Mother's Day

 

Mother’s Day falls on May 14. Maa left us in January 2020. With Mother gone, one is suddenly less loved, forever. Because who else will love you so selflessly? The space that a mother leaves in one’s heart stays vacant forever. It cannot be filled. Till your mother is around, and even if you yourself are old, you hardly feel that you are old. After all you are still someone’s child and your mother would show the same care like she did when you were small. So how can you feel old?

I keep convincing myself that Mother is now part of everything around me. In her human form she gave me birth, reared me, protected me, nurtured me. She still does the same as Dharti Mata, Mother Earth. So to me Mother’s Day and Earth’s Day are just the same. In her lap I walk, enjoy, shit, pee, cry, laugh, throw tantrums. The very same child of yore.

It pains to see Mother Earth getting older and older, her strength failing to support the errant kids. But She will give her all till She lives. I’m not a power aspirant. I know I cannot handle it. But if ever I’m given some authority I would make cutting the trees without justified permission a punishable offence. I know it’s hardly possible. But this type of daydreaming helps me in imagining a lush green earth at night.

An ode to the spring

 Summer the moth is passionately kissing the dewy petals of spring blossoms in my courtyard!!! The heat of its greedy passion is building up!! Aye, summers plz stay away from my flowers for some more time!!

All pains and suffering lose their meaning in the face of such smiles. Wake up to a beautiful spring morning. The worst of frosty nights are over. The sun shines warmly. The air is fresh. The skies bathed in repainted blue. The trees assertive through new saplings. The birds ecstatic. And with a kissable smile, Mother Nature sends her assurance through a belated spring. The message of love, life, living and compassion. Listen to it. Read it written all over. Her child is sick. She has redecorated the garden with utmost care. So when the child comes out of the sick bed, there will be plenty of fun and frolics. She just just put her child to bed for rest and recuperation. Most importantly, she has given the little picture of alphabets for the child to revise and recollect the basics of existence, the simplest things which the child has forgotten as it made its postdocs thesis too complex. Time to shed the burden. High time to smile more. Acquire the natural cosmetics of health and glow with peace of mind. To hug the trees. Kiss the flowers. Listen to the singing rivulets. To lie on grass and stare at the vast canvas of the sky. To breathe in life and let go of anger, hate and jealousy. To shed animosity. To love animals. To allow Mother Nature to stay undisturbed in pristine forests. To maintain the sanctity of the seas. To distribute dignity to the masses instead of amassing wealth in select pockets. To make this little home earth a paradise instead of seeking heaven in the cosmos. To liberate faith from the clutches of dogma. To replace paranoid competition by balmy cooperation. To rest, repose for creative imagination. To walk joyfully instead of huffing and puffing to another same boring destination. To be joyful and help others be the same. To complete the journey so joyfully and fully that the culmination loses its pain. To reach the destination full of grace, dignity and with a smile. To say goodbye not with a painful sigh, but with smiling tears of feeling blessed!

The storm screeched through the night,

Poured its fury through sadistic love bite,

Undefeated but smiles the beauty,

Still doing its fragrant duty,

Her holy petals bear 

the storm's violating drops without fear,

Holy beads now they are,

Smiles, smiles and no war!

There is always hope,

As long as nature holds the rope

through its smile pure, 

Survive we will for sure!

A sad tree

 

The mourning tree...it was once a huge, luxurious semal (silk cotton tree). In March and April it used to smile with big, red, luscious flowers. Then the sand mafia came. Greedy for the river silt piled around this tree, they scraped away earth, cutting its big roots. The tree survived somehow. But it hasn't smiled even once, not a single flower, during the last two years. And now when the spring is at its peak and flowers are abloom on uninjured semal trees, this sad tree stands without even a single leaf, forget about flowers. It's its way of showing its mourning over the loss. It still greets me with its sad barren silhouette. I feel its pain. With a little extension of our sensitivity, we can feel and be aware of the joys and sorrows of the non human component of life on earth. The flowers are their smiles. The sap oozing from the cuts on the bark are their tears. Their luxurious canopy swaying to the winds is their dance. The ripe fruits, shadow and fresh air is their kindness. It's all there. We just need to be aware of it.

