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.

The baloons

Of late, flavored condoms have hit sales to the ceilings in West Bengal’s Durgapur. The students have gone berserk. It should be encouraged if they are using contraceptives. But here poor condom is used not for love-making nasha. It’s used for a dangerous intoxication. It contains aromatic compounds that produce alcohol on breaking down. Condoms are soaked in hot water for long hours and the booze is ready. Once consumed it produces scores of health hazards but they are unseen and wait till they strike down the system. But for the time being they give a high and that’s what matters for the short-sighted modern generation.

Growing up in the eighties, we did free advertisements for the newly launched Nirodh. We inflated them to full size and left them floating in the air. The big balloons floated and scandalously spread the message of family control in the conservative society. But we had hardly any clue to the slap-stick advertisement. The elders gave scandalized, embarrassed looks. So in a way we carried free publicity for birth control on behalf of health and family welfare department. But most of the farmers were greedily griping misers as far as pleasure, the sole form of entertainment at night, was concerned. They won’t budge and give away the tiniest slice of pleasure by using the free-selling contraceptives. They found the thin barrier thicker than palace ramparts.

Journeyman, set up your Lagrange point!

 

In the infinite womb of the cosmos, the interplay of matter and energy churns out newer and newer formations, births and deaths of supermassive bodies. The cosmic churn goes on and on. Stars burst, black holes swallow supermassive bodies and galaxies heave massive pulses across the space. It’s basically a super-storm going around. Cosmic bodies pulling, repelling, orbiting, colliding, sucking and maybe many more phenomenon beyond our perception range. But there are little points of peace, balance and poise where there is equanimity and balance in this cosmic storm. These are Lagrange points or Libration points, the points of ‘equilibrium for small-mass objects under the gravitational influence of two massive orbiting bodies’.

Usually, two gigantic bodies put an unbalanced gravitational force at a specific point, thus changing the orbit of any small-bodied object present at that point. However, at the Lagrange points, the gravitational forces of the two massive bodies balance the centrifugal force exerted by each other. It results in little Lagrange points that can be used for space docking for satellites, because here they can float almost unchallenged by any force in one particular direction and hence decreasing the fuel requirements. The manmade space objects can be placed at these Lagrange points for observing the marvelous chaos unfolding around. The satellite is very stable at this point and like a meditative saint can marvel, observe and make a meaning of all this meaningless unfoldment going around.

Human life is also a tiny replica of the cosmic upheavals, shifts, transformations, collisions going at a bigger scale in the cosmos. There are forces that pull us down and curtail our flights just like the forces of gravity tend to crash the objects back onto the ground. These are the forces of discontentment, fear and insecurities that pull us back to the base level, cutting our wings. There are repelling forces as well that keep our real self away from the essential core of our pure being. These centrifugal forces are anger, hate, jealousy and judgments. And being either pulled or repelled by one or the other we have to spend a lot of fuel in cutting through the rough atmospherics and vicissitudes of life. We feel the wear and tear of this struggle against the opposing forces. We carry the scars, the discontentment and lots of dis-ease in our being. Life feels a burden as a result.

Luckily, in this rough journey we too have our Lagrange points just like the satellites. Every individual has his/her own Lagrange points, where the soul-ship can be docked in the balanced zone; where it requires minimum dissipation of life-force. Here we don’t feel the struggle of it. We feel the light of just ‘being’. We can feel the ease of just being. In this zone of equanimity and balance, we can set up ourselves with least conflicts and dissipation of energies. The contrasting forces here neutralize each other. A conflict-free existence naturally provides a lot of comfort to the soul.

Now the all-important question arises: How to find one’s very own Lagrange point? All of us have varying situations, circumstances, advantages, disadvantages, insecurities, fears, skills. All of us know the things that pull us down like the force of gravity. We also are aware of the repelling forces that keep our real self from coming face to face with the egoistic one. In my opinion the Lagrange points for a common person are the intersecting zones between materiality and spirituality—the zone between desires of the flesh and the dreams of the soul. One can set up a specific Lagrange point for one’s being and dock the soul-ship there to see, observe, witness all the drama going around, just like observatory satellites placed at Lagrange points do their job. This is the zone where the forces of materiality and immateriality are balanced by each other, allowing us to just be a celebrator of life, a witness of all this seemingly meaningless unfoldment around. Maybe we observe a meaning of life then. Wish you all a happy, cozy and safe Lagrange point in your life!

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.