever he was not drunk, whoever approached him with whatever kind of critical symptoms—ranging from snakebites to terrible skin diseases, even paralysis—his remedies would rarely fail.
And there came a stage in the last phase of his life when he would be giving medications just for liquor.
And then, one fine day, Dr. Mahesh was gone.
It's a sad story of a pure talent gone astray and into the darkness of oblivion.
September—the season of stray big clouds floating in the azure blue sky, like big wagons acquiring different shapes. This is the season of the retreating monsoon, and instead of the grey and black widespread canvas of monsoon clouds, like in the earlier months, which results in widespread rains, here in September you have sudden drizzles sent down by these mischievously floating clouds.
So, a sudden drizzle here, sunshine there, and due to the rainy season, the trees have a lush green canopy.
There has been lots of nesting by the birds, and a few survivors. Like in a typical nest of a bird—suppose there are four eggs—two or three of them are able to successfully come out of the nest for the first few days of basic training in survival. After a couple of days, I think hardly one or two survive, and at the end of it, possibly just one bird takes full wing to start an independent life for Mother Creation from its end. That's what we call successful nesting.
This is the season of gentle breeze, and you can see lots of children flying kites from rooftops, kites swaying against the various shapes of clouds in the sky.
For the past few days, a group of Asian green bee-eaters has arrived in the area. It's a beautiful bird, sending down trill, trill notes as it flies, taking dives with agility, stalking its prey mid-air—mosquitoes, moths, bees and flies.
Honeybees, I think, hardly form the core of their staple diet as of now because there is hardly any honeycomb left. But yes, houseflies have increased tremendously. So should we rechristen them as fly-eaters instead of bee-eaters?
On the Parijat tree, on its grey trunk, I could see a circular mating of monkey caterpillars. This is the particular pattern that they make in order to stay as a unit and survive.
The trees in the garden have nourished their canopy to such an extent that now the entire garden has a roofing of leaves, with barely any sky visible above.
And look at Mother Nature's beautiful way of maintaining balance. You have these voracious leaf-eaters, the caterpillars, who eat up entire leaves. Just like if you have many rats, you will have snakes. If you have rats, you will have cats. Just a balancing act.
They survive in a group, in a colony, these monkey caterpillars. But those who have fallen from the colony on the leafy Parijat are waging a long survival fight to go and make a shelter somewhere, crawling on the ground, their fate decided by so many chance factors, accidental circumstances which decide whether they reach home. Many of them get squashed under human feet, and possibly, while being left alone in the open on the ground, crawling slowly, some naughty bird with time on its hands tries to break the fuzzy resistance of their bristly hair.
Some of the caterpillars even manage to reach inside the room, and one of them I found in my shoes. I wonder what it would have eaten there.
As far as caterpillars are concerned, it's a very symbolic tale of transformation, like so many other species, phenomena and processes going on on Earth.
The larval stage, the caterpillar, is its feeding stage, with fuzzy hair spikes serving as a defence mechanism against predatory birds. And if it manages to reach the pupa stage, these monkey caterpillars don't form a smooth chrysalis like butterflies. Instead, they spin a silken cocoon, weaving their shed hairs into the silk to make it stronger and save themselves from the predatory beaks of birds.
And inside this cocoon, the famous metamorphosis occurs, and a moth comes out to take flight as an independent entity, taking its lineage further into the cosmic folds of expansion.
These monkey caterpillars are processionary caterpillars, and I found a little colony of them on the host tree, the leafy Parijat, the night-flowering jasmine, trying to survive as a colony, as a unit, aggregating on the trunk and then moving up to devour and eat the green leaves.
The solitary monkey caterpillar that I see crawling on the yard bricks looks like a fuzzy, thick, brownish mass crawling from a distance. But as I look closely, I see its fine, long, brownish-grey bristles spiked along a greyish or dark brown body.
But the Parijat loop was quite interesting, where they were aggregated as a unit. During the daytime heat, they form a circular mat on the tree's main trunk, almost blending with the tree trunk's colour to hide and remain cool. And they break the pattern, as if waking up at dusk, and move in a file or a procession line, heading towards the leafy canopy to eat the green foliage through the night.
And after surviving this phase, they will spin cocoons and then metamorphose into monkey moths.
The monkey moth is a medium-to-large fuzzy moth, having broadish tan or brownish-yellow wings streaked with delicate, wavy patterns—a nice design of Mother Nature on their wings. They are called monkey moths because the adult moth's face and legs have thick, woolly hairs resembling a little monkey's fur.
