Runaway Husbands by Sandeep Dahiya

 It’s a beautiful world. If you are happy and joyful, this entire existence feels the same through you. If you exist on a plane of harmony and peace, you invite the entire cosmos to the same plane. When you smile, everything around you does the same. So be a joy-maker and see the beauty underlying everyone and everything around you. 

Look out for beautiful souls around you. They are great in their simple ways. They are exceptional and unique even while they are part of the rutted routine. But they run this world and touch our lives in constructive ways that we hardly realise. As Charles Dickens says, ‘It's not possible to know how far the influence of an amiable honest-hearted duty-going man flies out into the world; but it’s very possible to know how it has touched one’s self in going by...’ 

Through my stories, I try to positively touch the lives of my dear readers. These stories 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. As Thoreau sums it up so beautifully: ‘Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.’

2119 AD: An Alien Research on Earth's Ruins

 

I don’t intend to sound like a frustrated loudmouthed propagator of doomsday scenario. However, with our iron-fisted, hard approach, resulting in taming nature and subjugating other species, giving rise to a scenario when we humans are too many to be friends and in the consequent fear and suspicion we become enemies of each other, there seems to be a sure-shot possibility of crash-landing in a pit.

With love and emotions taking a backseat, and mechanization of human self gone full throttle, there is a possibility of the confrontation going out of control. The chances of peace plummet down. Then you can expect anything. With our steely nerves, we are more of the agents of destruction instead of creation. The things that we count as creation are nothing but desperate efforts to counterbalance our own previous follies. And solutions to follies themselves are no lesser follies.

Since mankind’s occupation of earth, by beating rest of the species through his main faculty, brain, everything has changed. Creaking carts with wooden wheels changed to spaceships. The acts of Gods came to be resolved as mere weather phenomena. Everything changed it seems. But there is an exception: happiness hasn’t increased and misery hasn’t come down. The latter in fact has soared up like never before.

In fact, modern man is far unhappy than the ancient one. Simple reason is the use of logic and science for creation and destruction at the same time. One step forward, one step backward: Life and death overlapping. Where will we go? The net result is zero. So we stand at the same place where we started from.

Medical research is doing wonders to beat mortality, overcome diseases, lessen pain and increase the quality of life. One step forward, accepted. But then the destructive face is no less on innovation. Nuclear weapons that can wipe out the entire earth, chemical weapons, missiles, warships, guns, bullets: many steps backward. You make deadliest weapons to take as many lives as possible. Then you contrive the best means to save lives through bullet-proofs, bunkers, shelters, helmets, surgeries and medicines.

Ease of life through modern utilities, one step forward of course. The consequent destruction of environment, multiple steps backward. The latter puts up innumerable challenges before mankind, thus necessitating further chains of remedial actions and innovations. The so called solutions to the problems turn out to be still bigger problems in the medium and long term. All this doesn’t seem to make much sense to me. It’s simply going nowhere.

It has been a plain, mindless hot-pursuit. Ever since we surged ahead on the path of civilization, it has been a rampant, mad rush to go ahead, at whatever cost. There has never been a civilized pause, a hiatus, a break to ponder over, to think about the costs we have paid: a calculating look back and around to evaluate future. All civilizations pushed for a relentless thrust, to march on, with full force, at whatever cost. Mind you, marching on and on, the storm, the fire, these cannot go forever. Such hot-pursuit and crazy race cannot sustain itself. It has to come to an end. It’s as per the laws of science. If you run forever, you will collapse. One has to take a pause somewhere to sustain the march.

The progress without a pause ends in a disaster. It simply isn’t sustainable. In genetically ingrained and socially ordained hot-pursuit, have we ever thought of devising the means of systemic pause and rest, for ourselves, for countries, for this planet itself? Only rest, peace, calm and love are sustainable, because these are not burning with the fiery energy. So before we continue rampantly and dive headlong into the abyss across the precipice, cannot we learn to devise civilizational pause, when this planet earth gets a holiday, for some time, its lungs getting a lease of life, its freshwater bodies getting lesser pollutants, its sickly body getting a sound sleep to help recovery and rejuvenation?

Just like we have carbon cut quotas, cannot we have population cut quotas? It will help. It will save earth from being inundated with human ant-swarms, who will ultimately eat the environment itself that sustains them. Cannot everything be slowed down at regular intervals to save the critically exponential stats from nose-diving into a deathtrap?

Long before a superior, antagonistic extra-territorial life overpowers us, or a rogue planet crashes into earth, or sun explodes, we will surely destroy ourselves before any such eventuality. And when that happens, some alien researchers will sigh with wonderment, looking at our ruins and archaeological remains, much like we marvel at the ruins of ancient human civilizations such as Harappa, Egypt and Babylon, and think and build hypothesis about the causes that brought about the downfall. 

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.

Rape: Peak of Violence and Nadir of Love

 

The modern civilization has a rapist approach. With recklessness and impunity we are plundering natural resources. Ambition and materialistic greed has reached each and every nook and corner of earth. It will now get into space. Well, if we are on the path of evolving as some far more monstrous species, then my criticism may be unwarranted. But from what I see, as a common human being, the endeavor counts as raping mother earth. Species are becoming extinct, forests are vanishing, pollution poses as the agent of death and whales are dying with quintals of plastic in their guts. To me all this qualifies as rape. The modern man is rapist by nature.