I put my hand on its hard bark. A handshake. An acknowledgment of we humans' rapacious ways. I feel sorry from the side of the humans. 'Don't worry, I am trying to smile with flowers and one fine day I will welcome you on this solitary trail with my flowers!' it seems to say. Well, best of luck you fighter tree. You are injured but big and strong. Keep your faith alive. Let's hope for the best during the next spring. And till then our handshake and greetings continue...in my heart and your wooden tissues, let this friendship stay fresh!. It's a lovely friendship and I'm honoured to be your friend, privileged to feel your pain and would be joyous in sharing your spring smiles.

The story of a wounded tree

 

This is for the history-minded common people who care to know about small things. We trees are highly underpaid and under-appreciated. What’s something preposterous is that it’s we who have sired the evolution of mankind and now we depend on him for our survival. We are numbered now—from that countless status when mother earth was lush green earlier—and there will be a time when the heritage lobby will be fighting to keep our ruins as a memorial for the past when mother earth was alive. There will be machines all around and human brain itself will be replaced by the artificial intelligence.

I’m a seemal (silk cotton) tree standing by the canal-side pathway. It used to be a beautiful thin ribbon of solitude between the canals overgrown with few trees and lots of grass, bushes and reeds. A poetic man would walk in somber profundity on the path. Then the developers hoeing the dirty grind of parasitic business arrived. The sand mafia would arrive at night and scoop away the sand from the canals and the path between them. The chauvinistic pigs would scrape out as much grains of sand as possible to build their big buildings. The earthmover’s claws were lucid, pertinent and driven by soulless precision. It would work with pure sense of abstraction. Its zealousness would cut the upper lateral roots of we trees to dig out more and more sand to fill the truck to the brim. The solitudional luminosity for the lone poetic man was gone; the grass, reeds and bushes obliterated; the smaller trees fell and bigger ones like me survived the onslaught with cut limbs and big gaping wounds. The cast and crew of development are too big actors now.

When the poetic man came and saw my big roots exposed and cut, he put a healing sad hand on my trunk. The edifying notes of his love touched my innermost rings in the trunk. He made a very little effort, this is all he could manage being a poetic man, and sweated for a couple of hours to gather soil around my wounded roots. For me the spiritual symbolism of this love is beyond its physical limits. It feels good to be cared and one’s pain acknowledged. But a small group of thugs took away even that little heap of earth this man’s poetic hands had built around me. I think they did it specifically to make it seem self-mocking to the poet—that your kind of emotions are meaningless in the modern age; that this artistic outlet is nothing more than a speck of dust in the face of the horses of greed in full trot. Since then I have tried to muster up courage to the extent of granitic endurance just for that poetic man who sometimes comes and puts a friendly hand on my bark. But I missed my flowers this season, the beautiful big red flowers, one of which I had intentionally dropped on his head as he walked under me. That’s when we became friends. So there have been no flowers because I have been using all my energies in keeping myself up with the remaining roots. My foliage also has been the same for the last one year. It’s pale without any new shoots. I’m still in mourning, you know.

They have cut a little square on my bark, a sort of numbered nameplate declaring my number, a kind of my leasehold to stand on this small portion of earth till they decide to terminate it any time. I sanctify their insinuations and grotesqueness by oozing my sap, my tears, through the square marking. This disquieting incision on my skin keeps reminding me that I’m their numbered property under some forest law that easily allows some thugs to lacerate me. I have a message for the bloodhound. I let out a yellowish sap through this little square of licensing cut. It coagulates to a meaty sanguine blob. I have obliterated their despicable number that they had assigned me. It’s my revolt. I don’t agree to their lease contract under whatever forest laws they have. The law that doesn’t provide me any protection and leaves me open to be vandalized by any thug whose spirit itches to play truant.

The poetic man sometimes comes and puts his gentle fingers on the protruding sanguine crust from my guts. I see his mournful countenance. This human touch is astonishing. It snaps off the thread of pain for a few moments. How I wish more humans could touch we trees like this! How I wish that more humans realized we are half of their lungs!

Reparation and redemption

 

Greying, thinning hair and pepper and salt beard. These are the changes in me that I reflect over. It’s just natural to spot the change within and without. But aren’t the little saplings of banyan and peepul that I had planted are handsome young trees now? Yes, they are! They are the expression of my youth. They are me. If you ever get bothered about age, do something fresh and young in nature, where you will always see the traces of your youth expressed in those creations. Plant trees, for example. Keep doing it periodically so that you always have some young tree lad youthfully swaying to the breeze as an expression of the youth of your spirit.

