Of rockets, reptiles and rubbish

Of Rockets & Rubbish

The link to Times of India article Of rockets, reptiles and rubbish

Of scientific temperament and snake feeding

On 5th March a rocket lifted off from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre launching a robotic satellite on its 200-million-kilometre journey to Mars. When asked why a poor, low literacy nation should be going to space, the learned men said that it was to demonstrate our capabilities, fill our hearts with pride and most importantly inculcate a scientific temperament among Indians. Two days after that, on C.V. Raman’s birthday, thousands of educated Vizagites, got all dressed up and fanned out into the bushes to find ant hills to feed eggs and milk to snakes!

Split personality

This is the quintessential split personality of India. One set of people reaching for the stars (a planet really) and the other group visiting our friendly neighbourhood Cobra which - they imagine - waits, mouth open inside an ant hill, for eggs, and milk. They expect it to feast on the offerings, burp, bless the feeder, and go back to waiting position. I guess these people wouldn’t know the difference between an anthill and a snake pit even if they tripped over the former and fell into the latter.

Leave those snakes alone

Snakes like to be left alone; they eat rats and don’t much care for milk and eggs for breakfast! For years naturalists and snake protection groups have been begging for this ritual to be stopped but it goes on unabated.  If someone really wants to worship snakes, they should start with a little respect for these remarkable creatures, which are far more fascinating in real life than in legend. For God’s sake stay home and pray to an image of the Snake.

It’s a family scene passing to the next generation

This morning, in the field across my home, I saw an entire family … father, mother, sons, teenage daughter in purple pants and green T-shirt, all earnestly wooing a mound of mud. After breaking eggs and pouring milk on the ground they burst a few crackers around it for good measure. I suspect that the poor snake died of fright. The family had come with a few plastic bags and after finishing their rituals they left all these bags strewn all over the green bushes to lie there like little white flags of the Republic of Messy land.

Immersing our beaches in rubbish

A few weeks ago after Dusserah hundreds of pickups, trucks and trailers made their way to the beach carrying the Goddess Durga, kids howling and to thousand watts of disco music as they made their way to the beach. There they immersed the idols into the water and messed up our entire coastline. The navy mounted an operation to clean up the unholy mess. Then on the next day the groups were back desecrating our God given sea side. It took hundreds of sweepers, funded by our taxes, several weeks to clean up the mess.

The famous Karthik Masam eat-fest and mess-marathon

Everyone knows that picnics are “too far … to go … to eat … too much”. This is that time of the year when hordes of Vizagites go on picnics. Families in their fineries descend on the green areas of our countryside with packets of food and white Styrofoam plates. They sit around listening to loud local reggae, drink, eat and leave behind tons of rubbish. As most of these areas are in the suburbs, the picnic spots never get cleaned. Consequently the once beautiful countryside is now filled with Styrofoam plates, plastic bags, aluminium foil packs, water sachets and tons of rotting leftover food. Karthik Masam which originally was for ritual bathing, prayer and communing with nature has become an eat fest and mess marathon in the woods around Vizag. This brings me to a little poem.

It’s Karthik Masam

It’s Karthik Masam and we can’t be denied

The right to mess up our countryside

We don’t give a damn

We don’t care

We will throw our garbage on the wayside

It’s a democracy, so we have the right

To make our woods an ugly sight

We don’t give a damn

We don’t care

We will spread our plastic everywhere

After lunch we must find the loo

For my kids, cousins and brothers too

We don’t give a damn

We don’t care

We’ll go to the bushes and do it there

At the end of the day our green countryside

Is messy, stinky and horribly defiled

We don’t give a damn

We don’t care

Next week we will mess up the sea side

Modern city versus blind ritual

On a serious note, we are a modern city, a city of destiny, our people should understand the difference between personal faith and harmful ritual, right? Not really, while we have a few rational citizens who care, we also have vast numbers steeped in ritual that defies logic. These people have forgotten the actual reason of the celebrations and have converted every ritual into a bizarre spectacle.

Get tough or choke in rubbish

And this will get worse every year unless local administration learns to control the menace with a small carrot and a large stick. A good start would be to penalize anyone littering public areas. There is nothing like a stiff fine to bring some sense to the senseless. Better still; send off all defaulters on a one way journey to Mars. On second thought let’s not do that because we don’t want to mess up our neighbourhood planet. We may have to relocate there some day.