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.

Cancered Mother and the Unconcerned Son

 

Well, trees are falling. It’s a routine thing now. The trees themselves don’t even seem to complain anymore. Men and his kind completely own earth now. The rest of the part of nature is all secondary. Everything is too familiar and routine now. Wilderness is gone. Go anywhere, in the most desolate part of the world, and you still cannot forget the familiar homo-sapiens smell.

My solace is a little eucalyptus grove that was planted 34 years back by my father. I remember myself tugging behind him and trying to help with my little self. Many trees fall in storms. People take away wood. Farmers drink and defecate here as I see tell tale signs whenever I visit it. Some say frustrated farmers go into paid orgies also. And I believe it. I don't have any problem as long as there is no rape and forced endeavor to infringe upon somebody's modesty. I tolerate all and everything as long as this little green patch is there as my father's leafy memorial.

Trees are being cut around. Roads after roads under construction. Mechanical farming takes one toll after other with poisonous injects. And there it stands with its little piece of seclusion. Love you father! Hope your consciousness still caresses these leaves.

Trying to amuse myself like a rusted classical poet of the bygone era, walking in the virginal silence of a forest, right there in the little grove, I come across a forlorn pair of peacock eggs in the eucalyptus grove. Two little lumps of fluid waiting as a milestone on the path of creation to shape into winged lives.

The world of seclusion abruptly comes to an end beyond the small proportions of the grove. Farmed fields are as clean as human dwellings. Farmers spray poison even on narrow 6 inch field divides lest grass grows there and encroaches into the paddy inside. There starts the tale of beggar peacocks—about whom I write so copiously in my stories—who roam in the villages to survive. This pair of eggs hardly stands a chance of successful hatching. Even if it does, it will be a sad pair of beggar peacocks.

On my curiosity-driven next visit, I see them growing in numbers from two to four possibilities of life and living. The mother seems to be doing well. The crows are croaking schemingly above. I hope they don't get into any mischief. But can there be a bigger mischief than the mankind himself?

It’s a gloomy forecast for Mother Nature. They quibble like school kids over trifles and nobody seems to be bothered about the house on fire. Still there are some faint rays of hope.

The Philippines, a tropical island nation in the Pacific, will now require by law all graduating students, from elementary school to college, to plant 10 trees each before they can graduate. It’s the best law any legislative body can think of at the moment. It will help alleviate our collective sins against the mother planet.

The bill, called the “Graduation Legacy for the Environment Act,” is meant for the Filipino youth to help tackle climate change and build a greener environment for the coming generations.

Well, Philippines seems too far. Here in my home state of Haryana, the last nail in the coffin of scrub forest appears firmly driven in. Haryana is a small state. However, the fact that it has the lowest forest cover in the country at 3.59% makes it really sound miserable. Yet, not too many seem to miss trees here. As a silver-lining to the hopes of development enthusiasts, it surrounds Delhi NCR and that is where the planners find scope of creating more and more concrete jungles.

Politicians in India basically keep their financial spines sound primarily by managing real estate, mining and quarrying through their cronies. Haryana is no exception. With Delhi NCR getting over-bloated, Haryana politicians have always eyed construction scope in Gurugram and Faridabad. Nothing wrong with that. However, the simple fact that this area covers Aravali scrub land, which is the last bulwark against total desertification of Delhi NCR, makes it really worrisome, especially given the fact that Delhi already is an intolerable torture chamber for its residents due to pollution.

Haryana governments, despite the SC directive of 1996, have not notified forest land in its territory falling in the NCR. They eye the mullah by keeping a scope for construction by clearing the semi-wilderness of the scrub forest in the area. Already a lot of it has been destroyed through illegal mining. The recent Haryana government legislation allows the illegality to be carried out in open, which till now has been carried out through dubious means. It also leaves the heavenly slice of little patch of Shivalik hills in Panchkula, having exotic species of trees and birds, open for quarrying and hotel industry. Greed for money has no softer consideration for Mother Nature. I wonder will the reprimand by the Supreme Court be sufficient to stop Haryana politicians from raping the last remnants of scrub forest in the state.

Elsewhere, the juggernaut of our consumerist greed goes on unchecked world over. Not the end of July yet and we have already consumed the annual budget of natural resources meant for the whole year. It means whatever was supposed to be used as per our needs in a whole year has been chucked out in less than seven months. So the remaining five months will bear testimony to our greed when we will rape natural resources. Unchecked growth of cells in a physical body leads to cancer. Unchecked growth of modern civilization has led to cancer and tumors in mother earth. It's a dying planet, eh!

Global Footprint Network (GFN) prepares an annual budget of natural resources. Since the 1970s, we have chucked out the complete year's budget well in advance. Now we spend the whole year’s budget in just half year.

They have this concept of Earth Overshoot Day, also known as Ecological Debt Day: It's the sad date in the calendar in the year when “humanity’s resource consumption for the year exceeds Earth’s capacity to regenerate those resources that year.”

The earlier it's met in a particular year, the more it indicates that our unsustainable practices are going deeper into earth's natural reservoir to draw out from the basic pool. Under the onslaught of ever rising demand born of bursting at the seams population, the pressure on the ecosystems is ever on the rise. Demand exceeds the supply, thus there is 'ecological deficit'. The planet is thus hugely debt ridden under the onslaught of consumer culture. Will things improve? Probably not!

The Sad Love Story of a Lonely Hoopoe

 

The pining notes are insistent, persistent, adamant and brave. Aaw, I can feel your pain lonely Romeo! Apart from my mind's own inconsequential blabbering with its own self, I hear this hoopoe's mate song almost with the frequency of thoughts in my mind.

He is relentless. Going on and on for the last two weeks. Hope he hasn't forgotten to eat in his mad song of love to attract some female of the species. Hoopoes are almost gone from the area. Where are woods, so where will they do their master carpentry on tree trunks? There are hardly any flocks left. It's a lonely bird who wants to keep its species alive at any cost.

Hidden in the foliage of an acacia tree, he is busy with love song in all this heat: The song of love that may reach some stray female to allow the natural chemistry to take place and delay their tragic story of extinction from the area for some more time. Its lyrical, pining uuup, uuup, uuup is riding the dusty air of wheat harvesting season.

Hoopoes are hardly seen in this part these days. In fact, I had forgotten its sound. Then its lovely sad notes reached me in meditation and some long asleep memory drew a picture of hoopoe in the blank vastness, reminding me of those childhood days when we were lucky to see them going tonk tonk on big tree trunks.

So that's how the tragic stories of bird extinction are unfolding. These are not just the desperate love notes of a lonely bird. These are the sad stories told by the last of their generation here in this part. Let's hope some lonely lady hoopoe comes to hear these mate-finding notes.

Contrary to the weeks-long day-in and day-out songs of love by this lonely bird, humans are having gala time. We have bred with the tenacity of ant swarms. So there is hardly any fight. Mates are available easier than provisions in stores. People pick up mates with the drop of a hat. Relationships last for weeks because there are humans and humans around. We humans are spoilt for choice. Instragram, dating sites, Facebook, twitter, everything is saturated with more and more choices for a mate fling. People hardly come to feel the depth of love. It's a short version T20 cricket type love. Hit sixes and fours, grab your trophy and start new innings.

Isn't it ironical that only animals and birds appear to carry the message of love these days? This hoopoe for example appears the lone flag bearer of genuine love in the scandalous air around. Can somebody show this type of lyrical dedication for weeks in all this heat? Well, it makes me sad and happy at the same time. Sad because love seems to have vanished from the world of we humans. Happy that I am at least lucky to see and hear these love tales in nature.