A day in the life of ants

 

The ants are busy over a tiny crumb. It must be something delicious because there is a stampede over the item. The advantage of being caught in an ant stampede is that there is hardly any chance of getting crushed. Well, unless a careless human foot crushes all of them enblock.

The tiny crumb is covered with ants and looks an ant mound. A babbler, having yellow-ringed furtive and Machiavellian eyes, is attracted towards the busy spectacle. There are so many takers, so it must be something very tasty, the babbler must have thought. We usually go with our first impressions. Most of us fall in this broad stereotype. Here it comes energetically and takes the coveted item with a jerk of its beak, drops it a few times on the ground to make it ant-free and thus unraveling the prize. Many ants take a tumble and get scattered around. But the culinary item doesn’t meet the babbler’s taste. It drops it on the ground and hops away.

What else the ants symbolize except a gripping grittiness? The ants regroup and once again it’s the same world. Such routine mishaps don’t dampen their fire. A squirrel sneaks in tentatively and it too is attracted to the coveted tiny crumb. Again the tiny item doesn’t fall in the list of the squirrel’s culinary likes. It also moves on a bit confused. But the squirrel was a bit better behaved than the babbler. It didn’t pick it up with a quick jerk and scatter the ants. It just snoozed over it for a moment and left it. Maybe the ants have sprayed some repellent over their dinner to deter other claimants.

 

Fight like a little seed

 

Energy’s manifestation as matter is bound by the laws defining our survival instincts. And survival has tools of attack and defense as the primary modus operandi. So ‘being’ is like walking on the tightrope, holding the pole with one end as ‘attack’ and the other as ‘defense’, sometimes tilting to this way to defend, the other times to the opposite end to attack.

Each gain on earth wants to survive. It has multiple layers of defense and attack mechanism to help it carry its journey forward. And we break through their defence portals by cooking them and make a pulp of their starch and protein by breaking these down. The grain accumulates lots of starch to lengthen its life, but we are smarter enough to break it down for our consumption. Primarily, a grain collects its starch for its own consumption. Getting eaten by humans or animals is the least of its priorities. So to reach this rich source of starch and protein, we have to first defeat its first line of defence, the structural line of defence. Grains have physical obstructions in the form of thorns, bark, husk and other protective armor. We go through it with our superior weapons by peeling and milling.

At the second tier of defence, the grain still tries to survive and here it engages the glutton humans with its chemical warfare. The grains have certain pathogen properties that don’t go along the digestive capabilities of stomachs. They also possess certain enzyme inhibitors that make the grains harder to be broken by the digestive system. It makes them very tough to be eaten raw. To break this line of defence we use the weapons of boiling, fermenting and germination. We even dupe them by soaking. Soaking actually dupes the grain into believing that it’s the first stage for the birth of a baby plant. As it gets ready for giving birth to a baby sprout, it withdraws the defence portals and immediately certain enzymes are born to support the baby sprout. And something eatable for the baby plant is eatable for us also.

So it’s primarily about attack and defence at all hierarchies of life. What we see in the world at the tangible level of we humans is simply a representative of all that is going at the tiniest levels. So keep your defence walls strong and the attack portals (skills and efficiency) well oiled. The bubble will anyway burst but to maintain that bubble and enjoy the pleasure and joy of being, we have to give our best just like a tiny grain does. Learn from a grain. If not for this tough fight, how will a tiny seed grow into a majestic tree some day? A tree is the optimum actualization of a seed's potential. Similarly, we too have the task of maximizing the potential that we carry within. Fight well!  

From the past

 

In ancient times, when we lived dharma instead of just identifying with it at theoretical level, like today’s theatrical lip service to religion through rituals, we were so tolerant as to even take harmless puns at Gods. As a satirist in a collection of ancient Sanskrit sayings takes a chutki in Subhashita Ratna Bhandgara:

Sleeps Lakshmi on a lotus flower,

Shiva sleeps on a snow-clad mountain,

Vishnu sleeps on a milky sea,

I think all of them

Are worried about bed bugs.

 

Weren’t our Gods very tolerant? Blind ritualism breeds intolerance and an elitist zealotry, a kind of gratuitous superiority or egotism. The scintillating accessories of faith have turned it into a lucrative business. And where there is business, there is greed. And then you have the resultant mad crackling of fear and insecurities. We have become very stern and strict presently.

The poor are very rich in laughter and the wealthy are very poor in laughing. A tenth century work named Dasarupaka of Dhananjya categorizes degrees of poverty and richness in the laughter of the people of different social strata. High class people are either miser or very poor in laughing quota. They just show a gentle smile (smita) or at the most a chuckle (hasita). The middle class people perform somewhat better and laugh with soft sound (vihasita) or at the most a type of laughter spliced with a bit of shaking of head (uphasita). And the so-called low class people hold rich bank account and enjoy roaring laughter with tears in eyes (apahasita) which usually graduates to a convulsive, uncontrolled laughter (atihasita).