Winters changing to summers

 

It’s February 21 and the maximum temperature already 31 degrees. In a decade or so the winters will turn spring and a few more decades down the line it will be an all summer affair. Well that’s change. And it lies there in the future. As of now there are still wild flowers along the little solitary path. This is more important than what is not available or what we will be missing in the future.

The spring is stalled and there is a beacon of summer or rather beacons of summer—numbering three. Three black stray dogs are coming at a trot and their red flashy tongues are hanging out, saliva shakings to the tunes of rapidly approaching summer. I have taught one of them a nice lesson. As I stroll around the countryside, dozens of stray dogs would bark at my intrusion. Then due to many reasons, such as getting used to my presence, amply aided by my soft cuddling words, they learnt to ignore me. All of them except one. This guy kept hollering at me daily without any provocation, despite the softest of my words. It made me feel like a thief in the broad daylight. It would be particularly aggressive, almost on the verge of biting me, whenever the farm owner, around whose fields it had marked its territory, would be present. It wanted to show its loyalty. Having exhausted all the means of bringing peace between us, I resorted to the last avenue. It required only this much. I had to change my lazy stroll to a blizzard of dash like an Olympics sprinter. This I did to good effect with a stick in my hand, raising a big hullaballoo along the way. Out of wits, the dog went rocketing over the planted wheat. I gave the chase to the capacity of my legs and lungs. I collapsed on the ground to recover my breath but luckily the animosity in the dog had also collapsed. After that it started respecting me. It would give me way and moved to the side as I approached. I think in handling incorrigible chaps a reasonable use of force is needed. Too much of generosity and elegance in behavior is taken for granted, is interpreted as weakness, and then even stray dogs won’t take you seriously.

There was this little piece of land covered with eucalypts trees, the ground covered with shrubbery and bushes giving a dense second canopy. It looked a little dot of refuge for wilderness among the well-manicured, tamed farm lands around. A little wild hovel for cats, rats, jackals, reptiles and birds. The farmer has sold it. It’s a clear skyline now. There is sadness in the air. But we cannot blame the farmer. He must have had his own reasons to cut it. But at least for a decade and half his trees gave oxygen to us and some wild space for the species that are losing their rights on mother earth.

I palpably miss the presence of those threes in the countryside. It feels like one more step towards swathes and swathes of treeless avenues where mechanized human systems would forge a new civilization completely unrelated to the raw forces of nature. A new species altogether. But isn’t that change? Didn’t dinosaurs become extinct? So, does it matter too much if we also become extinct some day and are replaced by a half-mechanized, artificially nurtured new super-species that will have the poor few—who will remain the same old homo sapiens due to their poverty and limited circumstances—homo sapiens of old blood, bones and capacities, either as zoo specimen or at the most as poor household servants. Change is the ultimate master.

A day in the life of a butterfly

 The lightness of being a Blue Tiger Butterfly...

Eco-heroes

 

A virginal forest is cut on a pristine island in the Andaman. I’m glad that at least we are paying a lip-service to the cause of environment. The government plans to compensate for this loss by planting trees in the Aravalis near Delhi NCR. Well, the world seems to have taken the cause of environment very casually. The expression of loss falls well short of awakening people to the fact of irreversible damage.