And one has to be careful. Forget about birds—even humans have to be careful about touching them because they have urticating, that is, stinging hairs. They can give you itching and rashes. And if your hand brushes a bit more forcefully against them, you may end up having bristles stuck in your skin.
And as a colony, they are quite strong eaters. They skeletonize the leaves, meaning they eat the entire leaf, leaving only the veins.
Now, as far as their procession is concerned, they are kind of follow-the-leader champions. If you see them breaking their loop and starting to crawl up the trunk to reach the leafy canopy, it will count as a kind of military-grade procession. The leader leaves an invisible silk trail or pheromone trail, and the leader's rear is followed by the follower's head, which is almost touching the leader's rear.
Like the locked compartments of a train, the entire chain of these caterpillars then moves up the tree.
And there have been very funny experiments in the past to test to what extent they can go into this processionary linear path.
While they are resting during the day to keep themselves safe as well as cool during the hot September sunny noons, it's a big fuzzy group hug. In the hot day, they don't hide individually under the leaves. Rather, they form a tight circular mat. It is a kind of group hug to stay cool and stay safe.
They look like a big hairy circular mass, a single one, and possibly it scares the birds. They find it to be something very big. And if a predator still reaches them, the entire group mat pulsates with a violent hairy rhythm to scare away the bird.
So that gives the moral that strength lies in unity—one and one makes eleven.
These lessons are clearly written over there in Mother Nature. We just should take small pauses and read them. This is an entire endless book of endless lessons of wisdom and practicality.
So these are characterized by synchronized marching with military precision, group hugging to survive as a unit, and when the metamorphosis takes place, these are miniature winged monkeys on closer look—the monkey moths, a kind of funny flying winged monkey.
Now there was this entomologist, Jean-Henri Fabre.
He was an interesting guy. He had the patience to watch and muse over the small world of insects and bugs. Alongside, he had the masterful playing spirit of a child, full of puns and jokes. And when these came together, they would provide funny anecdotes along with so many nice golden bits of truth that he extracted from the existential fabric of Mother Nature.
So he performed an experiment on these processionary caterpillars. It turns out to be a classic dark comedy as well, and the experiment earns the title of the "Circle of Doom."
He saw the hairy caterpillars in his garden. Very cleverly, he coaxed them onto a very big clay flowerpot with a broad rim, and then he manoeuvred them to move around the rim of the flowerpot in a circle.
The leader took the lead, and as it was moving on a circular path, very soon it found itself at the rear end of the last caterpillar.
So now everyone was a leader as well as a follower at the same time, in a closed loop. No leader, all followers—or all followers, no leader—in a never-ending marathon.
So symbolic of the way things go in the human world as well.
So we have to choose our leader very, very wisely.
The poor caterpillars, blindly trusting the chemical trail of the one in front of them, went on marching in the freezing cold at night. During the hot day they paused briefly and rested in a mat. Then, with the arrival of the new sun, they again started on the same circular path.
And it went on for seven days.
On the seventh day, a few starving and exhausted caterpillars stumbled out of the loop. Either it was incidental, or maybe they were pioneer caterpillars, just like you have pioneers in the human world. They laid out a new chemical trail, and the remaining exhausted and wearied followers again followed them—to food and safety this time.
So possibly there are pioneers in the human world as well who have the capacity in them to break the wearied, fatal and doomed loop, and they create an offbeat path that leads to something new.
In real life, there have been a few instances which are quite funny. Jamie Dornan, the star of Fifty Shades of Grey, was playing golf with his friends in Portugal. They were so engrossed in playing that Jamie and his friend brushed quite vigorously and forcefully against a line of pine processionary caterpillars, and they had many bristles sticking into their skin.
They took it to be a minor itch, rubbed themselves with their palms and went on playing.
By evening, Jamie's friend's left arm went completely numb, and his heart was racing. He thought he was having a heart attack. Dornan himself found his hands and legs going numb.
So a medical emergency was declared. They were taken to a hospital, and doctors told them that they had borne the brunt of a passing line of marching caterpillars and ended up having many bristles in their skin. After rubbing, the reaction had become much worse.
Coming back to Jean-Henri Fabre, he had the patience of a lama in a cave, and he combined his childish sense of humour with a lama's patience and meditative presence. It made a very, very striking combination for looking deep into the lives of bugs and insects, even though it made the life of that particular individual bug or insect quite difficult for some time.
His dung beetle prank is quite famous.