However, the idea of a rapist species may not be too appealing to most of us. So let us limit our discussion to rape as we know it. Rape: the act of criminality perpetrated by a man on a woman, forcing his will on her against her consent, thus objectifying, violating her body and bruising her soul forever. Rape is the catastrophe, the most loveless infringement, when the rapist hits the rock hard bottom of most beastly existence. It’s an act aimed at harming the soul. The world appears glaringly violent with rapes.

Long before we see the flower, the process starts at the roots. There are seeds of rape. Fruits are the result of a long process that began with the seeds. The deeds or misdeeds are not sudden sprouts; they also carry their seeds, their incubation, their structural building and growth before the final appearance.

With geometric progression, another crime happens against women in India. It happens so many times that it doesn’t sound like news anymore.

Harassment, molestation, eve-teasing, domestic violence, rape and murder, there is a long list of the evil deeds. These don’t occur just randomly. They have their poisonous seeds and incubation processes. Long before they sprout with thorny branches, the soil is generated. It is a common social soil. It’s a cumulative shit that piles over generations. It takes a long time, this process of soil formation. Tradition and patriarchy rake it up over generations.  

The rapist only doesn’t carry the burden of culpability on his sick head. The social system that breeds such thorny seeds shares the cumulative crime. A poisonous seed doesn’t land from another planet. It has its supportive forces. It has its environment.  

Rules of conduct and tradition certify your sociality and civility if you pander the taboo. Avoid women. Stay away. Only pour out your frustration through passable, ignorable acts of minor mistreatments. These are somewhat acceptable offenses.

Away from the skin-deep purification of the taboos, the beast lies in the mind, tied with the ropes of patriarchal conventions. The ropes are strong, it takes some time to break and claim criminal freedom. Before that there is a long drawn out phase of passing remarks, molestation, eve-teasing, staring and criminal visualization in mind.

The beast is struggling against ropes. The ropes aren’t getting stronger. The beast is claiming power at a furious pace. The beast of skewed ideas in deprived brains has unlimited potential to grow strong and break the ropes. It comes of age then. It is no longer satisfied with passing lewd remarks and brushing against the taboo in crowded buses. It wants more. It’s an untamed criminal now. It has got a helpless body to carry out its evil design.

A rape happens. And of course murder in its wake.

So if we tell our children about excellence, why don’t we emphasize respect for the opposite sex, which is the best human trait. Respect is the seed that fruits as love. Much as we focus on pandering the sense of insecurity and fear in our girl child by telling her the risks and adding to the consequent lists of taboos, why don’t we groom respect for the opposite sex in our male child?

Mass rape of earth, rape of women and other crimes are nothing but symptoms of the bigger malady: love and empathy have taken a backseat because neither socially nor institutionally these get any support. From biggest to the smallest criminality, the only roadblock to the evil and its various forms lies in loving kindness. The subject of loving kindness, compassion, empathy, joy, happiness and peace needs to be taught like any other subject at the socio-academic level.

Lack of Love and its Evil Spin-offs

 

There are tell-tale signs of our inconsiderate and empathyless actions, policies and practices in the modern day culture. You know without a small lamp, the room is totally dark. This sea of miseries prevailing around has a lot to do with lesser focus on emotional quotient and more on intelligence quotient, propelling us into a blind competition. This is nothing short of the rape of human mind. And a raped mind is bound to retaliate. Its proofs need no retelling.

In cut-throat competition, any considerate sensitivity appears like a bad choice that will drag you down on the ladder of progress. Softness and being high on emotional quotient is almost considered a major disability now. People just laugh it off, condemning soft, sensitive people as emotional fools. Well, they miss a huge point in this.

A healthy mind is an ideal mixture of EQ and IQ. The IQ-propelled evolution will take us to the world of machines and artificial intelligence, which will do what we have done to other species in subjugating them. As robots take place of manual labor, and human physiognomy takes up more artificial parts in body to cope with the survival challenge due to destruction of nature, whose part it evolved as, and will not be able to survive naturally if the surrounding nature is gone, the major challenge will be to retain humaneness. The EQ is the seat of softness, aesthetics and sensitivities where love shines. These are the coolants that douse the otherwise inhuman fire.

The IQ has been the launch-pad allowing us to hit cosmos in our game of survival on earth. But the existential forces have given us the possibility to evolve far more comprehensively. That is the reason our brains have the seat of EQ also. The IQ is the huge, robust structure called house. The EQ is the home, cozily full of warm aroma. Think of having one without the other.

So empathy, love and compassion are as important as logic and reasoning. If not, Mother Nature won’t have given us two brain hemispheres to operate these major human faculties. These aren’t contradictory. They complement each other and make us what we are. You have a home full of love because there is a structure of house around. So the IQ is basically there to shelter and groom our EQ. That is what makes us humans.

If you want your future generations to be robots then please feel free to pursue the blind race driven by the lopsided development of brain. In that case, people with high EQ will come to regarded as almost disabled, needing special care like we do with people with different abilities these days. But remove the bulwarks of EQ from among the rampaging IQs and all you have is a fiery clash leading to catastrophe. Competition makes you run towards a target. But love, empathy and softer sensitivities are the elements that define the meaning of that run. Lose it, and all that remains is a blind race. So we don’t need just excellent, talented people; we also need gifted people who decide their goals with kindness and consideration.

So the IQ-driven society has its pitfalls. These are basically the areas of darkness unlit by the lamp of love and compassion. Pick any problem in the world, and at the core you will find that the reasons have something to do with the lack of loving kindness. You have one pill of treatment for thousand and one of our basic problems world over.