It’s befitting the fabric of a humane self to grieve over the ecological loss. As a beacon of hope, there are eco-heroes who are holding processions, dinners, benefit concerts, readings and memorial rituals to mark the dents and bruises suffered by mother nature. They have put red gauze flags signposting dead mangroves in Goa. Artists and environmentalists are setting up monuments to pay homage to the lost species. As mega-floods, super-droughts and super-storms come out shrieking, voicing mother earth’s agony, soft and sensitive souls get under a pal of despair, depression and anxiety. They hold gatherings to commemorate the extinct species. There is a memorial dinner for Dodo in London; there is a candle march and handwritten posts for extinct and imperiled pollinators. Musicians, scientists, filmmakers and academicians express their sense of loss at the death of a glacier. A memorial plaque stands for a huge majestic tree gone extinct. An Australian artist composes songs for dying reefs. In December 2018, Olafur Eliasson fetched thirty blocks of ice from Greenland and put them at public squares in London to melt away, hoping it would melt the ice clods in our hearts also. In Canada the creaking sounds of a dying glacier are broadcast live through speakers so that the office goers know what they are walking upon; so that they realize that a part of earth is groaning with pain and agony. Somewhere a glacier stops moving, groans, cracks, melts and dies. At least some people hold a memorial ceremony to commemorate the dying ice. In Oregon a funeral for Clark glacier is held. A coffin full of meltwater from Clark glacier is ferried to the steps of State Capitol building. And somewhere far away a lone tree holds the last baton for its species. It’s Wood’s Cycad, a native of South Africa, the only tree of the species left in the world.

Belated greetings on the World Environment Day

 Wish you all a happy world environment day! Save trees, save mother Earth!

Let's celebrate the Environment Day! Mother earth is the root cause of all our joys. Go close to nature. She needs your healing touch. As Bond Sahab says:

"The more intimate you are with the natural world -- the world that exists without actually having to worry about how to exist -- the more we will come to terms with our own natures."

If Mother Earth stands any chance at all, it lies there if we treat each day of the year as the Environment Day. Everything less than it falls well short the least redemption.

Sow a seed of love. A seed that will one day sprout, spread, bloom, sway to the breeze. It will remain as your best footprint on the planet once you move ahead on your journey in a different dimension. Be a plant parent! Happy environment day to all!

Happy Environment Day

 Wish you all a happy world environment day! Save trees, save mother Earth!

Let's celebrate the Environment Day! Mother earth is the root cause of all our joys. Go close to nature. She needs your healing touch. As Bond Sahab says:

"The more intimate you are with the natural world -- the world that exists without actually having to worry about how to exist -- the more we will come to terms with our own natures."

If Mother Earth stands any chance at all, it lies there if we treat each day of the year as the Environment Day. Everything less than it falls well short the least redemption.

Sow a seed of love. A seed that will one day sprout, spread, bloom, sway to the breeze. It will remain as your best footprint on the planet once you move ahead on your journey in a different dimension. Be a plant parent! Happy environment day to all!

Climate Change

 

Time sweeps the slate clean and draws a new picture, only to do it again. Climate change has seen unprecedented droughts world over—and flooding—especially Europe and America. As rivers and reservoirs dry, there emerge telltale footprints of the largest animals earth has seen, dinosaurs. Weighing dozens of tons and standing taller than even our buildings who would have imagined they would be wiped out one day. A comet or meteorite strike off the coast of Mexico—leaving an almost 100 mile wide and 12 mile deep crater—unleashed  tidal waves and global winter. The dinosaurs vanished from earth.

Presently, as rivers in France and Germany dry up, we see hunger stones exposed—a kind of famine memorial engravings—telling the tales of human sufferings. The engravers left them as a mark of severe drought and famine that struck the region. When the rivers dried up and the humanity hit the rock bottom of miseries, someone engraved this message on an exposed stone in the river: ‘When you see me, weep.’ Another famine stone has the message: ‘When this stone goes under, life will become more colorful again.’

The Earth Overshoot Day

 

The Earth Overshoot Day is the day when we have used all that the ecosystem can replenish and regenerate in one year. On July 28, we have already consumed all that mother earth will be able to renew in a year. It means what mother earth generates in one year we eat it up in almost half of the time. So for the rest of the year we are borrowing from the natural coffers at the cost of future generations.

Mother earth’s bio-capacity is severely overstretched. As per the current consumption levels, it would take almost two earths to sustain us. There are countries that chuck out an entire year’s sustainable resources within just two-three months at the beginning of the year. For the rest of the year, they would be drawing from the deposited pool of resources, the pool that is diminishing rapidly and will surely go empty one day.

Well, I should abandon all gloomy thoughts born of these stats for the time being. An earthworm is not bothered either. After a spell of monsoon rain the earthworm seems all joyful.

The earth is all wet

and the earthworm is all set

to crawl to a new home.