Dung beetles roll balls of poop to bury, and while one rolls its booty, a friendly beetle may arrive, apparently to help.
But don't get it wrong.
It comes to steal it.
And there is a fight. The owner beetle has to chase it away.
Now, in order to test the value of the hard-earned dung ball for its owner beetle, Jean-Henri did an experiment. He saw in his backyard, which was his experimental stage to study beetles and bugs, a beetle rolling its dung ball.
After reaching its destination, just when it was about to bury its ball in the ground, Jean-Henri struck a metal pin through the ball and anchored it into the ground to make it unmovable by the beetle.
The beetle kept pushing.
It tried its best from all sides—top, bottom and sides. It even dug underneath to get at it, using all parts of its body to move the ball.
Having failed to do so, it allowed even the thief friend, who had come to steal away its dung ball, to come and push it, as if checking, let us see whether both of us can move it or not.
But then, finding that it was having no effect, it chased the thief away again.
Finally, when the owner beetle realized that the ball could not be moved, it chewed it up again to make a new dung ball and spent hours on it.
So that is the spirit of being possessive about one's booty.
At so many levels, we humans are just repeating the same thing, only on a larger scale. These basic characteristics that we come across in humans seem to be written into the code of existence, and we are just mere, poor, instinctively drawn followers on the path, almost helpless in doing so.
The other experiment that Jean-Henri did was about the cicadas.
The summer air of southern France would leave the entire area buzzing with cicadas, raising such a high-pitched ruckus. People thought that possibly these were mating calls or some sort of communication.
But Jean-Henri had other thoughts.
He arranged a festive cannon, of the type used for blasting on festive occasions, and set it up under a tree in his backyard.
The tree was almost shaking with the high-pitched sound made by hundreds of cicadas. It was such a big vibrational commotion that it would even drill a hole in your mind. It was so strong.
So he blasted the cannon.
The thunder was so loud that his hat fell off his head. It was such a loud bang that even the panes in his windows shook with the effect.
But much to his surprise, the cicadas did not stop buzzing even for a fraction of a second.
They went on with the same high-pitched ease as earlier.
So now it turned out that cicadas could not possibly hear their own noise. They were deaf.
And that makes them a very noisy little bug, because you have such high-pitched intensity and force to make a loud noise, and at the same time, you cannot hear either your own or others' noise.
So that possibly sums up their excitement in making the air so noisy during the musty, hot days.
Post script: And mother existence provides me a live demo of Jean-Henri's experiment. A stray monkey caterpillar, beating its lonely path away from collective security, happens to get onto the rim of a plastic bucket. Now, this, according to me, is quite incidental. Had it gone some linear or curving or serpentine way, I mean anything short of a circular one, it would have at least moved ahead, searching for some chemical trail of a fellow caterpillar, seeking a chance to arrive some leafy shelter even after taking a long cut. At least there was a probability of it reaching some bush or plant if it was lucky not to be squashed under human feet or turned into a hairy uneatable protein ball some over-curious babbler. But it happens to be unlucky to be on a perfect circle. The rim seems inviting, a clear path, an enticing loop. And since they have this natural trait of leaving their pheromones in their wake, it gets into a vicious circle of circular chemical trail. Then its own trail seems like left by some other caterpillar's and there it goes on and one, caught in the vicious circle of its own traits, tendency. It's so difficult to break the futile loop of inherent tendencies and collective identities. And here lies a great lesson for we humans as well. We have to break the loop if we really want to grow and evolve. We have to seek our own path, however lengthy, haphazard, random it seems to be. It should at least not close into a loop. Because in that case you end up reaching from where you had started.
I saw it at night and the poor thing looked tired the next morning after the nightlong procession on its circular path, going after its own scent. So I picked it up on a leaf and left it among food and safety among plants. So maybe luck too plays a massive part in where we land up, as big as chance. But then luck is nothing but a positive chance.
Post Post-script: Most often the futile loop laid by someone else, and later consolidated by scores of other followers, becomes our own loop of futility. The collective confirmatory chemical trail, taking you in the same beaten circle. So this morning here is another follower of the trail. The previous caterpillar, salvaged by luck through my hands, left its pheromone trail across the circular rim and here comes the instinctive follower, going in circles thinking it will lead it to food and shelter.
These little ones will need loads of luck to be safe from the rascals mentioned below:
And anong all this, a village poet wonder stuck at all this interplay of contradictory elements on the surface but a deep unity beneath all this segmentation on the surface.
Post-scritpt:
