Harmless Hornets, Biteless Bees and Beggar Peacocks

 

In the balanced pattern of evolution, there were well-laid out course of energy channels. That’s how it went on till mankind was just one of the species. However, as the super-species he has toppled the equation. A super-species is helpless in pursuit of more and more goals. So we simply continue fighting. The fight with other animals and nature is almost over, now we have to fight among ourselves.

Now with his IQ he is trying to decimate EQs, the enemy within, the signs of weakness. But then little does he realize that this supposed weakness itself is the strongest fortification against the ultimate destruction. 

Elsewhere, I see most of the species subdued and beaten to behave appropriately. They appear to have drawn the mighty lesson. It’s no more living and evolution for them, just a depleting struggle to survive for some more decades, ultimately to be kept as souvenirs and specimen in museums and zoos, or at the most natural parks, if mankind’s greed allows that much space to be left out.

Large yellow paper wasps, one of the stinging hornets, defended their nests with a single-minded determination. Stinging winged chivalry! Attack! So much for their primal instinct! Well that was almost three decades back when we ran helter-skelter as the winged yellow striker, twitched its antenna, its dull black points of eyes staring menacingly before the strike. Children cried with pain. Next day a joker with a swollen face would provide free entertainment. So much so for the wild instinct! There were still remaining traces of wilderness in the countryside.

What is meant by being wild? It’s just to be natural. But then having turned the wilderness upside down, trading it with the civilized onslaught, we humans are restlessly marching ahead. There is a stampede and many species are getting trampled in the dust below. The wilderness is almost gone. Most of the species have lost their footing, as the terribly over-bloated and glutinous super-species, man and womankind, firmly hold the reins of the chariot of nature. Everything has changed. The wilderness vanishing, so is the mundane ‘wild’ streak in birds, animals and insects. It’s a tamed world in controlled, humanized environs.

Coming back to the yellow foe of our childhood, they held their positions, defended their share in nature, struck lips, cheek, nose and forehead to defend their fortifications. The punished swollen face of the linage of Homo-sapiens bearing a testimony to the fact that he is not the only claimant to the cakes of Mother Nature. Things have come upside down since then. As the human juggernaut moves on, mowing down the last traces of wilderness, species are losing their primal instincts, just to buy some more time before the inevitable extinction. It’s an acceptance, a sort of death time’s letting go of any signs of further struggle, a final surrender, a soulful resignation.

The yellow hornet doesn’t bite now. Somehow stealing out some niche in the not so impressive corner of the house, where they are not a blot on the household decorum, surviving there like some beggar on the pavement, they simply don’t bite. The sentinels don’t rush at your nose even when you raise a cobweb cleaner in the nest’s direction. The instinct of survival seems to have taught them a lesson that they cannot afford to mess with the bi-pedaled torch-bearer of the onslaught on nature.

I commit the error of still linking honeybees to the notorious chivalry of those comb-defenders we witnessed during childhood. They don’t bite anymore. Forget about flowers, they have to run greedily for the semi-arid shoots of acacia.

It’s scorching heat and honeybees buzz around the water bucket. It’s man’s offering. It’s no wild stream bordered with wild flowers where they can lay claim their share of nature and defend their fort. The bucket is man’s creation. So they don’t bite. They sense that it’s man’s beneficence and kindness that they are still surviving. I put my hand among a swarm of honeybees stuck up around the corners of the bucket. Nostalgia strikes. I still remember those bites and swollen limbs. Well that is history. They just fly away. In a struggle to grab the last survival sips in a world that has no place for them anymore, they have forgotten to strike. The confidence is gone. They don’t have any rights anymore.

That’s what happens when you just survive and not live. Only woman and mankind are living, or at least think they are doing, others are just surviving. They will definitely become extinct. Then it will the human’s time to struggle, merely survive and get extinct. (Before that of course humans will desperately try to artificially replace whatever nature, in combination with countless other species, has bestowed them with. The stage is getting set for the evolution of a new species—some unthinkable human-machine combination.)

The peacock, a riot of colors, is in double mind. With its cute eyes it stares at me. The age-old instincts in it are admonishing of a danger. It takes a step back. Where can it fly back to? It’s a migrant in the village. The countryside is saturated with pest control chemicals. So there is nothing for it to feed upon there. I understand its helplessness, so take some more steps forward with chapatti pieces in my hand. I know it’s hungry. It won’t fly away. The peacock has accepted its fate and so have all others, except humans, of course.

Last in its Lineage, the Grand Mogul, the Peacock

 

With one after another species becoming extinct, a direct offshoot of our inconsiderate non-loving self, we hit another nail in the coffin of our follies. In the man-manipulated evolutionary pace, things will go out of control in such a daunting way that little will we realize what is happening. Mechanization is its own goddess. It has already steeled up our nerves. It needs its own battle-worthy soldiers. And mind you, it decides its own course.