 

It seems a huge effort by the earthworm to move. It has to stretch its length repeatedly and make a humpbacked U in the middle to stretch and bring forth the tail part by a few millimeters with each heave. An ant-swarm crawls out. The breakfast is almost steady, a slightly shifting breakfast it is to them. They would love to eat it alive. They have the numbers with them. Like the politicians have the numbers to eat our public money in one way or the other. There are hundreds of tiny bites. It wriggles with pain. I think we are like the ant-swarm and poor earth is like the earthworm. It’s wriggling with pain as we the human-swarm continue biting it non-stop, twenty-four hours a day and 365 days of the year.

Uncaring children

 

Cultural anthropologists say that the human society functions on the principles of ‘reciprocity’ and ‘obligations’, both at the individual and collective levels. All our relationships work on the principle of ‘reciprocity’. You feel obliged, even indebted, if someone has done you a favor. If someone has given you something, helped you in some way, or even simply smiled at you, the inherent sense of obligation will firmly ask you to return the favor whenever possible in whatever form. Most of our likes and dislikes are based on what people have given us. If they have given us joy, we like them, love them, feel indebted, and return the favor. If they have given us pain, we return the same. But we hardly do the same in case of mother earth. We forget the principle of reciprocity and indebtedness. We just keep on taking and mother earth keeps giving. That is entirely slyly slanted, one-way process. What we give her back is extraordinarily miniscule (in terms of her health) in comparison to what we extract from her.

Just to show our fellow human beings low, we are drawing longer lines of achievement by their side. The fire of competition persistently burning. The planet crashing like a fiery meteorite. We have already chucked out most of the attractive, holistic heritage that fell into our entitlement. We have taken mother nature for granted and the consequences are plainly scattered around for us to see. Her grievous moanings are no faint ripples anymore. These are piercing cries. Hear them!

Climate Change & a Monkey's Personal Pool

 

Monsoon is a crazy, proud lover. It knows 1.3 billion people are seeking its date. It teases sometimes and gets late. This time she sanctioned June 30 as the appointment date with the Delhi NCR. It showered its pining thirsty lovers with soul-pacifying kisses through drops. When the monsoon hits the sandy burning lips, a mystical fragrance of the soil surrendering to water pervades around. Sadly, I missed the smell. A neighbor had lit up his heap of single-use plastic and the toxic fumes rode the backs of the low clouds and killed the trademark smell of the first summer rain. It was nice to see the first monsoon showers but sad to have missed the famous fragrance of the first monsoon rain. In any case, we will have to bear up with hugely curtailed joy in future.

Western Europe is burning in July. For the first time in its documented history, the UK records forty degree plus temperature. France burns at 46°C. Forest fires. Burning grasslands. Denmark also records its maximum temperature in history. The house is on fire. Do we still need more proofs of global warming? Spain, Portugal, Germany all are in the grip of heat that is typical of northern Indian summers. Now is the time to think of global warming. Hypersonic missiles, wars, superpower status won’t have any meaning if all of us get roasted alive.

Half of the world is caught in forest fires. The other half is flooded. The planetary system seems to be crumbling down while we are using time, energy and resources in developing still deadlier weapons. It seems as if the catastrophes born of climate change are not issues at all. It’s like bubbles fighting among themselves in a boiling cauldron.

The glaciers are melting at an unprecedented rate. The Italian-Swiss border in the Alps is denoted along glaciers. Now the glaciers are melting and the borders are thawing and shifting. An Italian mountain ridge is now being pulled into different directions by the opposing nationalities. The melting snows and the shifting drainage patterns have shifted the Italian ridge into the neighboring country. Now, around two-third of the ridge is technically within the Swiss territory. So the man-made boundaries are melting. Mother nature is giving a message that our cartographic lines don’t matter much to her. High time that we all think now in terms of the planet as one entity and consider ourselves as citizens of mother earth first. The rest are all secondary denominations.

We have perilously shrunk within our civilizational interiors leaving the exteriors—everything non-human among flora, fauna and the rest that constitutes earth—as mere utilities. We have gone on the wildest of eternal quests in pursuance of the completely unending path of ambition. We have turned into extravagantly rich-bodied people with shoddily poor souls. And all these natural disasters are merely reflecting the chronic dissonance between what we actually need and what we try to grab out of greed. The seminally formative natural forces lay ravaged. The sprawling canvas of mother earth’s natural painting is replaced by a fractious abstract art drawn with grotesque sense of redrawing anything natural with artificiality—the human-centric abstract art that absolutizes the ultimacy of our madness to keep utilizing natural resources at any cost. The free gifts of mother nature that were once quintessentially common are now swiped away and grafted with our crass mundanities. The virile vibrance of our vigorous negativism eclipses the earth. Where are the starry skies that once crooned moonily? As the centuries old trees fall mother earth sadly applauds the feats of her child, the child who is engaged in a mega-larceny.