Family discords can take classical shape. Sas and bahu can call each other Kulavyadhi (disease of the family), Kalahapriya (fond of discord), Jatasura (matted hair demon), Ajnanasri (rich in ignorance), Vyadhisindhu (ocean of illness), Aturantaka (killer of the sick).

Here is a dig at unworthy officials in Sukti Muktavali:

Scarcely any understanding, knowledge or learning,

not even any skill except fawning,

Minister, how do you still feel unfortunate and unrewarded?

 

Here is something from a sixteenth century work Subhashitavali (Garland of the Well-said Verses):

He possesses the beauty of full moon,

and sounds honeyed as a cuckoo when he speaks,

His caress and kiss is swooning like a pigeon,

Walks he as if he’s a regal swan,

Almost crushes he a woman in his strong arms

with the raw power of an elephant,

Such is my praiseworthy spouse,

All women and girls worship him,

I can’t see any problem,

except that he is my husband.

 

And in the same work here is an ode to a genius:

Other’s words are meaningless to him,

Nobody can read his script either,

The eccentric thing is that

he hardly can make out

what he himself has jotted down.

 

And here is something my own: Many a time the triumph of law is simply a mockery of justice.

So we writers have had our own peculiar ways of taking digs at even the strong and the mighty.

The perils of communalism

 

If we look into the communal history of the last four decades, we find a disturbing pattern in India. Big communal violence has shaken our social fabric almost once in a decade: Delhi riots (1984), Mumbai riots (1992-93), Gujarat violence (2002), Muzaffarnagar riots (2013), Manipur violence (2023). Statistically a big communal flare-up jolts the fabric of our unity once in a decade. And during the lull period, there are little-little fireworks that are kept alive by politicians, vigilantes, hardliner religious leaders or anyone belonging to the power-aspirant group—the slow-smoldering smoke in the social fuel wood that reaches its burning point after a decade.

Polarization on religious grounds is a dangerous pill of instant profits. So the communal element is a big trend in our politics these days. But statistics point to a great danger to our unity if this divisive element isn’t weeded out from our socio-political stream. As we can see from the above statistics, minor communal haggling and rhetoric creates enough fire under the social ground that it bursts out in a big flare after a decade. But the law of mathematics doesn’t stop here at the once-in-a-decade big communal flare-up. The big-scale communal fires separated roughly by a decade will churn out something far bigger in nature after their incubation period is reached. For example, the exponential growth of hate like it happened in 1947. That was preceded by a communal bug that incubated for almost 90 years when the Britishers systematically introduced the element of communal divide in the Indian society after the first war of independence in 1857. And now, with year-long little communal propagandas going full throttle, resulting in a big tragedy almost once in a decade, we may reach the very same partition-time critical limit of social breach in 2040s, that’s almost hundred years after 1947.

Even impartial mathematics is pointing to the dangers to our unity by the communal bug if political parties, organizations, institutions, religious leaders and other influential groups don’t discard divisive communal rhetoric from their plan of action to gain power and influence. 

My noisy neighbors

 

I’m the most abused person this morning. You can say it with full confidence if you have a tailorbird couple training their just-out-of-nest chick in the art of calling, flying and survival. They have turned ultra-sensitive and start abusing with staggering impertinence the moment I step into the courtyard. My morning newspaper reading corner has been grabbed. The freshly hatched chick is flapping its wings for little flights from one branch to another in the clump of plants in the corner. It’s almost as big as its parents minus the tail. As I try to focus on the news in the paper there is a constant barrage of drilling notes into my brain. Even the noisy news items look so peaceful.

The longer-tailed gentleman is more audacious, comes nearer with warning tweets. He has a nice bow-tie kind of spot on the neck and carries a rusty brown head. Whenever I get up from the garden chair, they change their tweeting as a mark of victory, of the enemy being routed. Well, defeat might be surrender sometimes, but victory is a matter of perception only. They have a right to perceive it as a victory. Sometimes Papa bird comes very near as if to take a nibble at my nose. Luckily for me he missed it. Then they tried bird-dropping upon me but the tiny spot on my newspaper proved that they missed it as well. It seemed to make them angrier. Their shrill notes can drill a hole in any brain. It’s better to accept defeat.

The ant hole is just nearby where I sit. The ants have put on weight. Believe me, they have! If you look carefully, you can even see the ants putting on weight. They look darker and glossier now.