I for one, take copious sighs at the dying traces of the still left out naturalities around. It gives more warnings than it provides sips of aesthetics for the chamber of emotions in the brain. 

Rain-washed green has painted the countryside. Nature seems to have been besotted with only one color on its palette, bold green. Thankfully, we still know this color in natural surroundings. Future generations though may not be that lucky. It’s very soothing to the eyes, and more so to the spirits. Trees look like they will survive mankind’s onslaught against nature. Clouds unfurl their sails across the sky and moist wind creeps into any nook corner that may still be dry. Monsoon is going well after all.

The fields around my village are splashing with as much green paddy as possible. Raise your eyes in any direction and you will see a green sea. Monsoonal sun across the corners of flying lumps of clouds gives the best glimpses of nature's bounty. But the travelling shadows also try to cover up silent, invisible man-made tragedies.

Farmers have been cornered like never before. One day they are forced to dump tomatoes in roadside ditch, the fruits of their labor not getting more than INR 1/Kg. The other day the price may go as high as INR 80/Kg in metros. Driven by intensive agriculture, born of costly inputs and decreasing landholdings, farmers mindlessly dump poison in all forms of pesticides, weedicides and insecticides. So this lush green is a merciless stroke of brush on the canvas of nature, swiping away the natural world of many insects, worms, reptiles and rodents that make nature holistic and all-encompassing in its game of give and take across food chains. So guys, it’s just green paddy and poisoned soil below.

Peacocks survive on insects and reptiles in the fields. Nothing is left for them to feed upon, so food-less where would they go? A peacock's plumage swinging to gentle breeze in open surroundings of the countryside is a treat, and we were lucky to witness it countless times during our childhood. Now the last or second last generation of these destitute birds, who rarely get an insect in fields, has landed with an airy resentment in the village. An irony: the poison-giver is somehow better than the poison itself, at least in the short turn. In the foliage of neem and acacia trees, they just pew out their miseries. To the infants and younger lot, it gives a chance to get acquainted with the national bird's sound, and of course help them in learning the initials of human language.

My mom has an almost regular bird visitor, who perches upon the neem in our courtyard and pews out its begging song as if pleading, ‘Mai roti do!' While she dispenses her routine chores across the yard, it continues to draw her attention. Roti delayed, it is forced to come down and enter the inner reaches of the house just to make its presence felt through luxuriant plumage. Once roti pieces are thrown before it, it has to chuck up the offerings as fast as possible because crows line up in their accusing harsh tones, blaming it for being a transgressor who has infringed upon their rights. Crows are very clever. Some of them get behind its plumage and take a pick at the feathers to distract the big bird. One defensive look behind and a few pieces are stolen by the other crows waiting in the wings. I call it the 'beggar peacock', my mother does not like the title though.

If that is the fate of the national bird, it’s hard to imagine the condition of others. Looking at this marvel of nature, whom mom sometimes accuses of being ungrateful—when it comes without its plumage, all the feathers having been shed somewhere, and mom cursing it for being so mindless to waste them somewhere and not shed them in the courtyard—I just feel sad on account of the fact that maybe it is the last or at the most second last in its lineage.

In this holistically interlinked plan of nature, if things are so miserable for so many species, mankind shouldn’t feel too safe. When evil effects have chucked out forests and countless species of birds, animals, insects and reptiles, they will have only humans to spread their tentacles into. In fact, it already is happening. Just that we have the toys of modernity to get busy with, while the fire burns around. Isn’t it childish? Did we grow at all?

It might almost be on the verge of irreversible loss, but we still have our last weapon to stall the doomsday. With love, systematically nurtured through academics and policies, we can still afford to be hopeful.

The Inconsiderate Indian Elephant

 

I look around and smell inconsideration everywhere. Just like mosquitoes and flies poop up in sewage drains, hate and anger take possession of an inconsiderate society.

It makes me terribly sad. We Indians basically behave like a group of tiny animals crammed in a little cage having lesser grains and more hungry mouths. It's basically a fight, a noisy wrangle for mere existence, a squeaking pandemonium for survival. It makes us one of the most inconsiderate, immodest people on earth. On the other hand, we have the most ancient scriptures talking of love, care, share and brotherhood. Everything vanishes in practice though.