Here in our part of the world, the temperature may be around 40°C but it feels like 60°C. You feel being roasted slowly. In the locality there is a vacant plot with plenty of wild growth. The owner thought of putting it in order by cutting the weeds, grass and bushes. As a result, a few snakes, monitor lizards and other reptiles turned homeless. They crept around seeking a new home. It created a big scare among the humans. A big rat snake sneaked into our garden as well. It’s a non-venomous snake. But irrespective of the category of snakes, poisonous or not, our fear is in proportion to their length. The fact is that rat snakes help us by chucking out rats and mice. But their size scares us. We cannot believe that such a big snake can be harmless. Never go by the appearances.

Wherever there is a snake many people gather around because it’s a common enemy. One of my uncles killed it exclaiming, ‘It’s a big one and dangerous!’ All of us felt very bad about the killing. It was the first Monday of shravan. It struck our conscience as a sin but what to do. Our fears turn us helpless and critically limit our choices. But we have a suitable accomplice in all our deeds and misdeeds. We absolved ourselves by quoting certain scriptures that clarify that probably it’s not a sin to kill a snake if it enters your house.

And beyond all these scary climatic issues a monkey has found his personal pool of water to beat the suffocating heat and humidity on this clammy, partially clouded noon. He has expertly disposed off the lid from the rooftop water tank. There he sits on the opening’s rim, his red bum safe on the frame, his tail hanging down, his smart paws holding the edges. He casts the look of owning a rooftop swimming pool. After enjoying a look of supreme solace he goes into the water, wallows for some moments and comes out sleek and shining. I saw him enjoying this for at least half an hour which included about ten dips in the water. The family of course would be using monkey-treated water.  

An ode to a snail

 

Next time you come across a snail give it a bit more respect than you did earlier. They move slowly as if carrying carefully cultivated, standstill reflections but they hold the recipe of beauty as well. Latest skincare products use snail mucin, snail secretion filtrate, which is found to be effective in skin healing, regeneration, works as a nice exfoliant, soothes and hydrates the skin, has anti-aging properties, removes acne scars and much more. Currently the Korean culture is high-riding the fame horse from music to movies. Snails have been a part of Korean beauty concoctions since ancient times. O thou conjuring satraps, whenever you come across a snail next time, slow down your pace to its own, take a pause, move a few centimeters alongside the guy always at ease, salute it. Maybe being balanced, poised and at pause holds the secret secretion of beauty.

The smart beetle

 Anyone who has worked in the corporate must have heard about ‘smart work’ scoring over ‘hard work’. In the competitive corridors of corporate buildings the so-called smart guys rule supreme. The victory of smart work over hard work spawns many an anecdote. Hard work is symbolically very dramatic. But it’s the smart work that pulls the strings of the mules. It carries a progressive veneer; smartness coming handily convenient. Just like this little rove beetle does. The ants are the hardworking laborers of the insect world. So inevitably there are supposed to be smart corporate guys among insects to take advantage of poor hardworking ants.

The rove beetle is very smart. Using its skill of smell and touch it dupes the ants into taking himself as an ant larvae. The befooled ants protect the impostor and nourish him like their own. The poor ant parents believing they are raising a handsome kid. Meanwhile, apart from all the bounties ferried by the tireless workers, the rove beetle feasts upon the ant eggs and their young ones. Isn’t it a real smart work? Now take a close look at the successful corporate guys around you!

Natural tricksteries in nature

 There is a beautiful set of program hatched by two species of fish. This is a mutual agreement among a species of larger fish and a much smaller fish. Normally the bigger fish eat the smaller ones. But here the predator-prey equation has been postponed for mutual benefits. It’s a ceasefire; burying the hatchet for gains beyond hunger and food. The group of bigger fish becomes stationary, almost sedately retired, and opens their mouth and allows the smaller fish to enter their jaws. Once inside, the little cleaners pick up fungus and other parasites from the mouth. They continue their cleaning services all over the body as well. One party gets its dinner and the other gets cleaned up.

