Down in jungleland: It’s a Big, Bad World

Sit back in the sun on a winter morning with a glass of beer in hand, at peace with the world. Raise it to your lips and you find a fly swimming (ecstatically?) in your glass, heading eagerly towards your mouth. Or, find the damn creature vomiting all over your magnum slice of blueberry cheesecake. (Well, what can you expect if you swim in beer?) Mosquitoes and flies are prospering like never before, no matter what heavy artillery we use on them. The former kills millions around the world, the latter can pass on at least 100 foul diseases. We spray, swat and zap them, but still, they keep coming, crawling over our faces, into our eyes, mouths and noses, and whine like lunatic dentists in our ears.

In the bargain, the good guys, often indispensable, get wiped out. Bees are in big trouble the world over. Their numbers are so low that, in some parts of India, beehives are being leased out. Without bees, there is no pollination. Harmless, often very beautiful, butterflies die out while rapacious caterpillars and grubs of various moths and beetles munch their way through entire crops and groves of trees, somehow having developed antidotes to our poisons. It’s much the same in the mammalian world. Rats and bandicoots are doing very well indeed, not only in sewers and landfills, but in every home and even hospitals. Pandas, tigers, elephants, rhinos, polar bears and so many others are declining rapidly. The simple bottom line seems to be: bad guys win. If you are nastier (often uglier), more belligerent, offensive, insidious, and simply more aggressive, you will not merely win and survive, but thrive.

So, what about ourselves? As far as the animal world goes, we’ve been the biggest aiders and abettors of this phenomenon, in spite of our efforts to get rid of them. We provide innumerable fetid, glimmering honeymoon pools and day-care centres for huge populations of mosquitoes. Swarms of flies swoon over our landfill sites, happy to raise billions of babies, knowing they will be well fed and cared for by the state and our offal. (Also, if there is such a variety in the buffet, it would drive a bluebottle fly nuts!)

Rats and bandicoots, too, must wriggle ecstatically in these salubrious surroundings, squeaking, “If there is a heaven on earth, it is this, it is this, it is this!” And not just a single heaven or haven, but heavens and havens everywhere you look! Can paradise get any better?

And, look at how we’ve treated the good guys! Apart from the collateral damage done to them while trying to tackle the bad guys, we’re actually trying our utmost to turn the good ones into bad guys! Elephants, those gentle jungle giants, are being turned into unpredictable, violent five-ton thugs because we’ve blocked off their migratory routes and run their babies over with our trains. Tigers and leopards are having their properties confiscated and converted into 16-lane expressways (by people who, frankly, should not be allowed to drive over four kmph). Then, they are being declared proclaimed offenders when they are forced to settle at the edge of cities. Macaques would have been quite happy if left in their forests, living off the fruits and flowers therein, have been corrupted by ghee-soaked paranthas and gur, and will now open your fridge, demand pomegranate juice or colas, pakoras and cakes, and throw tantrums (especially around women and children) if they don’t get what they want. We tear down forests and then say that the denizens who live there are pests because they come looking for something to eat in the fields we’ve grown in their place.

But then, take a look at our own human world. Even here, is it the survival of the fittest or the survival of the baddest? Let’s never forget Mark Antony’s dire proclamation at Caesar’s funeral: “The evil that men do/ Lives after them…”
Our kids are going to hate us!