Something about doves

 

In order to survive, a dove’s hatchling needs the best of luck from all angles possible. It seems a fickle, vacillating and indecisive parenting. They need their guardian angels to be at maximum alert to thwart the renegadely lurking agents of death. The nest is so fragile and small, almost hitting high notes of imperishment as the bizarre, complicated sub-plots of life and death unfold around. It’s an almost see-through, flat assemblage of thin twigs placed at almost a public place, among easily reachable branches at a hand’s reach. Its mere sight giving a pickling and grilling push to the taste buds of many a predatory bird. The souls of cats getting into stir-frying and deep-frying mode at the culinary prospects.

You need to make a substantive leap of faith to collect any rhyme or reason on the question of how do they even survive as a species. The nest bears such a frustrating anatomy that even by a gentle breeze the egg or the hatchling may plop down by itself to the delight of brooding dark shadows of mortality. So among the boiling and steaming culinary scenarios, if a creamy-white egg survives and a hatchling comes out, even this can be taken as a successful nesting. As the burgeoning, cascading clamor of life moves on, the majority of the hatchlings survive for a few days at the most. It’s a miracle that the doves still survive as a species. It seems impossible without prompt, belligerent defense by mother existence itself. Maybe mother nature sets up a miraculous scheme of chance factors to keep some odd baby bird alive.

The cats are in love, following freaky mirages most of the time, so their absence in the garden means that one egg out of three survived. The other two were taken by the guest treepie after the expletive-rich fight that went for three days, rewarding it with two eggs. The rufous brown and pale chestnut bird kept threatening and blustering for three days to chuck out two out of three eggs.

The honey buzzard seems to be away on its poaching foray. It hasn’t been seen for a few weeks even though there is a bigger honeycomb near the dove hatchling.

The treepie then returned with a whippy and aggressive attitude to have a heavy lunch on the hatchling also. The doves, with their tentative gazelle looks, fought tooth and nail to foil its efforts. But a crow, spurred by a thieving itch, unapologetically swooped down to clutch the prize with an eerie precision to give the little one its first and the last flight. Now, the laughing dove is crying through its chuckling notes. To the uninformed audience she must be sounding laughing. But I know her situation and feel her pain oozing through her ripply, cuddling laughing chuckles.

Isn’t it that most of our instinctive reactions and the consequent emotions of anger, hate, jealousy, fear and prejudices are born of our ignorance of the reality surrounding that individual? It’s so easy to get judgmental of someone without being aware of the complete picture. Like taking the cries of a distraught dove as joyful chuckles! So it helps to know a bit more about people and their situations beyond a point that merely appears on the surface.

Trash pickers of future

 

The scientists are taking up their domains with a legendary integrity. Every inch on earth is under our sweeping ambit. So we are chronicling space odysseys. The terrestrial miracles have been regularized to an extent to turn them most mundane things possible. The earth is littered with our rampant desires’ jargon. There is a dangerous fallacy at work but it comes attired as the new-age holism. So we are now space bound like Vasco de Gama and Columbus explored hitherto unseen lands.

The low-earth orbit has three thousand satellites. And thousands more are in the pipeline. Among this overcrowding, the risks of collisions are emerging at a grave rate. Then we will have a very lucrative profession of space-cleaners. The trash collector, who just asked me if I have any stack of old newspapers to sell, has to know that his sons and grandchildren will have the chance to clean space if they will persist in the trade and use the latest technology, like the rest of the traditional occupations are adopting new technologies.

The grain merchants in Delhi have their grandsons working on laptops to manage what was earlier done in fat red-cloth bound account books. In Chawdi Bazaar in Delhi, in a tiny few square yard space crammed with nuts, bolts and the portly grandfather, hardly leaving any space in the tiny cubicle of a shop, the educated grandson is tucked in a corner and trying online selling. So maybe the coming generations of these trash pickers will turn tech savvy and take their endeavors to collect trash in the space.

And schooling starts

 

One year of preparatory schooling put enough burden on three-year-old Nevaan. The classrooms look almost like poor ghettos to mere two-year olds made to sit, already under the disciplinarian stick. Then the pandemic-facilitated lockdown was a big respite for these tiny students. KG 1 and KG 2 went through online mode without claiming too much from the rich bounty of childhood. The online classes were a big fun initially. Not going to the school is a big bonus to any child. It’s really joyful. But then the idea of joy is already relative. Now the one-hour online class has started to sound tedious. And off day from this session comes as joy presently. So the other day when he was expecting a full holiday, the message popped up that there will be a thirty-minute fun activity class today. ‘Oh no, even today we have school!’ he gets irritated.

A tiny story of faith and love

 

Here is beautiful story of love, faith, prayers and persistence. A nasty tornado strikes Kentucky. It’s a countryside house. A grandma with her fifteen-month-old granddaughter and three-month old grandson is all there to protect the two little angels. You don’t have the physical force to fight a tornado but you have a still more potent power in you to do it, prayers.

The storm’s eye lurks viciously. The old lady knows the house is just moments away from being blown off. She puts the kids in a bathtub and swathes them in pillows and blankets. More importantly, she puts a Bible with them and says prayers over them.

The tornado strikes the house. The house is blown off. The bathtub is picked off the floor and is blown away. The rescue workers find it at a distance, upturned among the telltale signs of the storm’s mauling. They lift it and hand over the kids to their granny. They are safe. Prayers indeed can help us in braving the strongest tornados of life.

In company with birds and animals

 

A basket is toppled. With typical simian assiduity, a mama monkey meddles with peace in the courtyard. The tiny imp on her back holds a raw banana as she expertly escapes. I can just bang a hollow bamboo on the parapet wall. She beautifully glides in air as she jumps to the other roof across the twelve-foot wide street. The baby safely perched on her back and holding the green banana as the trophy of their effort gives me a taunting, smirking look, as if to say, ‘You are no match for my mama!’

Even the doves, despite the foreordained tragedy about to take place in the scraggy, sparse nest, sometimes go against their nature and turn a fighter. A docile dove is a beautiful sight but to have these lovely cooing moments they need to fight with talons sometimes. It enkindles some faint hope for the hatchling in the nest—it’s a miracle that at least one egg was spared and there is a funny, hairless plump chick, forcing me to count it as a success even if it dies the same day. But there is every chance that you will be disappointed if you nurture hopes about the doves successfully raising a brood. I haven’t seen a single successful case in dozens of episodes witnessed over the decades.

The conspicuous calls of the long-tailed rufous treepie carry reminiscences from the hills. Sometimes they seem throwing a weighty pun at the local birds. It’s a migrant couple with cinnamon body, black head and bluish grey long graduated tail. These treepies are known to keep a covetous eye for the eggs and hatchlings of smaller birds. So the little ball of meat in the dove’s fragile, clearly visible nest has caught the treepie’s attention. The predator makes frequent forays to taste it. The doves don’t stand a chance against an eagle. But they think they can give it a fight against the treeepie. The moment the treepie lands on the curry-leaf tree, the doves turn soldierly and chase it away. The intruder takes off with a loud and shrill ko-ko-ko-ko. It kept coming for three days but the doves defended well.

As I have emphasized it many times, a dove hatchling needs to be very lucky to survive. The resident cats have smelt feline girls outside the fence. It meant at least the eggs survived. It seems the honey buzzer has found honey somewhere else, so it hasn’t turned up for the last few days. And now the challenger to its survival happens to be a treepie against which the docile doves can feign bravery for some time. Accepted that we need luck to survive but effort is luck’s operational part.