Why do we need medicines? Simply because there are diseases. Similarly, the endless holy talks of scriptures only prove a diseased society plagued with hate, selfishness, lies, conceit, crime and malice. In a healthy society, you don’t need tomes of holy talk in religious books. No wonder, ours has been a terribly unkind, unhealthy society. Need a proof. You try to come in anyone’s way in any form at whatever level. You will get a slap, an abuse, or at least a burning glare. There is more possibility of a fight than a smile all the time at all places. There is an air of antagonism. The probability of a mishap lurks at every nook corner. You have to be extremely cautious. God forbid, if you just, involuntarily, happen to raise somebody’s ire!

Forget about the rules of civility. There seems to be mass frustration. People have a frown on their faces as they stampede on the survival stage. You drop your guard and you will not get a chance to offer apologies. Justice will be dispensed on spot. It’s basically about one-upmanship. Courtesy is taken as the inevitable final resort of the coward and the weaklings. Civility and chicken-heartedness are assumed to be synonymous. So no wonder everyone is out there to prove his/her bravery. You have to hold your position; however ill-conceived is your idea of the fight.

Mass conscience seems to have been bruised too deeply. Try it any level, from beggars to billionaires, you will find courtesy, civility and consideration hurriedly cut out from the people’s book of life.

I was parking in front of a railway station. Now I am least prone to disturb anyone’s sovereignty. However, the congestion necessitated me honking twice to attract a man’s attention who was standing in the way. It resulted in the puny man to shout an abuse. It was bigger than his size, but luckily I was unwilling to take the abuse. I simply parked my car and approached him. Now, even with my modest stature, I looked over and above him in size. But then as an offended Indian he had to hold his guard. He mustered up his body language to show courage, expecting a fight. I approached him and with folded hands said, “Sorry O King of this land! O Angad ji, I ask forgiveness for making your foot budge from the ground!” There was no way for him but to accept my apology. With a sheepish grin, he said, “Koi baat nahi!” And there I came out absolved of my crime. 

As we stamp and stomp around, we simply grab the opportunity to spit anywhere, urinate everywhere, park our vehicles at any place, flout every rule, shout louder and louder to have our say, molest anyone, take every shortcut to make our ends meet, etc, etc., and still more and more etc. Oofs, the list is endless!

The air is full of insecurity, suspicion, anxiety, jealousy and negative complexes: as many negative shades of human behavior as can be expected in a situation defined by decreasing morsels and increasing hungry souls. Thanks to the universal applicability of the concepts of marriage and siring a male heir for moksha, India is full: overpopulated to the extent that the core of individual philosophy is solely defined by the fight to survive. It’s always about ‘fight or flight syndrome’. The norms of jungle! It makes us self-seeking and beyond the consideration of anything above our own little self. Do we qualify above the so called animals in the jungle?

We cannot see beyond the basics of life. And with so many hands grabbing the same morsels in the same little plate what else one can expect? We just identify with our lower selves, the ego, defined by fears, insecurities, complexes and jealousies. The stage is so small that one doesn't possess the opportunity, or the will, and consequently the ability, to get connected to the higher self, the stage of consciousness about one's role, responsibility and duties as a considerate, contributing entity of the collective environment. This attachment to the lower self makes us terribly self-centered.

There is mass apathy. As long as we get the survival crumbs to pamper our lower selves, we care a damn about anything else. Self-responsibility! The compound word doesn’t exist in our vocabulary. We allow ourselves and others to violate any socio-legal norm. It’s a mischievous hush-hush pandering of the collective evil. A simple give and take. I will take my ill-gotten liberty, you take yours. The offshoots of such behavior include spitting anywhere, defecating almost everywhere, flouting traffic rules, tendency to take short-cuts to reach our little journey to meet the same puny destinations, grease palms of government employees, take bribes whenever possible, etc., etc., and etc.

You name anything, and we Indians will not disappoint you in flouting the norms, all because we inherently and instinctively connect with the lower self. Out of all these huge mass of self-seekers, the most potent ones become politicians. They are the best self-seekers who have hardly any restrictions, moral or legal, to stop them from meeting their desires and destinations. No surprise, small self-seekers deserve only bigger self-seekers to lead them.

There is no need to comment on our politicians and their oft-used tools of dividing society on caste, communal, regional and class basis. Indian democracy functions on divisiveness.

Individually we Indians are very low on self-esteem, creativity, guts, courage and enthusiasm, so we identify ourselves with collective identities in the form of caste, creed, religion and region. This tendency is smartly used by the traders of divisiveness, the politicians. And there moves the great juggernaut, the inconsiderate Indian elephant.

If we want to become what we have been claiming to be since thousands of years, high time we accept that soul is the real substance! This physical being is merely the shadow of that true self. Ironically, we grow up believing the shadow to be the substance and substance to be the shadow. It requires reverse conditioning to be truly on the path of evolution, which will turn us some day into a loving society comprising considerate human beings.

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.