The question is, how has been this fear of the smaller fish for the bigger one stalled in the evolutionary survival chain? To signal that they mean to perform a clean-up service operation, the smaller fish perform a kind of ‘undulating dance’. The bigger fish forgets its hunger and the more pressing issues of cleanliness strike home the message. They stop swimming, open their jaws and turn relaxing like one lies for massage and pedicure.

But then there are always very keen observers of others’ behavior also. A little fish named sabre-toothed blenny has been keeping a keen eye on the housekeeping, cleaning and picking dance of the real cleaner fishes. So here they play smart and perform the same dance. The bigger fish allow them to come near without eating them. They mistake the looters for ministering angels. The cunning blenny then takes a bite of flesh from the unsuspecting host’s belly and scampers away. Well, this would count as paying the costs of cleaning services. But to a different species though.

It seems we can no longer solely count upon human frailties for the darker shades of character. We have co-sharers of the burden. There are species that are anciently ingenious in their machinations to loot, plunder, deceive and run away with their booty. In the game of survival, there is a highly creative incandescence that lights up the cells in all types of manifestations around. 

Deadly lovers

 

The female fireflies of the genus Photinus have a lovely love-thirsty courtship code carrying a sensuous shine, when they are ready to mate, to send loftily high, seductive signals to the males regarding their willingness for lovemaking. This courtship blinking triggers a surrender mood in the males and they run to embrace love. Then there are killer females of the firefly genus Photuris. They seem to have cracked the code. They also send the all goody apparently Photinus-sounding love signals. Seeking the divine direction of an unquenchable love-thirst, the Photinus males flutter to embrace love. They pursue the multifarious glamour with eclectic passion. They miss the desired destination by a long-long mark and it soon turns to death’s ever-lasting final embrace. Then the sensuously stylish ladies, the Photuris females, eat them with awful female valor. The sensuous flowers turn out to be thorn traps. The males hardly getting a chance to even nurture any kind of repenting reflections over their choice. Well, there are always bound to be stormy ripples in the sea of love. This is what we call cracking the code of love to eat your man. And we always relate the beastly, clawy contrivance to the homo sapiens only! All the shades of human character seem to be already etched in nature. All the fifty shades of gray and more seem to be structured inherently in the subconscious entrenchments of the energy field walloping around us. Isn’t this creation a motley mess of wonders?

Year-long summers

 We are piling up data like no other hunter-gatherer, among any species on earth, collects anything. And on top of that we have computers to store data, so here come more and more numbers with each passing second. One little statistical fact: June 19 was the first and the only day since March 11 when the maximum temperature was 30°C, a day of least maximum temperature during the interval. I mean it happens to be the least maximum temperature in the interval from March 11 to June 19. Nothing surprising here, it’s a routine burning summer in north Indian plains. My only worry is that the most of March had more than 30°C temperature. It makes March a summer month. Where is our spring in that case? We have to shift it to the second fortnight of February which once used to be the peak of winters. There would be a time in the coming decades when the coldest days of January, as they stand now, would qualify as a brief spring. Finally we will have year-long summers. These are the perils of global warming. It’s fearsomely hard-hitting. The fragile frontiers of varied seasons will give in. The illustrious legacy of winters, springs and autumns will be held by myths. It surely will happen unless we plant trees, save forests, cut pollution, abandon our deceiving double standards, give an ear to the circumspecting nerves, and on top of that somehow systematically tame the bug of consumerist greed in our brain. 

The elephant lost a human right

 So the court has ruled that Happy is not a person, he is an elephant. A court was hearing a petition whether the zoo-confined pachyderm in the US could have human rights superseding his animal rights. Had the verdict gone in his favor, he would have been released in semi-freedom in a big sanctuary. Alas, that wasn’t to be! I think all animals should have human rights and the humans, with their huge sets of ominous rumblings, will do pretty well with animal rights. After all, we are the strongest animal among the booming bedlam on earth. Mother earth is replete with the abundant sagas born of our criminal candor and odious excesses. So who else is the biggest claimant of animal rights?